War / Peace

Georgia Military College officials sent out a news release earlier this week inviting reporters to hear a speech by a helicopter pilot involved in Jessica Lynch's rescue. When they came, however, the college informed them that the pilot, Marine Maj. Craig Kopel, didn't want the news media around. When reporters stayed, hoping to interview and photograph Kopel, the college said they were trespassing and called the police on them.

Now that Private Jessica Lynch has told the truth about the conditions of her capture and rescue in Iraq, right-wing telebabbler Joe Scarborough is complaining that she "started whining about the Pentagon PR machine and the fact that they told parts of the stories that may have made her more of a hero than she considered herself to be. ... Well, Jessica, I've got bad news to break to you. It was because of the Pentagon PR machine that turned you into an American hero -- that got book publishers interested in paying you $1 million to tell your story. It was the Pentagon PR machine that told America how you were a hero that got NBC interested in doing a movie about your story. It was the Pentagon PR machine that's turned you into a millionaire."

Buzzflash editorializes, "So this, in summary, is what happened: The Bush Cartel Ministry of Truth heard that a young blonde female soldier was severely injured and they made up a heroic story about her, as part of their ongoing Iraq-war attempt to manipulate American public opinion. And what does Jessica Lynch do? She has the nerve to toss out the script the propagandists wrote for her. She has the audacity to speak for herself. She has the American heartland respect for the truth. She became a hero, in an entirely different role than the Bush Cartel wrote for her.

"Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place. ...