Jessica Lynch Rescue Video

[Cori]

This was interesting to me: CNN aired portions of this last night, sourced to Liveleak (although I couldn't find it there until this morning.) They edited it so faces and names weren't visible or audible, btw. What I found interesting was that the tone of the CNN piece cut against the tone of the coverage of the recent House testimony, in other words the point of the piece was that she might say she wasn't a hero but this footage proves she is -- as are those who rescured her. (The anchor says this explicitly.)

Anyway, .

It's currently the highlighted item on their homepage.

The person who posted it, btw, has also posted the same "Hostage Rescue" video, each time labelled differently (Delta force rescue, Navy Seals rescue, etc.) which I discovered last night searching for the Jessice Lynch piece.

What's on cnn.com right now is not the version I saw last night (different anchors, different comments, different narrative frame -- ie, a focus here on how frightened she is, poor little thing, which strikes me as a bizarre take, almost as if it were the rescuers' fault that she's scared, and a shorter cut from the video; on the 10pm version they went further, showing her being removed from the hospital. Rhetorically speaking, the longer cut "justifies," so to speak, her fear, as it ends with her safe in American hands.)

[Merv Benson]

This post excerpts Ret. Gen. Michael Delong's response to the recent hearings.

AS the deputy commander at United States Central Command from 2001 to 2003, I represented the military in dealing with politicians regarding the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch in Iraq, and thus I can speak with authority about what really happened after her maintenance convoy got lost near Nasiriya in 2003 and she was taken prisoner. I feel compelled to respond to accusations that have been made in recent days by several politicians.

The initial reports from the field regarding Private Lynch stated that she had gone down fighting, had emptied her weapon and that her actions were heroic. Based on these reports, politicians from her home state, West Virginia, wanted the military to award her the Medal of Honor. Their request rose up the ladder until finally it reached me.

...

... when the request landed on my desk, I told the politicians that we’d need to wait. I made it clear that no one would be awarded anything until all of the evidence was reviewed.

The politicians did not like this. They called repeatedly, through their Congressional liaison, and pressured us to recommend her for the medal, even before all the evidence had been analyzed. I would not relent and we had many heated discussions.

The politicians repeatedly said that a medal would be good for women in the military; I responded that the paramount issue was finding out what had really happened.

...

Since it seems pretty clear that it was West Virginia politicians hyping the Lynch story it appears to me that the hearings on Lynch made a bad faith allegation against the military. While the chances of Congress investigating its own is remote, it seems unethical for the media who received the hyped story to let this slander go unchallenged.

[jcustis]

I don't know why Lynch is in front of Congress. We are a bit beyond that, and wasn't most of her testimony already in her book?

As for the CNN anchors, I agree that the point about her "definitely being a hero," was counter-intuitive and pretty bone-headed. But so goes the media.

[Cori]

My pt about the CNN anchor's comment that she was a hero was that their use of the clip, and the comment, cut against the frame in their reporting (well, everyone's reporting, that I saw) of the hearing: that there had been some "lie," perpetrated by the military, with intent, in setting her up as a hero. That was the pt made by her in her testimony, at least in the clip used in all the networks that night. It represented her as somehow a dual victim, once of the Iraqis and a second time of some kind of "hype" perpetrated by the military.

The media's role was never, that I saw, discussed in the coverage.

[Cori]

This is what's annoying me -- the Post's role in this, and their own assessment of their reporting, has just been completely forgotten.

[Merv Benson]

I don't know why Lynch is in front of Congress. We are a bit beyond that, and wasn't most of her testimony already in her book?

I think it was no coincidence that Chairman Waxman scheduled his hearing attempting to discredit the military, with the scheduled appearance of Gen, Petraeus who was reporting progress on the surge to congress. This was at a time when Democrat leadership figures were already saying that we would not believe him if he said things were improving.

I think my earlier post on West Virginia politicians being the source of the "heroic Jessica" story, point out the dishonesty of his efforts and the lack of ethics of the media in not calling him on it when they knew who the source was.

[JD]

I am not from the US so I am not fully aware of the happenings surrounding Jessica Lynch, but it seems quite incredible from an outsiders perspective that she is held up as a hero when someone like Capt Hornbuckle is ignored. She undoubtedly was manipulated and it doesn't appear that she is to blame for the controversy around her. But there seems to be a theme of making heros out of people who get it wrong and I am thinking of aircrew who get shot down and the SAS at the heart of the Bravo 20 story. That is not to say these people are necessarily to blame either, but why do we try to make non-heros into heros when we could find plenty of real heros. Is this passivity in the face of unfortunate circumstances what is venerated now in an increasingly litigious society where there is so little willingness to accept responsibility? Is it enogh to be like the people on Big Brother and do nothing exept endure to become a star? Who is the hero in a post heroic society: the real Jessica Lynch or the one that was constructed?

JD