It's wonderful to be here with you all. I'm so glad to be home now. Perhaps you've heard the good news. But I'm still under house arrest, so there's more hard time for me. Anyway, it's such a privilege to be guest-blogging today. My GPS ankle bracelet keeps chafing, and I'd shank a newborn in the neck with a sharpened toothbrush for a cappuccino, but it's just great to be back in my own little hut.
All I have from my time in the belly of the correctional beast are memories, bittersweet memories of cold, frequently lonely nights. Well, and the tattoos. I have got to get these teardrop dealies under my left eye lasered off ASAP. The spiderweb on the elbow I'll probably keep; there's a sentimental story behind that one. (Asian Lucy, call me when you get out!)
Oh, that reminds me! I always love sharing new discoveries with my friends and fans, things that they can use to brighten their own drab lives. Here is a very special Martha recipe for pruno. It's an exotic concoction of oranges, fruit cocktail, ketchup, and sugar, specially heated and fermented for several days. I love all those things, and now I can put them all together and enjoy myself while doing it! The "American Me" in you will thank me later.
Well, enough small talk. Let's take a look at the first entry in the old mail slot, shall we? It appears that one of the soldiers involved in the capture of Iraqi baddie Saddam Hussein is claiming that the famous spider-hole capture was staged.
Ex-Sgt. Nadim Abou Rabeh, of Lebanese descent, was quoted in the Saudi daily al-Medina Wednesday as saying Saddam was actually captured Friday, Dec. 12, 2003, and not the day after, as announced by the U.S. Army.
"I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced," Abou Rabeh said.
"We captured him after fierce resistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed," he said.
A Lebanese ex-Marine telling this to the Saudi media? Hmmm, nothing odd about any of that. That reminds me, I need to collate my hummus and tabbouleh recipes; they're getting hard to keep straight. And I don't know how I'd last in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia; nothing but earth tones and black. Black can be helpful for what my ex-cellmate calls the "bootylicious woman", but I just couldn't live without a little ocher and cerulean in my life.
He said Saddam himself fired at them with a gun from the window of a room on the second floor. Then they shouted at him in Arabic: "You have to surrender. ... There is no point in resisting."
"Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam's capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well," Abou Rabeh said.
One thing I learned in my hard stretch was that, no matter where we are physically, deep down inside each of us hides in our own spider-hole sometimes. As Yeats once wrote, "The night is young, and I cannot linger, so look out butt, here comes my finger". It's probably not the Yeats you're thinking of, but the butch who ran our cell-block, Ramona "Salt Lick" Yeats. There's a funny reason for that nickname, as you might guess. By the end of my first week around Ramona, when my jaw and tongue muscles finally stopped aching, I knew one thing for sure -- almost everything tastes better with a dash of cinnamon, or in a pinch, a packet of ketchup swiped from the mess hall.
But as outlandish as Sergeant Rabeh's story sounds at first blush, I recall the story of another fresh-faced West Virginia maiden, with pouty lips, milky thighs, and perky, inviting breasts. I remember how her story got redecorated a bit, here and there, for theatrical effect.
"I examined her, I saw she had a broken arm, a broken thigh and a dislocated ankle," said Dr Harith a-Houssona, who looked after her.
"There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound - only road traffic accident. They want to distort the picture. I don't know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury."
Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital.
"We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital," said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital.
"It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan."
There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Harith had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance.
But as the ambulance, with Private Lynch inside, approached a checkpoint American troops opened fire, forcing it to flee back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch.
....
The American strategy was to ensure the right television footage by using embedded reporters and images from their own cameras, editing the film themselves.
The Pentagon had been influenced by Hollywood producers of reality TV and action movies, notably the man behind Black Hawk Down, Jerry Bruckheimer.
"Snatch squad". God, that makes me tingle in places I didn't know existed until last October. And oh, I just love that nice Bruckheimer man's CSI franchises, don't you? If I could be the watercress in a Marg Helgenberger/Melina Kanakaredes hors d'œuvres, I'd consider wearing white before Memorial Day. Mmmm, Helgenberger.
Sadly, almost nothing fed to reporters about either Lynch's original capture by Iraqi forces or her "rescue" by U.S. forces turns out to be true. Consider the April 3 Washington Post story on her capture headlined "She Was Fighting to the Death," which reported, based on unnamed military sources, that Lynch "continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds," adding that she was also stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in.
It has since emerged that Lynch was neither shot nor stabbed, but rather suffered accident injuries when her vehicle overturned. A medical checkup by U.S. doctors confirmed the account of the Iraqi doctors, who said they had carefully tended her injuries, a broken arm and thigh and a dislocated ankle, in contrast to U.S. media reports that doctors had ignored Lynch.
Another report spread by news organizations nationwide claimed Lynch was slapped by an Iraqi security guard, and the U.S. military later insisted that an Iraqi lawyer witnessed this incident and informed them of Lynch's whereabouts. His credibility as a source, however, is difficult to verify because he and his family were whisked to the U.S., where he was immediately granted political asylum and has refused all interview requests. His future was assured, with a job with a lobbying firm run by former Republican Rep. Bob Livingstone that represents the defense industry, and a $500,000 book contract with HarperCollins, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox network did much to hype Lynch's story, as it did the rest of the war.
Well, she sounds like a lucky girl. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to manipulate your own media coverage from behind bars. I don't know how the rest of the girls on my cell-block managed to do it.
Thanks for reading, and remember -- buy stuff with my name on it!
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