Reply
Wed 16 Apr, 2003 08:38 am
April 16, 2003 - London Times
So who really did save Private Jessica?
From Richard Lloyd Parry in al-Nasiriyah
Doctor claims that soldiers terrorised unarmed staff
THE rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, which inspired America during one of the most difficult periods of the war, was not the heroic Hollywood story told by the US military, but a staged operation that terrified patients and victimised the doctors who had struggled to save her life, according to Iraqi witnesses.
Doctors at al-Nasiriyah general hospital said that the airborne assault had met no resistance and was carried out a day after all the Iraqi forces and Baath leadership had fled the city.
Four doctors and two patients, one of whom was paralysed and on an intravenous drip, were bound and handcuffed as American soldiers rampaged through the wards, searching for departed members of the Saddam regime.
An ambulance driver who tried to carry Private Lynch to the American forces close to the city was shot at by US troops the day before their mission. Far from winning hearts and minds, the US operation has angered and hurt doctors who risked their lives treating both Private Lynch and Iraqi victims of the war. "What the Americans say is like the story of Sinbad the Sailor ?- it's a myth," said Harith al-Houssona, who saved Private Lynch's life after she was brought to the hospital by Iraqi military intelligence.
"They said that there was no medical care in Iraq, and that there was a very strong defence of this hospital. But there was no one here apart from doctors and patients, and there was nobody to fire at them."
Dr Harith was on duty when Private Lynch was brought to al-Nasiriyah general by Iraqi soldiers a few days after her capture on March 23. She was a member of a 15-member US Army maintenance company convoy that was ambushed after taking a wrong turn near the city.
At the time, she was suffering from a head injury, a broken leg and arm, a bullet wound to her leg, a pulmonary oedema and her breathing was failing. In a hospital inundated with war casualties with few drugs, her condition was stabilised and she regained consciousness.
"She was very frightened when she woke up," Dr Harith, 24, a junior resident at the hospital, said. "She kept saying: ?'Please don't hurt me, don't touch me.' I told her that she was safe, she was in a hospital and that I was a doctor, and I never hurt a patient."
Private Lynch's military guards would allow no other doctor to tend to her and Dr Harith formed a friendship with her. She talked to him about her family, including her arguments about money with her father, and about her boyfriend, a Hispanic soldier named Ruben.
Dr Harith went outside the hospital during the bombing to get supplies of Private Lynch's favourite drink, orange juice, and struggled to persuade her to eat.
"I told her she needed to eat to recover, and I brought her crackers, but her stomach was upset. She said as a joke: ?'I want to be slim.'
"I see (many) patients, but she was special. She's a very simple person, a soldier, not well-educated. But she was very, very nice, with a lovely face and blonde hair."
The Iraqi intelligence officers told the hospital that Private Lynch would soon be transferred to Baghdad, a prospect that terrified her.
After her condition stabilised, they ordered Dr Harith to transfer Jessica to another hospital.
Instead he told the ambulance driver to deliver her to one of the American outposts that had already been established on the ouskirts of the city.
"But when he reached their checkpoint, the Americans fired at him," he said.
On April 1 the local Baathists fled al-Nasiriyah for Baghdad and arrived at the hospital looking for their prize captive. Dr Harith moved her to another part of the hospital, and other doctors told the soldiers that he was away.
"They said that they thought Jessica had died, and they didn't know where she was," he said. In their haste and confusion the soldiers left, leaving behind only a few critically injured soldiers.
The American "rescue" operation came on the night of April 2. The hospital was bombarded and soldiers arrived in helicopters and, according to the hospital doctors, in tanks that pulled up outside the hospital.
Most of the doctors fled to the shelter of the radiology department on the first floor.
"We heard them firing and shouting: ?'Go! Go! Go! Go!' " Dr Harith said. One group of soldiers dug up the graves of dead US soldiers outside the hospital, while another interrogated doctors about Ali Hassan al-Majid, the senior Baath party figure known as Chemical Ali, who had never been seen there. A third group looked for Private Lynch.
US soldiers videotaped the rescue, but among the many scenes not shown to the press at US Central Command in Doha was one of four doctors who were handcuffed and interrogated, along with two civilian patients, one of whom was immobile and connected to a drip. "They were doctors, with stethoscopes round their necks," Dr Harith said.
"Even in war, a doctor should not be treated like that."
Unluckiest of all was Abdul Razaq, one of the hospital administrators, who took shelter from the bombardment in Private Lynch's room, believing that he would be safe.
He was seized and taken with the US soldiers on their helicopter to their base, where he was held for three days in an open-air prison camp.
"When he left his skin was the colour of yours," another doctor, Mahmud, said. "When he came back, he was black."
Bizarrely, the rescuers cut open a special bed, designed for patients with bed sores, which had been provided for Private Lynch's use.
"They took samples of sand out of it," Dr Harith said. "It was the only bed like it that we have, the only one in the governorate."
Today, the hospital struggles on without adequate supplies of drugs and without running water or mains electricity.
"There are two faces to Americans," Dr Harith said. "One is freedom and democracy, and giving kids sweets. The other is killing and hating my people. So I am very confused. I feel sad because I will never see Jessica again, and I feel happy because she is happy and has gone back to her life. If I could speak to her I would say: ?'Congratulations!'"
bumblebee - if you have another source confirming this story, I would appreciate it.
The problem I have with the London Times is that it is a Murdoch paper, and, just lie Fox news and the rest of his publications, they are more devoted to tabloid stuff, and have had to print retractions.
Not that I doubt the story - it seems likely - but the London Times is not longer the paper it used to be.
Reply to Mamajuama
Mamajuama, the story is based on a journalist's interview, rather tham coming from a news service, so this is the only source. However, I did look up the journalist and found the following on Google:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Richard+Lloyd+Parry+&btnG=Google+Search
-----BumbleBeeBoogie
Okay - thanks. As I said, it's not that I necessarily doubt the story, but Murdoch, Fox News, the New York Post -all the Murdoch media - this is a man I truly believe has no morals or ethics, nor does he care anything about journalism. And in almost everything he puts out he's instaled a son, a relative, a lackey. So, I'm torn about this.
It definitely makes a lot of sense to me. I saw a quote somewhere else -- from an Iraqi doctor commenting on his desire to show that Iraqis are a humane, civilized people.
thanks for posting this, BBB
It's also a curious fact that very little else has been mentioned about the rescue. Not in the papers, not on tv. The story is not receiving the coverage - so one must wonder.
I try to be careful about this whole subject, because of how I feel and have felt about it. But I also feel strongly about Rupert Murdoch. Here's something else...Murdoch was given permission by the FCC to have several tv channels as well as papers in the NY area, something not previously allowed to other networks. And the FCC is headed by Michael Powel, son of Colin.
One of the first reports, we received was that the "Doctors" in Iraq in Jessica's hospital had been planning, prior to her rescue, on amputating her leg.
Doesn't sound like very good medical treatment in that hospital!
How often is a broken leg treated, in the US, by amputation.
Source, new haven? What I read was the opposite. That they were attending Lynch well and properly, and that there were no bullet holes as first described. I read an AP dispatch, where does your come from?
Quote:Rescued Soldier's Iraqi Doctors Doubled as Her Guardians
By ALAN FEUER
ASIRIYA, Iraq, April 20 ?- First, there was a huge explosion. Then, the helicopters filled with soldiers landed on the hospital grounds.
They moved through the wards destroying doors with plastic explosives and yelling, "Go! Go! Go!" They stopped and handcuffed everyone they found.
"It was just like a Hollywood movie," Dr. Harith al-Houssona, a witness, said. "But there was louder shouting and scarier bombs."
The rescue of Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch from an Iraqi hospital here on April 2 was described by military officials in Qatar and Kuwait as a picture-perfect pinpoint strike. But a ground-level view of the mission, provided by two Iraqi doctors who witnessed it, suggests that it was a harrowing and complicated operation that included far more than simply saving an injured prisoner of war.
Private Lynch, a 19-year-old member of the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, was captured on the road near Nasiriya on March 23. Suffering from broken bones and gunshot wounds, she was handed over to physicians at Nasiriya General Hospital by the Iraqi military doctors who treated her in the field.
"We received her in the casualty unit," said Dr. Houssona, 24. "She had a fractured leg, a gunshot wound and a pulmonary edema. She was barely conscious and extremely psychologically upset."
Within a few hours, Private Lynch woke up to find herself under the watchful eye of Dr. Houssona and an Iraqi intelligence agent, acting as a guard.
"I said, `Hello? What's your name?' " Dr. Houssona recalled. "Her first words were, `Please, don't hurt me.' She was terribly afraid."
Dr. Houssona said he reassured Private Lynch that he was duty-bound to help her. "I told Jessica that our relationship was as a doctor to a patient. I made her understand that it was no more and no less than that."
Over the next few days, as she started to heal, Private Lynch opened to up Dr. Houssona and his colleague, Dr. Anmar Uday, also 24, both of whom speak English.
"I was very impressed by how brave she was," Dr. Uday said. "Even lying in her bed, she told us all she wanted ?- aside from orange juice ?- was to get back to her unit. She wanted to wear her uniform again."
"She was also very truthful," he went on. "I asked her if she liked the Iraqi people, but she said, no, she hated them."
With her blond hair, blue eyes and disarming manner, Private Lynch enchanted the hospital staff, the doctors said. She made jokes, teasing Dr. Houssona that her injuries would help her lose weight.
"I told her I felt like a brother to her," he said. "But she told me I was more like her mother than her brother."
Private Lynch was kept alone in a single room, where her nurses would sing her to sleep each night. But as the shelling and shooting intensified near Nasiriya, her doctors moved her to a crowded ward. It was better to hide her in plain sight, they said. After all, as the Americans drew near, Iraqi intelligence agents were certain to take her away.
"When they showed up, I had the nurses tell them she was dead," Dr. Houssona said. "They asked the nurses, `So where is the cadaver?' They told them so many people had died at the hospital that we simply threw the bodies out the door."
Sensing the end was near, the doctors devised a plan. They hired a driver to sneak Private Lynch in an ambulance to an American checkpoint. But when the driver drew near to the American troops, they stopped his car and turned it around before the driver had a chance to speak.
"So we waited," Dr. Houssona said.
They did not have long to wait. Two days later, close to midnight, there was a deafening explosion just beyond the hospital grounds. The thudding staccato of helicopter rotors sounded in the darkness. The American Special Forces had arrived.
The soldiers stormed the hospital, working slowly down the halls. They detained four doctors at gunpoint, Dr. Houssona said, binding their hands with plastic ties.
As one team rescued Private Lynch, he said, a second searched for Iraqi troops and a third dug up the remains of nine bodies, thought to be other American prisoners who were buried on the grounds. All told, the mission took four hours. They vanished just as swiftly as they arrived.
These days, Dr. Houssona and Dr. Uday are struggling to treat Iraqi patients in a hospital lacking the most basic medical supplies. They have not forgotten Jessica Lynch.
"If I could talk to her," Dr. Uday said, "I would wish her a happy life." Dr. Houssona had a message of his own. "I would tell her I miss her," he said.
New York Times Article
The Iraqi doctors not only took care of her, they actively tried to get her back to the Americans themselves.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace