Ms. Lynch, you do not know me but I owe you an apology. I read where Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, an Iraqi lawyer who claims to have assisted U.S. forces in your rescue, visited your home town on Monday October 27, but according to your attorney, Stephen Goodwin, said you were still going to rehabilitation five days a week and had commitments related to the release of your upcoming book and were unable to meet with him. My thoughts upon learning these facts were that you were arrogant and unappreciative of what was done on your behalf. I was wrong, egregiously wrong. You were being honest and displaying integrity far beyond what most would have. You knew deep in your soul the truth, and you were not going allow anyone to use you or your name to help continue a charade and a lie. I am sorry Jessica Lynch for thinking poorly of you. The fact is that I now view you as an incredibly wonderful role model for demonstrably being honest and a true heroine.
If anyone on here on theDaily KOSmissed the details of the capture and repatriation of Jessica Lynch I would suggest you look at a variety of sources, here, here, and here.
The Bush Administration, and its willing sycophants in the Defense Department and press, concocted a story that exaggerated the accounts of her ordeal recasting it as a patriotic fable. She was the female John Wayne firing her rifle at Iraqi's until she eventually ran out of ammo. She was the poor waif who was slapped around by her captures and mistreated while in the hospital. Finally, the sole Iraqi who had a conscience and a heart, Mohammed Al-Rehaief, saved her. Wow!! There were two casualties in this story, Jessica Lynch and the truth. Miss Lynch decided the real truth should be told as will be. Not the truth as told by Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, not the Hollywood truth told by NBC in their upcoming movie, and certainly not the truth spewed forth by the Mighty Wurlitzer.
For Jessica the truth she told in her own inimitable way was through the prism of actually living through the ordeal. Jessica comes away from all this as one who truly earns our respect and accolades. She could have easily said what had been reported was factual. But she realized that doing so would have dishonored those fellow servicemen and women with whom she served and who lost her life on that fateful day on a highway outside of Nasiriyah. For me the Jessica's genuine honesty is put forth when in an interview, Lynch also clears up conflicting stories about her actions during the March 23 ambush in which Lynch was taken prisoner. Initial reports portrayed the Army supply clerk, then 19, as a hero who was wounded by Iraqi gunfire but kept firing until her ammunition ran out, shooting several Iraqis ""I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do," she tells ABC's Diane Sawyer in the interview, airing Tuesday, Nov. 11. "I don't look at myself as a hero," she adds. "My heroes are Lori [Pfc. Lori Piestewa], the soldiers that are over there, the soldiers that were in that car beside me, the ones that came and rescued me." Piestewa was one of the 11 members of Lynch's unit, the 507th Maintenance, who were killed in the ambush near the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah.
"I did not shoot, not a round, nothing," she tells Sawyer. "When we were told to lock and load, that's when my weapon jammed ... I did not shoot a single round ... I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember."
Lynch, now 20, says she feels hurt to have received praise she says her colleagues deserved. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. They did not know whether I did that or not. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell that story. So I would have been the only one able to say, 'Yeah, I went down shooting.' But I didn't. I did not."
And what about Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the Iraqi hero? Quoting from a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, referenced above, I found the following very curious: "committing to a film about Lynch's rescue, NBC emerges with a suspect tale that's primarily about an Iraqi lawyer who has used it to profit beyond his wildest dreams. "I don't buy any of his story at all," Toronto Star correspondent Mitch Potter said in an interview from the Middle East. After the rescue, Potter was in Nasiriyah, where Lynch was captured and hospitalized. He spoke to numerous people directly and indirectly involved with her care, and was the first North American reporter to provide a comprehensive story from the scene."
Further " The wife (of Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief) is portrayed as a nurse at the hospital where Lynch was treated, but no one who worked there who was interviewed by Potter, or by other reporters who followed him, recognized any nurse who was married to a lawyer. Nurses who did care for Lynch around the clock told Potter they had seen no one who could have been the lawyer.
In the film, the lawyer sees a vicious slap by a security guard that pulls at his heartstrings and sends him out into the desert to alert the Americans. Doctors, nurses and hospital administrators said no one mistreated their patient while she was in the hospital.
Lynch's primary nurse "broke down crying," Potter said in a telephone interview, while denying there had been any mistreatment.
Potter said the lawyer, named Mohammed, didn't need any direct knowledge of Lynch's situation: "A blond woman in the hospital, it was such a novelty, the worst-kept secret in town. There were several dozens of thousands of Mohammed's who knew where she was and that the Iraqi military was long gone [during her hospitalization].
"He's just trying to dine out on his version of the whole thing... a guy who has opportunized to an incredible degree on a situation that presented itself."
The lawyer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, and his family got instant asylum in the United States and free housing. In addition to being paid for his story by NBC, he has written a book, and is now a principal with the Livingston Group, a Washington lobbying and consulting firm headed by former Louisiana Republican congressman Bob Livingston, who has close ties to the Bush administration." No irony there.
George Bush, when you meet Jessica Lynch make sure you apologize. Not for being AWOL during your term of service in the military, not for perpetuating a lie, though perpetuate you did, but for sending Ms. Lynch and her fellow servicemen and women into harms way so that you could be a "war hero." So that you could tell your Daddy you accomplished something he could not, that being toppling Saddam. However, tell him the price. The price in human life, the price in suffering, the price in dollars, the price in American standing abroad, and finally the price it cost in engaging in this war in the dishonest fashion with which you entered the entire fray. George Bush, when it comes to honesty, Jessica Lynch shamed you!
The lawyer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, and his family got instant asylum in the United States and free housing. In addition to being paid for his story by NBC, he has written a book, and is now a principal with the Livingston Group, a Washington lobbying and consulting firm headed by former Louisiana Republican congressman Bob Livingston, who has close ties to the Bush administration." No irony there.
George Bush, when you meet Jessica Lynch make sure you apologize. Not for being AWOL during your term of service in the military, not for perpetuating a lie, though perpetuate you did, but for sending Ms. Lynch and her fellow servicemen and women into harms way so that you could be a "war hero." So that you could tell your Daddy you accomplished something he could not, that being toppling Saddam. However, tell him the price. The price in human life, the price in suffering, the price in dollars, the price in American standing abroad, and finally the price it cost in engaging in this war in the dishonest fashion with which you entered the entire fray. George Bush, when it comes to honesty, Jessica Lynch shamed you!