Jessica Lynch and other Tall Tales

In her book 'Terror Dream' Susan Faludi devotes a whole chapter called " Precious Little Jessie" pp. 164-195 to the story and myth making and propaganda dealing with the American contractor Jessica Lynch who was captured in Iraq by Iraqi forces in November 2003. The story was rewritten by the Pentagon and the Bush regime to make Jessica into a hero and a victim who was in need of rescue. Her story was framed in a similar fashion to that of pioneering women & women in the Old Wild West who were taken captive by Native Americans. The Iraqis being savages like American Indians wantonly kill women and children or take them cative . The women are often in both cases beaten , tortured and raped at least according to the myths told by whites about Native Americans and now they tell similar stories about Iraqis. The facts are that Native Americans rarely raped White Female captives and usually treated captives fairly well. As Susan Faludi concludes many of the women and children captured often assimilated and came to accept their situation and when given the choice often refused to leave the Native Americans to return to their homes.

So the Jessica Lynch story is refashioned to fit this type of 'Mythology ' of capture and escape as found in numerous stories during the Indian Wars. The Indian Wars were more like the slaughter of Native Americans as opposed to fights or battles. The fifth calvary would often attack Indian villages unprovoked to steal the land based upon some wild rumor about a massacre of white people or even the rumor of a rape of a white woman. The same sorts of excuses were later used to lynch africa-americans or even to slaughter a whole black community. As we see Americans have not changed very much over the last couple of hundred years ; their lust for blood is still unquenchable. Now they are out to continue with their Genocidal attack on the Iraqi People.


The Jessica Lynch story the American public was told was that of an heroic female Rambo blasting away at Iraqi forces attacking her truck convoy delivering MCDonald's hamburgers and Milk Shakes to the starving American troops. Jessica Lynch lost her battle was then shot, stabbed, beaten and raped by those savage Iraqis . Except most of the story is untrue. As is her rescue since she was not being held captive and the staff of the hospital treated her well and tried to deliver her back to the Americans but the Americans had plans of their own of how to turn this incident into a propaganda goldmine. Of course the truth has little interest to a mobilized hyperpatriotic citizenry who are more interested intales true or not of heroism on the part of their soldiers and of attrocities on the part of the enemy . One must see Abu Ghraib and the abuse by American soldiers of tens of thousands of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere as either justifiable given the brutish nature of all Iraqis or merely the acts of a few bad apples.

Jessica Lynch story fabricated propaganda by the Bush Regime and the American military . It was merely a means to increase support for the Iraqi war. The movie WAR,Inc can't compete with the Pentagon Bush Myth making conglomerate which needs to justify an unnecessary war .

and here's a video from the BBC questioning the veracity of Jessica Lynch's story of being captures by Iraqi forces:




and from

Jessica Lynch myth/ Penta-Con
Journalist /entertainment / Propaganda reporters follow the Pentagon's script - so play the video which is already cued-up to go yet they act as if it were all impromtu -
It seems American ideal of a free press is one that does what it is told and does not tell stories or show images which might upset the public at large or might force them to actually think- the thinking is done by those in control-



Little Girl Rambo story not quite true
But most Americans will only remember what the media first told about this story. They are not interested in the truth which is quite different from that told by the Media, the Pentagon & the Bush Regime. Even Jessica is bothered by the lies and exaggerations made by the media etc.

May 03, 2007
Emily Corio of West Virginia Public Broadcasting interviews former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch. Lynch is still confused why the U.S. government sensationalized, and lied about her horrific experience in Iraq.
This segment aired May 3, 2007, on the program "Outlook" on West Virginia PBS.Part two available Youtube.

At Common Dreams .org The Big Lie Of Jessica Lynch by Mark Morford of San Francisco Chronicle , Sept. 5,2003

Jessica Lynch. You know the one. The sweet, American-pie 19-year-old soldier and kindergarten-teacher wanna-be whose army squad took a wrong turn in Iraq and was, apparently, ambushed.

And some of her comrades were killed and she was taken prisoner, full of stab wounds and bullet holes, and she was whisked off to a ragged Iraqi hospital and held for eight days by vicious Iraqi guards and ostensibly abused, and later supposedly "rescued" in the most daring and macho made-for-TV moment of the war by elite teams of hunky U.S. Army Rangers and U.S. Navy SEALs. Wow.

Except tha tit never really happened that way. Except that Lynch herself doesn't remember a single thing and all the nurses and doctors and eyewitnesses on the scene say the Iraqi fedayeen guards had fled the day before the "rescue," and there was no danger whatsoever, no resistance of any kind, the U.S. forces could just walk right in, and they knew it.

And the hospital doors were wide open, and the nurses and doctors had gone out of their way to provide decent care for our precious Jessica, considering the circumstances, and doctors even tried to return Lynch to U.S. forces themselves.
And despite U.S. claims, Lynch had no knife wounds or bullet holes at all, just a few broken bones, and the dramatic and violent "rescue" was really just inane and silly and entirely faked and yet America bought it, hook, line and Rumsfeld, because it was on TV.

And now, here we are. Jessica and disgraced N.Y. Times reporter Rick "Oh my God do I need a gig" Bragg just inked a $ 1 million book deal to tell her nonstory, titled "I'm a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story," not "Oh My God You Are Such a Sucker for Buying This Book I Mean Wow."

Because this is how we fabricate our history. This is how we spin our patriotism, how we bake our jingoistic cake, the Lynch tale the most apt and definitive myth of the war so far.

And from Salon.com Glenn Greenwald in his article The Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch Frauds / April 25, 2007 examined why the Bush Regime lied about these incidents using them as more fodder for their propaganda to gain support for their wars in Iraq & Afghanistan .
As Greenwald argues that the media has become schills and uncritical propagandists for the Bush Regime:

I defy anyone to go back and read the April and May, 2003 tongue-wagging, mindless American press accounts of Jessica Lynch's epic firefight against the Enemy; the severe gun shot and stabbing wounds she suffered; the torture to which she was subjected while in the Iraqi hospital; and the daring, gun-blazing rescue of her by our Special Forces, and then try to claim that we have a functioning, healthy political press in this country that serves as a check on government deceit and corruption. It is impossible for any minimally honest person to make that claim in light of those stories.

The seminal article "reporting" the Lynch Fraud was published on April 3, 2003, from The Washington Post's Sue Schmidt and Vernon Loeb, which mindlessly and uncritically passed on one false claim after the next, beginning with this paragraph: "Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday." If one's metric is accuracy, it goes downhill from there.
That is the article that spawned virtually every other newspaper and network news program to repeat those lies. As but one of literally countless examples, ABC News' Robin Roberts said this to Diane Sawyer on the April 3 broadcast of Good Morning America:

And we keep finding out, Diane, how remarkable it was. Military officials are calling Lynch's rescue from Iraqi captivity, the first successful rescue of an American POW in almost 60 years. . . .
This morning, we are learning dramatic new details of her rescue and her capture a week ago by Iraqi forces. According to "The Washington Post," Lynch fought fiercely after her unit was ambushed near Nasiriyah, shooting several Iraqis during the attack. Emptying her weapon before being stabbed and finally taken prisoner. The young soldier was shot at least once in the leg.
Lynch was kept in this run-down hospital that had been converted into an Iraqi military headquarters. Her whereabouts unknown until a local doctor handed a note to US Marines in the area saying there was a wounded soldier inside. The daring nighttime rescue was right out of a Hollywood thriller as seen in this footage released by the Pentagon just this morning.

And he goes on to criticize these journalistic dupes and co-conspirators of Propagandizing for their beloved Bush & Co. who are not tobe questioned in a time of perpetual war (ala 1984)

So The Washington Post thinks it did nothing seriously wrong here and, astonishingly, defends the behavior of "its sources" as admirable and honorable (just a little inaccurate due to that notorious "fog of war" that put imaginary bullet and stab wounds in Jessica Lynch as a result of a heroic and inspiring firefight that never happened).

And most of all, Schmidt and Loeb continue to protect the identity of their sources, and will until the day they die. The fact that their sources fed them lies in order to manipulate American public opinion about the war is irrelevant to them. Over and over and over, our most influential American media outlets publish false stories based on government "sources" who purposely lie to them, and they never report on the real story -- who are the government sources lying to the American public while hiding behind shields of anonymity granted to them, and maintained by, our nation's "journalists"?

Also see:
And fromThe Naked Truth August 24th, 2005 Jessica Lynch's Heroic Rescue-Another Fabrication by N. Mallory
and:
Jessica Lynch Debunks 'hero'myth,Stands with Tillman's Family By Stone Martindale Apr 24, 2007 at www.monstersandcritics.com/

and so it goes,
GORD.