Flit

THE TROUBLE YOU SEE, IS

THE TROUBLE YOU SEE, IS ALL THE LYING, CONT.

The post-war retractions have started to come out. Of course, there's that great big elephant-on-the-dining-room-table of no WMDs, but since I've said since the start there likely wouldn't be any, there's not much more I really feel the need to say on that one.

Then came the Star's story on Jessica Lynch, which, if nothing else makes it clear that a massive U.S. Special Ops operation, meeting no resistance of any kind, managed to successfully escort a medical patient from a civilian hospital, in a peaceful area, where she'd been left when the Iraqi troops using the hospital had fled two days earlier. (The hospital staff had then apparently tried to turn her over to the Marines themselves, but had been fired on by American troops.) Presumably, they could have as easily sent a taxi...

(NB: What's left unsaid in the Potter story, of course, is exactly what happened to Lynch after her capture and BEFORE the Iraqis abandoned her on the run. Not that any of Potter's sources would possess that information, of course. The story adds no real information on how brutal Lynch's actual experience of captivity may have been. I'm not saying she had an easy go in any sense, only that some aspects of the presentation of her "rescue" at the time seem now rather disingenuous.)

Now today, we find out that the Baghdad statue flag did not, in fact, come from the Pentagon on Sept. 11, but from the U.S. Senate gift shop. Oh, well, another entry for Snopes.com, I guess.

PS: And it was bought by Chuck Schumer's aide, no less! SMAM's most hated Senator... oh, the irony...

ROCK ON A perfect example

ROCK ON

A perfect example of why British Airways is the airline that actually does PR, and the rest of them are just flailing marketing grads. Asked to comment on a story that Liz Hurley was thwarted in an attempt to have sex in first class, the anonymous spokesperson responds:

"We're delighted to see that British Airways' spacious flat beds in first class are being put to good use. It is a welcome example of how our unique flat beds offer not only great comfort, but room enough for two."

For the PR connoisseur, a perfect example of "key message" theory.

UPDATE: Here's another example of interesting PR:

A casino source, hearing of [Bill] Bennett’s claim to breaking even on slots over 10 years, just laughed.

HE'S HAVING A GOOD POST-WAR

HE'S HAVING A GOOD POST-WAR

The Toronto Star's Mitch Potter is on a roll. He was the Canadian reporter who found those documents conclusively proving there were 1998 contacts between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. Now in the last three days, he's found eyewitnesses to the last days in captivity of Jessica Lynch, and the last hours in power of Comical Ali. The man's on fire. Almost makes the Star worth buying again (kidding, Patrick, kidding... through it all, I've never cancelled the subscription).

NB: Note one of several interesting factoids in the Lynch piece: the Nasariyah hospitals report 400 killed in that city, mostly civilian, with the responsibility, in fairness, about equally divided between both sides. Given that the height of the fighting in Nasariyah was still at a point where the Iraqi defences were buckling, but still holding, the civilian hospitals wouldn't have been seeing a lot of straight-up military casualties, who likely would have been evac'd back to army hospitals (right to the end, the road from Nasariyah back to the Iraqi regular army HQ at Amarah stayed open, if interdicted). So this number is a lot more believable than the 150 civilian/military in all of Baghdad noted earlier.