Conspiracies

A friend of mine sent me an article from Salon, in which the Pentagon is accused of staging the whole Jessica Lynch rescue in order to create a wonderful bit of PR and psy ops.

I’ve dug into this a bit, and a variety of respectable players in the Blogosphere, such as Andrew Sullivan and instapundit are questioning the America-Staged-The-Whole-Thing story.

The whole thing began with a BBC story, which states that the rescue effort was a complete sham, staged for propaganda benefit, and that the soldiers involved were shooting blanks and pyrotechnics to make the whole production more dramatic. The author of this story, John Kampfner, later told CNN in an interview that while he questions the Pentagon’s spin on the story, he did NOT believe that the event was staged. To me, however, the above-referenced BBC article sure sounds like that’s what he was saying.