Torture and Jessica Lynch
Check out this excellent timeline on torture. This is a fascinating history of the Iraq War.
While reading the timeline I remembered Jessica Lynch, and wondered specifically what the Bush administration propagandists had to say about torture back then as this hero fable was being sold to the public. Check out this People Magazine article from the time, which reads like a Karl Rove press release on what happened.
Note that the un-named administration source calls the imaginary torturers “barbaric”. That an Iraqi officer slapping Lynch undermined her humanity — that’s a tactic right out of Bush administration’s own handbook!
This same tactic of slapping is mercilessly being mocked RIGHT NOW by right-wingers. What’s so bad about a slap? Yet here we have a story fabricated by the Bush administration where one of the main characters is so disturbed by this slapping that he begins to fear for his own safety, even hides his wife and kid, then risks his own life by going to the U.S. Military.
When this horseshit was originally disproven, critics at the time accused the Bush administration of concocting the tale to sell the war. But many Americans (including most of the media) were already sold on the war and would remain sold for years afterward.
In light of what we now know was going on, it is clear that the Lynch myth was created not to sell the war, but to sell torture. After all, if these evil Iraqi’s could do it to Wirt County Fair’s 2000 Miss Congeniality, by golly, they could do it to you too, and that made it okay for US to do it to THEM.
The story of Jessica Lynch is a torture fantasy written by torturers. And yet, it still manages to be an indictment of torture as a tactic that doesn’t work in getting intelligence (they claim Lynch remained defiant through the torture). This illustrates that only thing torture succeeds in doing was scaring the living crap out of every man, woman and child who hears about.
Excerpts below, but definitely read the whole article:
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20139817,00.html
Whether she was shot in captivity or earlier, during the battle in which she was captured, or even through friendly fire, is still uncertain. But a Capitol Hill source privy to intelligence briefings about her condition tells PEOPLE that some of her wounds were the result of extensive torture. “Those people—the Iraqi captors—were barbaric,” says the source. “I have no doubt that with her injuries, and with what they had planned for her, she was going to die.” Her tormentors apparently met their match in Wirt County Fair’s 2000 Miss Congeniality.
…
She has many to thank for her survival, among them a 32-year-old lawyer named Mohammed who had seen Lynch on a chance visit to Nasiriya’s six-story Saddam Hussein Hospital, where his wife worked as a nurse….Mohammed (whose last name hasn’t been disclosed for security reasons) says he saw a black-uniformed officer whom others addressed as the Colonel slap the woman across the face. “The Colonel wanted a certain reaction out of Jessica, and he didn’t get what he wanted,” says a Pentagon intelligence officer familiar with Mohammed’s account. Horrified by what he had witnessed and fearing for his own family’s safety, Mohammed sent his wife and 6-year-old daughter to stay with a relative and walked six miles outside of town to tell U.S. GIs where Lynch was being held. “My heart cut,” says Mohammed, whose story has been confirmed by the Pentagon. “A person, no matter his nationality, is a human being. It was very important that I save Jessica’s life.”