Chocoholic wrote:shafique wrote:Arnie - as long as you have the battery hostage, of course I agree with you!
Choco - I hadn't heard about females from the UK and US being raped and tortured in Iraq.. so you are right about no one 'harping' on about this. Was I mistaken in believing that there weren't any such abuses commited?
The one incident that did make it to the media was that of the female US private that was 'liberated' from a hospital, despite the fact that the doctors had told the US army where she was and that there were no guards imprisoning her. She was treated well she says.
I'd also like to put the record straight as to my view of the British army - I have 2 uncles that served in WW2 and my dad was a reservist (TA). I have great respect for the army and their professionalism.. they do a lot of peacekeing aroundthe world and keep us Brits safe.
I disagree with some political decisions and I am proud that I have the freedom to express these views.
Cheers,
Shafique
Shaf, I'm not sure where your info on the female private comes from, it was well documented (she's even written it in a book) that she was captured, held against her will, she was raped and the docs tried to amputate her leg, even though the damage to it didn't warrant it!
Choco...Isn't odd that she never claimed any rape or torture after her so-called rescue....only after 1 million dollar book deal did she remember that the Iraqis raped and tortured her... I mean what better way to sell you book than to claim that the enemies raped tortured me....
Four of the people in that Humavee died and she was the only one who lived from that crash, now lets see the Iraqis took her to somewhere and savagely raped her, then took her to the hospital, where they obviously cared for her as best as they could.
, why not kill her....why would they go ahead and save her life, just so she could be used maybe later on as a witness to iraqi war crimes. Doesn't make sense to me....and how could she remember the rape when she was unconscious until she treated in the hospital...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1083110,00.html
Private Lynch's media war continues as Iraqi doctors deny rape claim
Sexual assault would have killed injured soldier, says medical team
Gary Younge in New York
Wednesday November 12, 2003
The Guardian
The Iraqi doctors who treated the American soldier Jessica Lynch said yesterday that they were "pained" by accusations that she was raped sometime after being captured.
The doctors insisted that the claims, detailed in her biography, I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story, which was published yesterday, were untrue, and that examinations of her showed that she had not been sexually assaulted.
Ms Lynch was unconscious for three hours after her convoy was ambushed and she says that she has no recollection of what happened to her.
But medical records which form part of her official biography indicate she was raped, according to the author, Rick Bragg. "The records also show that she was a victim of anal sexual assault," the book contends.
"The records do not tell whether her captors assaulted her almost lifeless, broken body after she was lifted from the wreckage, or if they assaulted her and then broke her bones into splinters until she was almost dead."
Ms Lynch's primary doctor during the three months she spent at the Walter Reed medical centre, which treats casualties from the war, backed up the claim.
"The exam in Landstuhl," Greg Argyros told Time magazine, referring to the place in Germany where she was treated, "indicated that the injuries were consistent with possible anal sexual assault."
Ms Lynch, a supply clerk for the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, has never claimed that she was raped. "Even just the thinking about that, that's too painful," she said.
But Bragg, a former Pulitzer prize winner, said it was the soldier's parents who felt that the details of her condition and of the alleged sexual assault should be included in the biography. "Because if we didn't put it in, the story wouldn't be complete. It would be a lie," he said.
The author, who left the New York Times this year after he was suspended for failing to credit a freelance reporter for doing the bulk of his reporting, did not visit Iraq while researching the book.
The claims have infuriated and shocked doctors in Nassiriya, where Ms Lynch was taken after a rocket-propelled grenade attack hit her Humvee vehicle on March 23. "She was a woman, young and alone in a strange country," said Jamal Kadhim Shwail, the first doctor to examine Ms Lynch when she was taken to the town's military hospital by Iraqi special police. When he saw Ms Lynch, Dr Shwail said, she was lying in the hospital reception, unconscious and in shock from blood loss. She was wearing her uniform including a flak jacket, military trousers and boots; none of her clothes had been unbuttoned or removed, as the book claims, he said.
"We only had a few minutes to save her life, we found a vein in her neck to give her fluids and blood," Dr Shwail told Reuters at his home in Nassiriya. "It was our duty to look after her and we did. Now people are saying she was raped, it pains us. The thought did not cross my mind.
"Her injuries were consistent with severe trauma, a car crash, nothing else."
Mahdi Khafazi, who operated on Ms Lynch's fractured right femur, said he had cleaned her body before surgery: "I examined her very carefully. I cleaned her body including her genitalia. She had no sign of raping or sodomising."
A sexual assault of that nature, he said, would have killed her: "If she had been raped there is no way she could have survived it. She was fighting for her life, her body was broken. What sort of an animal would even think of that?"
Khudair al-Hazbar, then deputy director of the hospital, said: "It was war, but we cared about her and we did everything we could for her. I spoke to her every day. She was frightened, but polite to us. I know she is grateful."
On April 1, after Iraqi forces deserted the hospital, it was raided by US forces. The event was filmed by the military through a night-vision lens and Ms Lynch was taken away on a stretcher.
"They attacked the hospital at night. There were explosions outside which broke the windows. The patients were terrified," Dr Hazbar said. "The Americans knew the Iraqi military had gone, so why they didn't come for her quietly, I don't know."
The dispute over the sexual assault is just the latest salvo in the media war over the portrayal of Ms Lynch's injuries, capture, treatment and rescue, which has intensified in the run-up to the publication of her biography.
Shortly after she was rescued by US soldiers anonymous American officials told journalists that the private had heroically resisted capture, emptying her weapon at her attackers until the last minute.
Subsequent investigations revealed that her vehicle had crashed after her unit lost its way, her M16 rifle, clogged with sand, had jammed from the outset and the Iraqi doctors had not only treated her well but tried to give her back when they were fired upon by US troops. Asked in an interview to be screened last night whether the military's depiction of events troubled her, Ms Lynch said: "Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolise all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong. It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about.
"Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, 'Yeah, I went down shooting.' But I didn't.
"I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do. I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember."
Ms Lynch has also contested claims by an Iraqi lawyer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, who reported her whereabouts to the US military and who now lives in America. He claimed in a book that her captors had slapped her.
"From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing," she said. "I'm so thankful for those people because that's why I'm alive today."
Jeff Coplon, who helped Mr Rehaief write the book, said last week that both he and Ms Lynch could be right: "One of the questions that could arise in the wake of this kind of trauma is that someone could believe they remember everything and their memory could still be incomplete."