The righty bloggers are claiming that the BBC is “backing off” the Jessica Lynch story. To paraphrase Deep Throat, always follow the links. This may be a clarification, but it doesn’t strike me as a “backing off.” The basic fact is, we don’t know what happened that day, but the whole story smells like a Manhattan fish market on a sweltering August afternoon. As Col. David Hackworth writes for the conservative World Net Daily site:
For example, as I write this, tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars are being spent on covering up what happened to Jessica Lynch and her mates during and after their unit was ambushed and they were captured.
Soldiers from Jessica’s El Paso, Texas-based 507th Maintenance Company have been warned not to talk. A soldier in that unit said, “It’s almost ‘say a word and you’ll be shot at dawn.'”
Jessica has been locked up in a private Walter Reed hospital room with an around-the-clock security detail normally reserved for high brass to ensure that what happened to her as a prisoner of war remains inside her room. Medical personnel who look after her have been given the same keep-your-trap-shut treatment as the 507th troopers. Almost daily, her cover story changes from amnesia to partial amnesia to more recently: “She’s blocked just the ambush event.”
Anyway, I’m not sure why people are treating this as solely a BBC story; as I’ve noted (permalink screwy, scroll down to “Saving Private Lynch”), much of the same information ran in a Times story on April 21.
Update: a reader asks a good question — is it standard operating procedure to take camera crews along on dangerous Special Forces operations?