US: At the height of the US-led invasion of Iraq, Private Jessica Lynch was captured and then rescued by US forces. The dramatic story was a terrific morale-booster for Americans at home and in uniform. Conor O'Clery reports.
According to contemporary accounts, the brave 20-year-old slip of a girl from West Virginia emptied her M-16 into Iraqi soldiers who were blazing away at her convoy, and suffered knife and bullet wounds in a fierce fight which took the lives of 11 of her comrades. She was seized by the Iraqis, mistreated and then confined to a hospital, until nine days later when a US Special Operations unit swooped down at dead of night and under cover of gunfire secured the hospital and spirited Jessica away.
Hazy, green nightscope pictures of the raid were supplied to American TV and played endlessly. The irresistible yarn about indomitable courage appeared in great detail in the Washington Post, which quoted a US official as saying: "She was fighting to the death. She did not want to be taken alive."
Now it has emerged that the version fed to the US and world media by the military press centre at Doha and by unnamed US officials "with access to intelligence reports" was riddled with romanticised details and blatant falsehoods which the Pentagon has done nothing to correct.
The Post, stung by criticisms that it relied on anonymous sources in telling the story, conducted an extensive investigation of its own and has uncovered a more complex and human tale than that stage-managed by the Pentagon.
The episode began with a military cock-up. Jessica's maintenance convoy was sent down the wrong road by US commanders and entered a town teeming with Iraqi fighters. Jessica's gun jammed. She did not kill any Iraqis. Nor was she shot or stabbed. Her injuries were caused when the Humvee she was riding crashed into a jack-knifed army truck, leaving Jessica unconscious with multiple fractures and compression to her spine.
The Rambo-type rescue turned out to be unnecessary, as Iraqi fighters had fled the day before, and the young soldier was in the tender care of Iraqi doctors and nurses eager to return her to the Americans.
Since the war, Jessica has been confined to a secure wing of a Washington army hospital and has not spoken to the press. So many pins hold her body together that it can take an hour for her to move from her bed to a wheelchair, the Post reported. Her real heroism is coping with pain.
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The first interview with Jessica is still regarded as the Holy Grail by news organisations, even if her story is not quite what it seemed. Some high-profile interviewers have backed up requests with gifts, but an offer from CBS News has really shaken up the media establishment. CBS News is a division of Viacom, which also owns MTV music network and Simon & Schuster publishing house. It sent word to Jessica that in return for the coveted interview, there could be a book deal with Simon & Schuster, an MTV "special" featuring a concert in her hometown of Palestine, starring hard-core rap artist Ja Rule, and perhaps also an "inspiring" CBS movie.
This one-stop-shop offer, which lone media outlets could not hope to match, was leaked by an indignant New York Times, prompting CBS to sniff, "Unlike the New York Times's own ethical problems, there is no question about the accuracy or integrity of CBS News's reporting" - a reference to the Jason Blair scandal.
But one big problem remains for whoever gets the interview. Jessica does not remember a thing about her capture.
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Next week the White House will issue a major report on the state of the environment, prepared by the government's Environmental Protection Agency. But the Bush White House, stacked with former oil company executives, has ensured that it will be as credible as pre-war claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
When the EPA sent the draft of the report to the White House, Bush officials reached for their felt pens. Out went a line saying "climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment". Out went a conclusion from government research that suggested recent climate change is "likely mostly due to human activities". Out went a reference to a 1999 study showing global temperatures had risen sharply in the past decade compared to the previous 1,000 years. Out went a National Research Council report on various studies that suggested recent global warming was due to human activities, such as vehicle emissions.
In went a reference to a study, partly paid for by the oil industry, challenging the uniqueness of recent temperature increases. EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman caved in to the White House censors, according to a leaked memo, in which she conceded that opposition "may antagonise the White House".
In the end the EPA withdrew most of the section rather than stand charged with issuing a non-scientific report, and prepared to explain its absence by citing "scientific disagreements" over global warming.
However, furious staff members at the agency made sure that the censorship was leaked to the media, and they protested in a confidential internal memo that the report "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change". The administration said climate change would be addressed in a separate report in the future.
Christine Whitman recently announced that she would resign from her cabinet post. Perhaps now we can guess why.
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The 2004 presidential race got under way this week with a $2,000-a-head hamburger "dinner" in the Washington Hilton on Tuesday - cohosted by "independent" counsel Kenneth Starr - at which George Bush raised $3.5 million towards a war chest to pay for campaign ads later this year.
Next day Mr Bush flew to Minneapolis for a rally to upstage Democratic leaders meeting there this week.
But the president is himself the target of negative ads. On the same day, two anti-war groups, Win Without War and MoveOn.org, took a full-page in the New York Times with a picture of Bush labelled "Misleader", beside some of his pre-war quotes on the danger from banned weapons in Iraq.
Democratic front-runner John Kerry has also taken up the theme, saying of Bush: "He misled every one of us." The Kerry campaign has been joined by a top White House counterterrorism adviser, Rand Beers, who quit, saying that Bush's focus on Iraq upset US allies, deprived the war on terror of resources, and threatened to create a new generation of al-Qaeda recruits.
Senator Kerry supported the war on the basis of White House claims about banned weapons, and now says that if Bush lied, "he lied to me personally." His new-found stridency may have something to do with the surprisingly effective anti-war campaign of rival Howard Dean, who in a poll of Democrats enjoys second ranking among the nine candidates, with 18 per cent support to 28 per cent for Kerry.