Several voices around the world say the Pentagon falsified reports about West Virginia’s hero, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, to boost patriotic support for President Bush’s war on Iraq.
On Tuesday, Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer said it’s a shame that Lynch, a teen-age soldier injured in an ambush, was used as “a propaganda pawn” by the administration.
“Sadly, almost nothing fed to reporters about either Lynch’s original capture by Iraqi forces or her ‘rescue’ by U.S. forces turns out to be true,” he wrote. “Consider the April 3 Washington Post story on her capture headlined ‘She Was Fighting to the Death,’ which reported, based on unnamed military sources, that Lynch ‘continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds,’ adding that she also was stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in.
“It has since emerged that Lynch was neither shot nor stabbed, but rather suffered accident injuries when her vehicle overturned.”
Similarly, Scheer said, news reports of her rescue from a hospital at al-Nasiriyah contained phony claims of a deadly fire-fight. Actually, the hospital had been abandoned by Iraqi troops before U.S. forces rushed in, firing weapons and videotaping the operation. Doctors and patients were handcuffed and terrorized.
Previously, the hospital staff had tried to return Lynch to an American unit. She was sent in an ambulance to a U.S. outpost, but American soldiers fired at the approaching vehicle, so the driver fled back to the hospital.
Scheer said videotape from the hospital raid “was artfully edited by the Pentagon and released as proof that a battle to free Lynch had occurred, when it had not.”
Similar reports of Pentagon falsification about Lynch have appeared in The London Times and The Toronto Star, as well as on the BBC in England.
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