Friday, November 07, 2003

Smackdown

I've been pretty hard on the media's treatment of Jessica Lynch, from the first Steno Sue-penned WaPo story to the subsequent revisions. Some have interpreted that as being hard on her, though I don't know why. As far as I can tell she's behaved admirably and with restraint as our government transformed her into Old Shoe.

The sad thing is, the PR flacks and their press stenographers had a perfect story. Young, pretty, American GI attacked and wounded by evil bad servants of Saddam, and then treated humanely and decently by "the Iraqi people" we had come to liberate from their oppressors.

Instead, they simply made up shit to try and pretend she was Rambo, putting a cloud of dishonesty over her and the whole endeavor - which dishonored both her and everyone who served with her. I'm glad to see she feels comfortable speaking freely:

Asked by the ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer if the military's portrayal of the rescue bothered her, Ms. Lynch said: "Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong," according to a partial transcript of the interview to be broadcast on Tuesday.

...

Asked how she felt about the reports of her heroism, Ms. Lynch told Ms. Sawyer, "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't."

...

Ms. Lynch also disputed statements by Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer, that he saw her captors slap her.

"From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing," Ms. Lynch told Diane Sawyer, adding, "I'm so thankful for those people, because that's why I'm alive today."