JESSICA LYNCH RE-REVISITED….Did the U.S. military stage the rescue of Jessica Lynch? The BBC says, essentially, yes, and the warbloggers say, essentially, that the BBC just hates America. But the entire dispute seems to be over this single paragraph (as quoted in the Guardian):
“It was like a Hollywood film. They cried, ‘Go, go, go’, with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show – an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors.” All the time with the camera rolling. The Americans took no chances, restraining doctors and a patient who was handcuffed to a bed frame.
I didn’t even notice this the first time I read it, but the Iraqi doctor quoted here says the American forces fired blanks, and Instapundit and others say that’s ridiculous. No special ops team would go into a potentially dangerous situation with their guns loaded with blanks.
Absent any further evidence I’m inclined to agree with that, and in any case an Iraqi doctor is unlikely to be an authority on whether a gun is shooting blanks or not. But that’s really a side issue. The question is, did the army know beforehand that there were no hostile forces at the hospital where Lynch was kept? As it turns out, of course, there weren’t, so who were the soldiers firing at? Was there any resistance at all? Since the army has already shredded their credibility by lying about Lynch’s “gunshot wounds,” these are reasonable questions to ask.
What’s more, all of this could be completely put to rest if the army simply released the raw tape of the entire rescue, not just the highly edited 5-minute version that was given to the press. But they won’t.
It’s unlikely to the point of absurdity that releasing the raw tape would divulge any important secrets of operational security, so the only plausible reason for witholding it is that it would embarrass them. Bottom line: the army can put this issue to rest any time they want, so they should stop complaining about the BBC’s coverage until they do. What are they afraid of?
