05.23.2003

John — Reporting on Private Lynch

Topic(s): Iraq | Comments Off on John — Reporting on Private Lynch

The New York Times has been busy with the Jayson Blair scandal, lately, but maybe they should be paying attention to larger issues. One of Blair’s fabrications related to Private Jessica Lynch — Blair made up interviews and described tobacco fields around a house he had never seen. But that was a minor detail in the Lynch saga. Scores of other reporters, editors and producers helped generate the storm of hype around Lynch’s dramatic rescue.
Now, according to reports by the Toronto Sunday Star, the Guardian and the BBC, it seems that Lynch’s rescue may have been staged especially for those high-tech night cameras the special forces were carrying during the mission. Jayson Blair is cause for concern at The New York Times, but the BBC‘s report should have the rest of the American media doing some soul searching about the coverage of this war.
Lynch’s story provided the Pentagon with heroes and happy news, just when the war was proving more difficult than the Bush administration had originally hoped. The grainy green night footage showed Army Rangers and Navy Seals busting into a hospital with guns drawn and whisking a stunned-looking Lynch away in a helicopter. A brave Iraqi laywer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, supposedly tipped off the Americans to Lynch’s location. “Daring!” “Heroic!” the headlines blared. The first reports claimed that Lynch had fought for her life, that she had bullet wounds, that she had been mistreated and possibly tortured at the Iraqi hospital.
But now, in a scathing indictment of both the Pentagon’s willingess to stage manage facts and the American media’s willingness to applaud the show, a BBC documentary has called most of the details of the original story into question. Reporter John Kampfner calls the entire rescue “one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived.“:

Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital.
“We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital,” said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital.
“It was like a Hollywood film. They cried ‘go, go, go’, with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital – action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan.”
There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Harith had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance.
But as the ambulance, with Private Lynch inside, approached a checkpoint American troops opened fire, forcing it to flee back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch.

(The BBC also notes that Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of Top Gun fame, has been advising the Pentagon since the war in Afghanistan …)
No reporters seem to have questioned the Pentagon’s official narrative, nor asked, as the BBC did, for the unedited version of the videotape that the Pentagon was handing out. The original New York Times report on April 5 read:

“Muhammad ultimately contacted American marines in Iraq, pointing out the exact room where Private Lynch was being held, and around midnight on Tuesday April 1, marines launched an attack on the nearby Baath Party headquarters while Army Rangers secured the hospital grounds and Navy SEALS raced into rescue Private Lynch. There were firefights to get into the building, and firefights to get out, according to Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the spokesman for the United States Central Command headquarters, in Doha, Qatar. Members of the strike force who stayed behind found ammunition, maps and a terrain model in the basement of the hospital. General Brooks said that was proof the Iraqis are using civilian facilities to disguise and protect military installations.
By Wednesday morning, marines seized the hospital under light sniper fire. Civilian patients and medical staff members emerged with hands raised.”

Jayson Blair provided “additional reporting” for that story. His contribution proved entirely fictitious. Presumably, all of the other reporters at least travelled to their reported locations. But given how much of this story may have been debunked, were any of them asking the Pentagon the tough questions? Were any of them skeptical enough of the made-for-Meg Ryan narrative being handed to them?
Most of America probably still believes that Jessica Lynch fought for her life, was terribly wounded, possibly even tortured and then saved by a heroic Iraqi lawyer and brave Navy Seals. In truth, the British report indicates that Jessica Lynch’s unit took a wrong turn, she was terribly injured in a car wreck, and taken to a hospital where Iraqi doctors treated her and then actually tried to get her back to American troops.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer is declining comment. The Iraqi lawyer Mohammed, a primary source for the version of the story where Lynch was mistreated and saved, has a cushy job with a Republican lobbying organization and a $300,000 book contract, so he has to stick to his guns. At the Pentagon, it’s bluster as usual. Spokesman Bryan Whitman called any accusations of stage management “void of all facts and absolutely ridiculous,” but included this healthy dose of backpedaling:

“‘We don’t want to take unnecessary risk. We do make sure that when we exercise military force we use the right resources, sufficient to get the job done. It is a decision made by the commander on the ground,’ Mr Whitman told CNN.
He also said that the US military never claimed that the troops came under fire when they burst into the hospital, but that troops supporting the mission exchanged fire nearby.
Speculative reports in the media were responsible for some of the misinformation, not Pentagon statements, he added.
‘The Pentagon never released an account of what happened to Lynch because it didn’t have an account. She never told us,’ Mr Whitman added.”

We may never know all of the details of what happened to Private Jessica Lynch. But the fact remains that it was British and Canadian outlets that broke this story. And Kampfner at the BBC doesn’t think that’s a coincidence. CNN asked Kampfner whether British officials themselves were worried about the Pentagon’s presentation of information, and Kampfner said:

“Well, I mean, it must be said the British are no more angels than the Americans when it comes to putting out certain messages in the war. The British were worried about the Lynch episode, but they saw this more in general terms. They were worried about the entire U.S. media operation.

Forget Blair, and forget his race. What are the rest of America’s reporters doing?