Global Policy Forum

By Warren Gamble

Private Jessica Lynch may not have needed saving from an Iraqi hospital by a kick-in-the-door squad of elite troops. The Iraq National Museum did not lose 170,000 artefacts in a wave of looting - latest estimates put the numbers still missing in the low thousands or hundreds. The painstaking search for weapons of mass destruction - the basis for America and Britain invading Iraq - has so far yielded scant evidence and a series of comical discoveries, including a cache of vacuum cleaners. As the "fog" of war recedes, the stories which captured the headlines have come into sharper focus, and some are not standing up well. One of the highest-profile events in the first stanza of the war, at a time when American and British troops were making slower progress than many expected, was the rescue of 19-year-old Private Lynch.

The blond country girl from Palestine, West Virginia, was captured after her Army Maintenance Company unit took a wrong turn outside the town of Nasiriya on March 23. Nine of her comrades were killed in an Iraqi ambush and six were captured, including an injured Private Lynch. She was brought to the Nasiriya general hospital by soldiers and questioned by agents. An Iraqi lawyer says he saw one of her captors slapping her and decided to help her to escape. The lawyer, Mohammed Odeh Al Rehaief, has since been given asylum in the United States and has not revealed further details because he has a book deal. Acting on Rehaief's maps of the hospital, where his wife worked as a nurse, a commando raid was carried out in the early hours of April 2, nine days after her capture. The dramatic green-tinted night-vision pictures beamed around the world the next day showed Private Lynch being carried on a stretcher to a helicopter. Military officials said at the time there were firefights getting in and out of the building.

Initial media reports said Lynch had suffered bullet and stab wounds in the ambush, although shortly after her rescue they were changed to a head wound and broken bones, including two broken legs. Lynch, still recovering in an American military hospital, says she has no recollection of what happened between the ambush of her unit until she woke in hospital. She has yet to speak publicly about what happened after that. But this month, journalists who visited the southern Iraqi hospital and talked to doctors and other witnesses uncovered a different version of events - one in which Private Lynch was unguarded when the commandos arrived, a fact that was or should have been known before the raid, according to one witness who told an American advance party that her captors had already fled.

Veteran BBC correspondent John Kampfner and the Times' Richard Lloyd Parry quoted the medical staff who treated Lynch as saying she had been given the best treatment available, the only specialist bed and a transfusion of their own blood. Kampfner, who made a BBC documentary called War Spin: The Truth About Jessica, says the junior resident who treated Lynch and built up a rapport during her captivity, Dr Harith al-Houssona, found no bullet or stab wounds, but injuries consistent with a road accident.

Harith told Parry that two days before the raid, Iraqi intelligence officers had ordered her transfer to another hospital. Instead, the doctor told an ambulance driver to take her to an American outpost. But as the ambulance approached it came under American fire, and was forced to return to the hospital. Harith says on the day before the American raid the local Baathists fled to Baghdad. On their way several turned up at the hospital seeking their prize captive. But Harith had moved her to another part of the hospital and other doctors told her pursuers they thought she had died. The Pentagon insists there was gunfire from irregular Iraqi forces outside the hospital, but inside the special forces met no resistance. Another doctor, Anmar Uday, told the BBC the elite troops broke down doors, handcuffed doctors and a patient who was connected to a drip. "It was like a Hollywood film," Anmar said. "They cried, 'Go, go, go', with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show - an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan - with jumping and shouting."

The Pentagon last week said it was insulted by the BBC documentary's claim that its rescue was hyped to boost support for the war. Claims that blanks were fired were silly, a spokesman said. "The thing that is most insulting is the suggestion that we would put US service members at risk to stage such an event," Pentagon spokesman Marine Lieutenant Colonel Dave Lapan said. "This was a real rescue under a combat situation." The United States Army is carrying out its own investigation into the capture of Lynch and her colleagues.

The Lynch story has also been tainted with suspect reporting and plain fiction. The Washington Post, which ran an initial account of Lynch fighting off her Iraqi attackers with gun blazing and being shot and stabbed in the ambush, was taken to task by one of its own columnists last week for not giving a straight admission that the story was wrong or suspect. The New York Times coverage of Lynch partly came from disgraced former reporter Jayson Blair, who resigned after fabricating or plagiarising stories, including a made-up interview with Lynch's father. With books and a movie on the Lynch operation being touted, more information may emerge, or it may be the legend of the rescue will survive no matter what. The exaggerated reports of looting at Iraq's national museum after American forces captured Baghdad last month also has a cloudy history.

Early reports said thieves had taken at least 170,000 artefacts, leaving nothing of real value. If true, and the early reports did caution that the full picture remained unclear, it was described as one of the greatest cultural disasters in recent Middle Eastern history. But the museum's research director, Donny George, told the Daily Telegraph last week that shoddy reporting amid the fog of war caused mistaken accounts of the looting. George says the museum collection totalled around 170,000 pieces and reporters mistook that for the amount taken, reinforced by eyewitness reports of empty shelves. Some reporters though have blamed part of the confusion on other museum officials, who were defensive and tight-lipped about the thefts.

American investigators say it is difficult to estimate how many items are still missing because of a lack of detailed records, but they believe the numbers could be in the hundreds or low thousands. Some priceless treasures were stolen, including a 5000-year-old vessel known as the Sacred Vase of Warka, but most of the empty display cases were the result of a storage plan carried out weeks, months and in some cases years before the war. Thousands of museum pieces were stored in a central bank vault, a bomb shelter and a secret storage area which staff have refused to reveal. Since the looting, nearly 1000 other stolen items have been recovered through an amnesty programme or raids on suspected thieves, including a checkpoint search which found 453 museum objects. But other artefacts believed to be stolen by professional thieves are presumed to now be on the black market.

A more dreadful hunt, the search for weapons of mass destruction, has so far not backed up America and Britain's main justification for the war. Despite intensive searches at scores of suspected sites, the specialist American teams hunting chemical and biological arms have uncovered caches of household appliances, seized a student's research paper and uncovered a distillery. In the lead-up to war, the United States Secretary of State Colin Powell did his best to convince a sceptical world that Saddam Hussein had hidden weapons of mass destruction in breach of UN resolutions.

In a February address to the United Nations Security Council he presented tape recordings, satellite photographs and documents which he said provided "irrefutable and undeniable" evidence of chemical and biological weapons, and a nuclear weapons programme. But despite several false alarms during and after the war, there have been no confirmed discoveries. Indeed late this week US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded Iraq may have destroyed such weapons before the war. The closest has been the discovery of transportable biological laboratories - which could be used to make illegal arms although there has been no evidence of their manufacture. The Washington Post's Barton Gellman, who spent a week with one of the specialist search teams, wrote of darkly comic missions, including one at a suspected chemical and biological arms site in Baghdad. The team broke the heavy crossbars sealing the doors and went room-to-room with torches, finding a series of steel orange doors.

None revealed any sinister secrets. The bolt to the last room was snapped and the hunters stepped inside. In the middle of the room was a cache of vacuum cleaners. Gellman recounted another mission during the first days of the war. The team was summoned to southern Iraq where Marines reported finding suspected anthrax in an abandoned building near Basra. The suspicious powder turned out to be harmless; the suspicious handwritten documents and sketches found at the scene turned out to be a school science project. Other intelligence leads turned out to be wrong, like the suspected chemical site which turned out to be a family-owned distillery. The weapons team was showered with offers of arak, the company's anise-flavoured liqueur. The search goes on, but Gellman reported a growing frustration among the weapons teams at poor intelligence reports and the widespread looting which may have destroyed evidence.

The Central Intelligence Agency is reviewing whether the intelligence community's prewar assessments of Iraqi weapons programmes were wrong. But despite the failure so far to find the "smoking gun" that America insisted Hussein possessed, the Washington Post says President George Bush appears in no political danger. According to a May 1 Gallup poll for CNN and USA Today, 79 per cent of Americans said the war was justified even without conclusive evidence of illegal weapons. Just 19 per cent said discoveries of the weapons were needed to justify the war. An April Washington Post-ABC News poll found 72 per cent supported the war without a finding of chemical or biological weapons. Commentators say the discovery of mass graves in Iraq has provided the public with another justification for the overthrow of Hussein's regime. White House communications director Dan Bartlett told the Post two weeks ago: "Both Republicans and Democrats alike know that Saddam Hussein had a WMD programme. In fact, the UN Security Council passed a resolution that confirmed it. So why would you criticise something the entire world knows to be true?" But even Bush allies are now questioning the intelligence evidence used to win the passage of that UN resolution.

And others are warning that the international community will be even less willing to believe American justification for future action. Jonathan Tucker, a weapons expert at the US Institute for Peace, told the Post that the American public was moving on, but other countries would continue to press the point if no weapons were found. "The credibility of the Administration and the US intelligence community are still on the line. This whole doctrine of pre-emptive war is predicated on our ability to determine a country's potential threat before the weapons are used."

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