Smoke ’Em Out

A little bit more on the earlier story about the possible staging of Saddam’s capture. First the Green Knight reminds us that A:

Two years before, Bush had said repeatedly that he would smoke the terrorists "out of their holes." Failing to find Bin Laden, the imagery was simply switched to the villain du jour.

and asks if anybody else is, B:

reminded of Jessica Lynch, who got the opposite treatment?

"[T]he 20-year-old criticised the release of false information about her capture by Iraqi forces....

The Pentagon initially put out the story that Private Lynch - a slight woman who was just 19 at the time - had been wounded by Iraqi gunfire but had kept fighting until her ammunition ran out. But she told [Diane] Sawyer that she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun had jammed during the chaos....

Initial reports also suggested that Miss Lynch had been abused after she came round in the hospital. She says that again was untrue - there was no mistreatment, and one nurse used to sing to her.

She said she was grateful to the American special forces team which rescued her but, asked whether the Pentagon's subsequent portrayal of her rescue bothered her, she said: 'Yes, it does. They used me as a way to symbolise all this stuff. It's wrong.'"

And as a final note, I’d like to revive this quote from Donald Rumsfeld, issued just after Saddam’s capture (bear in mind that the ex-marine who brought us this story asserts that Saddam was found in a house, in possession of a gun, which he used to engage our troops, killing a soldier):

"Here was a man who was photographed hundreds of times shooting off rifles and showing how tough he was, and in fact, he wasn't very tough, he was cowering in a hole in the ground, and had a pistol and didn't use it and certainly did not put up any fight at all," Rumsfeld said.

"In the last analysis, he seemed not terribly brave," he said.

Dost thou perhaps protest too much, Master Rumsfeld? I’m just saying…