SHOWTIME! "The rescue of Jessica Lynch"

news.bbc.co.uk...

"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.





What do you make of this?

I'm guessing a diversion of some sort. Draw our attention to this to slip something else in of great importance only to go unnoticed.

obviously a PR stunt - and it also seems that the 'Mighty US Military' didnt want to be seen recieving help from the iraqis

Well, right after she was rescued - it was said that Marines staged an attack as a distraction while special forces went in got her out. What could be a PR stunt could have also be a sound combat rescue operation.

Has anyone seen the footage of this rescue? Just curious.

Originally posted by Bob88

Has anyone seen the footage of this rescue? Just curious.

Saw bits & pieces of the rescue ... it was pretty intense and all, but it was lacking a certain pizazz because, well, the hospital seemed pretty damn empty.
It *did* look vaguely like a made-for-TV movie, which was probably intended.

To wit:
"But as the ambulance, with Private Lynch inside, approached a checkpoint American troops opened fire, forcing it to flee back to the hospital."
(from the linked article)

Sounds like maybe we almost screwed up big time, and made a dramatic little rescue in hopes of brushing that faux pas under the rug.

Footage of this rescue has been shown many times on UK TV since the night that it happened.
It's been analysed by BBC SAS correspondants and they all go on the record as saying that it looked like a standard special forces operation. I can't remember seeing a news item that said that US forces came under heavy fire at the hospital. There was a diversionary attack on another target and the rescue mission went in pretty unopposed. What could have been a major Hollywood action scene didn't happen and none of the TV footage that I've seen shows it to be "intense".
The fact that there wasn't a lot of shooting doesn't mean that this was an elaborate hoax. If anything it makes it more of a success - the idea after all, was to rescue Lynch and not lose a US life in the process.
The media were given TV pictures and they were the people who went for the sensationilist headlines. In the eyes of the US government the actual military operation was a military success so they seem justified in their self congratulation. I think the public didn't really understand the nature of a special forces mission. Bred on a diet of Hollywood Navy Seal and Schwarzenegger movies, we imagine every SpecOps mission to be blood and thunder. We were the ones who blew this out of proportion.
The hospital was in enemy held territory. Even the eyewitness says that the Iraqis were there 24 hours before the raid and it would have taken longer than 24 hours to arrange a special forces operation of this nature (even longer if it was a set up). Western elite forces don't just walk up to a building and storm it like in the movies - there's intelligence, planning, logistics, troop training for the particular mission. A lot of highly trained and expensively trained troops went in. I doubt the US government would have risked them just to perpetrate a hoax. Not only that but they could NEVER hope to keep it secret. Special Ops missions are probably the most publicized military media around. If our elite forces go into action WE want to know about it and there are any number of ex-soldiers who took part in those missions who will be shown on TV or will write a book which corroborates with other people who fought by them. The US government knows too well that it wouldn't be able to keep a hoax quiet and it hates humiliation. The Bush administration just sat back and enjoyed the ride as the media awoke the romantacism about special ops that Hollywood instilled in us.

I don't believe Udays story, it's not logical and it uses certain facts to it's advantage.

"Reports claimed that she had stab and bullet wounds and that she had been slapped about on her hospital bed and interrogated."

They overlook the fact that those reports weren't substantiated by the US government but the media took it upon themselves to report it as fact. These reports soon died out though when the media realised that they had made a mountain out of a molehill.


"There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Harith had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance."

Two days before, the hospital was crawling with Iraqis. This guy doesn't sound pro-US enough to risk smuggling out a US POW to freedom.


The whole article reeks of bias IMO. It seems to be trying to knock down a military operation that was a success, whichever way you look at it. The only way to do this is by claiming that it was a hoax. The difficulty is that, because there are many military details and operational tactics in the Lynch mission, the US govt won't give too much information away. Some people therefore get a free shot at the Bush administration.

Who knows? Maybe the media is trying to draw the government out to tell the whole story of the rescue down to every last detail so it can feed it to us. By questioning it's credibility they will annoy the Bush administration. The TV producers and the newspaper editors know we love anything involving special forces and there is lots of money to be made out of this story. They've had one big pay day from it so far and it can be milked for a lot more.

What did or didn't happen is probably forever lost in media hype.
The embedded journalists wanted something silly as there was little of substance being let out.
I'd guess a team-effort (military and media).
I cannot think that many people believed a word of this story as it was first released in its various, broadly similar, versions.

I thought the masterpiece, after all the nonsense about whether she was, or wasn't, shot, stabbed, tortured, molested etc was the announcement that she had amnesia!

How very odd...I'm not even going to try and count the numbers of injections that can do that trick.

Leveller - You're probably underestimating how well the US military understand the media. This was obviously used as a PR exercise. I think the US military have shown exactly how adept they are at propaganda during the whole conflict. Honestly, when al-jazeera becomes more trustworthy than the US military briefings you have to wonder what's going on.

Anyway, this was always going to be a great story, the US knew it, that's why they told us about it and were careful not to contradict any of the blown-up media hype too loudly.

I really don't believe that Bush cares about whether he gets caught out lying. The WMD's (missing in action) don't seem to be causing him much trouble. With the media under his thumb he can just feed them new stuff as soon as holes start to appear in the old stuff. For example, "chemical weapons found" is the headline, "suspected chemical weapons actually pesticide" is somewhere down page 12...

that this whole "amnesia" bit stinks to high heaven....

Thats right gazrok - PREMIUM BULL

Premium bull???

Someone call my name?


Just seen something about this.
The BBC are going to be showing a program on it.

Apparently the US military filmed the entire "rescue" this was then edited to a 5 minute film which many of us have seen.The BBC have requested to see the entire film but were unsurpringly denied access.

They interview the doctor who treated her.After an initial examination in which she was found to have a broken arm,a broken leg,and a dislocated ankle she was taken to the only fully equipped intensive care bed in the hospital.She was unconscious at first but she had not been shot.

The Iraqi lawyer(who led US troops to her),meanwhile,is being feted in NY and has a book deal.

I guessed most of it was crap when it happened.

I think you were not alone in your verdict J-B. And Premium Bull most certainly has a fine ring to it.
We still have people who doubt the moon landings here: so expect a few lunatic-fringe responses.
We have those who believe everything they see, and those who believe nothing that they see: we need more who see, and think.

And, if you're a native of Southampton -good luck this afternoon.
It's live in China (they love English football).

Originally posted by dom
Leveller - You're probably underestimating how well the US military understand the media.

No, I don't underestimate it at all. Please give me some credit.
My point is that whichever way you look at it - this was a successful special ops mission. Period. It achieved it's goal and more and there is no other way to look at it.

The fact that the media created a frenzy and so many people swallowed it isn't down to the Bush government. The blame lies at the door of the media and in our own minds. We're the suckers who drink up every story that we can lay our hands on about our special forces. We're the suckers who watch the Hollywood movies and create a fantasy world in our minds where the spec ops teams always go in guns blazing and kill all the bad guys. We're the suckers who took this story, ran with it and then came back dissapointed when we found that it didn't match our romantic vision.

The Bush government just let the media and the public create their own fantasy. You can hardly blame them for dashing expectations that they never really built up in the first place. Yeah they sent the cameras in, but that's standard procedure in spec ops missions all over the world now. Yeah they released media footage, but they never claimed that this was a gunfight at the OK Corral. The media did. And we were the suckers who swallowed it.

Strictly speaking I suppose this was successful as a special ops mission. But did it need to be special ops? If the doctors were perfectly happy to drive the ambulance out of the hospital and hand her over to an American checkpoint, why not arrange that?

Remember that the context of this rescue was a time when people were really beginning to criticise the tactics in the war. This rescue was a great optimism story which underlined the fact that a lot of progress was happening, very useful PR at the time...

Should the special ops team be used to provide great photo oppurtunities?

I watched the program last night.The doctors did indeed try and take her to the Americans in an ambulance and were then shot at by,guess who?

The best bit of footage,in my opinion,was taken by an Australian imbedded journalist.He caught the Americans firing machine guns from the back of trucks at motorists driving behind,this resulted in three civilian deaths.
It was the best because it showed exactly how those incidents occured.No provocation just tired and jumpy GI's with itchy trigger fingers.

leveller's making a valid point here: in a world with an ever-decreasing attention-span there's little to worry about in terms of being caught out.
Just the old Goebbels/Hitler point - if you're going to tell a lie, make it a big one.
And so much easier now then it was in 1939 because memories have shortened dramatically.

And, no doubt, when the appalling movie is made -that will become truth for the benighted masses.