- "The rape story raises questions, not least because
so much of the Jessica Lynch story has already been discredited as a less
than honest propaganda opportunity for the Pentagon."
-
- LOS ANGELES -- The much-sensationalised
story of Jessica Lynch, the US Army private airlifted to safety from a
dilapidated hospital after she was ambushed and wounded in southern Iraq,
was given another twist yesterday after her official biographer disclosed
evidence that she had been raped at the moment of her capture.
-
- The revelation coincides with the forthcoming publication
of the book I Am A Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story and has yet to
be subjected to the sort of scrutiny which has already amended many of
the more breathlessly melodramatic accounts of Ms Lynch's ordeal. But it
immediately fed into the seemingly limitless appetite of cable news stations
and television talk shows apparently more interested in continuing their
beatification of the 19-year-old from West Virginia than they are in examining
the consequences of the US invasion itself.
-
- Advance reports claim Private Lynch's ghost writer, the
Pulitzer prize-winning former New York Times reporter Rick Bragg, has unearthed
an intelligence report and some kind of medical record indicating she was
sodomised about the time her vehicle crashed and came under fire outside
the town of Nasiriyah on 23 March.
-
- "The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted
her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage,
or if they assaulted her then broke her bones into splinters until she
was almost dead," Mr Bragg writes.
-
- Ms Lynch cannot help establish the chain of events because
she has no memory of them. Mr Bragg continues: "Jessi lost three hours.
She lost them in the snapping bones, in the crash of the Humvee, in the
torment her enemies inflicted on her after she was pulled from it."
-
- Since the book will not be publicly available until Tuesday
- Veterans' Day in the United States - it is not clear exactly what evidence
Mr Bragg has unearthed.
-
- Some details came from Diane Sawyer, the ABC television
host, whose exclusive interview with Ms Lynch will be shown on Tuesday.
"The book does indeed cite some intelligence reports that she was
treated brutally and a medical record which says, in the book, that she
was a victim of a sodomising rape," Ms Sawyer said on her morning
news show. "I talked to her and her parents about this, and asked
them about the decision to put it in the book, and they told me that it
was a decision to tell the reality, not selective parts of a story of going
to war."
-
- The rape story raises questions, not least because so
much of the Jessica Lynch story has already been discredited as a less
than honest propaganda opportunity for the Pentagon.
-
- Initial reports that she was caught up in a firefight,
and kept shooting her M-16 until she was riddled with bullets, proved inaccurate.
Controversy still rages, too, whether the armed raid launched to rescue
her was strictly necessary to free her from doctors all too willing to
hand her over, or whether it was staged for the television cameras.
-
- Why, one might ask, has it taken so long for the alleged
rape to be made public? Did the Iraqi doctors who tended to Ms Lynch know
about it, and, if so, why did they keep quiet about it when interviewed
by dozens of journalists investigating the original rescue story?
-
- Mr Bragg was not commenting yesterday, and his publisher
and the Lynch family issued pleas to see the episode as just one moment
in a long ordeal, not something to be dwelt on unnecessarily.
-
- Six months after the fact, America clearly remains in
the grip of Jessica Lynch mania, capitalising on what the entertainment
newspaper Variety has described as "the one truly 'feel-good' moment
from the war in Iraq".
-
- Mr Bragg's book will be the second on the subject to
go on sale in as many weeks; a teelevision movie recounting her adventures
is to be shown on NBC on Sunday night.
-
- Ms Lynch has just announced her plans to get married
to an army sergeant next summer, a perfect fairy-tale ending to the seemingly
irresistible narrative of American innocence wronged, brutalised and then
set to rights again.
-
- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=461247
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