Smackdown. 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."
UPDATE: I've been watching the latest twists and turns in the saga of Pvt. Jessica Lynch.
What's impressive, though, is the way Lynch herself is emerging from the wreckage of a phony story as a real person -- and a woman who seems determined to be the subject, not the object, of her own life.
Needless to say, the people formerly doing the spinning aren't too happy to find their hero now has a mind of her own. Having "saved" Private Lynch, the conservative propaganda machine is now looking for a way to destroy her. Turning Jessica Lynch into Jane Fonda may prove a little bit harder than convincing the true believers we've always been at war with Eurasia. But perhaps not much.
