Bertelsmann zahlt 1 Mio$ für Soldat Jessica Lynch - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[Joerver]

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch has signed a $1 million agreement with Alfred A. Knopf, giving the injured former U.S. Army private the chance to tell her own story, the publisher said September 2, 2003. Lynch talks to reporters upon her return to Elizabeth, West Virginia, July 22, 2003. Photo by Blake Sell/Reuters
Endlich jemand, der es außer Halliburton und Bechtel geschafft hat, aus dem Irakkrieg Geld zu ziehen. Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Jessica.
Hoffentlich zockt das Geld nicht irgendein Raffzahn von Agent ab. Dazu kommen Filmrechte usw.
Lynch wurde von dem amerikanischen Militär und der Presse als Held aufgebaut, wobei sich nachher die ganze Geschuchte als Ente entpuppt hat.
Die junge Frau konnte aber nichts für den Rummel, und sie hat sich deshalb das Geld verdient.


Pvt. Lynch to Tell Story in $1 Million Book Deal
Tue September 2, 2003 12:09 PM ET

By Mark Egan
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch has signed a $1 million agreement with Alfred A. Knopf, giving the injured former U.S. Army private the chance to tell her own story, the publisher said on Tuesday.

The publisher said the book, "I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story," will be written by former New York Times reporter Rick Bragg.

Sources familiar with the book said it will tell the tale of a small town girl who goes to war and becomes a national hero, recognition she does not feel she deserves.

Sources at Knopf said the publisher will pay $1 million to Bragg and the Lynch family. Bragg will be paid a flat fee for producing the book while the Lynch family will receive part of the advance and all of the royalties.

"I have been heartened by the hope and faith of the American people and by the tireless effort of the U.S. Armed Forces," Lynch said in a statement issued by the publisher.

Lynch said many Americans had written offering their support to her. "I feel I owe them all this story, which will be about more than a girl going off to war and fighting alongside her fellow soldiers.

Lynch was granted an honorable military discharge last week due to her injuries. An army private, she became a symbol of American patriotism during the war, which generated controversy as accounts of her rescue in Iraq varied.

A source familiar with the book said it will tell, "what she saw and what she remembers" of the Iraq ordeal. The source said the book would tell the story of, "a kid from the back woods who goes to war and becomes this national hero who doesn`t really feel as though she is a hero."

The 20-year-old supply clerk was captured by Iraqi forces on March 23 near the city of Nassiriya. Eleven other U.S. soldiers were killed and nine wounded in the incident.

U.S. commandos rescued Lynch from an Iraqi hospital on April 1. An early media report quoted unnamed U.S. officials saying she fought fiercely before being captured. But the Army later concluded she was injured when her Humvee crashed into another vehicle in the convoy after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Their report said a tired company commander misread his map and took a wrong turn.

Lynch was given a hero`s welcome when she returned to her hometown of Palestine, West Virginia, on July 22. But the full details of her story have yet to be told since Lynch said she suffered a loss of memory after her capture.

She was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart and the Prisoner of War medal.

Pulitzer-Prize winner Bragg resigned from The New York Times earlier this year after allegations that he relied too heavily on the work of a freelancer.

Knopf is a unit of Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann AG.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=SRZNNGKXR0EJ…

[Joerver]

Die anderen sechs aus der Gruppe sind getötet worden, sie haben nichts. Nur Lynch ist gerettet worden und macht nun das große Geld, das ist für die Angehörigen der Toten nicht so leicht zu verstehen.


Slain Soldier`s Father Criticizes Lynch`s Book Deal
Kiehl Says Lynch Is `A Profiteer`

September 4, 2003: KSAT.COM

COMFORT, Texas -- The father of a Comfort soldier killed in an ambush in Iraq that former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch survived said that Lynch`s million-dollar book deal will taint the memory of the soldiers killed in the ambush.

"Pretty severe, isn`t it?" Randy Kiehl, the father of Army Spc. James Kiehl, said in an exclusive interview with KSAT 12 News Wednesday from his home in Comfort. "That she makes money off the death of my son and off the deaths of so many others."

James Kiehl (pictured, below) was among seven members of the 507th Maintenance Company stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso killed in the ambush on March 23 near An Nasiriyah. Lynch survived the attack and was taken prisoner of war. She was later rescued from a hospital and became a national hero.

On Tuesday, a publisher announced that Lynch signed a $1 million deal for a book that will tell the story about her capture and rescue.

"Where`s the million-dollar book deal for the other members of the 507th who were killed?" Randy Kiehl said. "How do they tell their story?

"Now, she`s a profiteer because what she did was in the line of duty."

Randy Kiehl said he also blames the publisher and others "who waved that million-dollar check in front of her."

Kiehl said he plans on reading Lynch`s book, due out in November, to find out what it says about his son.

Kiehl added that he`s glad Lynch survived the attack

[Joerver]

Die Sache scheint nicht viele zu interessieren. Aber trotzdem hier noch ein Kommentar aus der Onlineausgabe vom S.F.Chronikel.

The Big Lie Of Jessica Lynch
A $1 mil book deal, zero memory of any "rescue" and the worst book you`ll read this year
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, September 5, 2003
©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=%2Fgate%2Farc…



Hey, remember that dramatic CNN footage of that big statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled by U.S. forces in that Baghdad square a few months back, during the "war"? Remember how powerfully symbolic it was supposed to be?

Remember, later, seeing the wide-angle shot on the Internet, the one of all the U.S. tanks surrounding the square and the whole bogus setup of how they staged the event, complete with a big crane and some strong cable and strategically positioned "citizens" cheering their "liberation" as the statue fell, as just off camera, a handful of genuine Iraqis loitered nearby, looking confused and bored?

Remember how you felt then? Like this little black worm had bored into your skin and was crawling around in your small intestine and you had the perpetual urge to go off into the corner and eat pie and slam double scotches and scream at the state of BushCo`s nation?


The Jessica Lynch story is just like that, only much, much worse.

These are the things that make you wince and sigh. These are the things that put it all in perspective, make you realize what the Pentagon and the military hawks really value.

These are the things that make you realize, goddammit, here I am working every day and struggling to make ends meet in a BushCo-gutted economy and all I really needed to do all along to make a million bucks is stage some sort of bogus wartime heroics and sell it to a war-numbed American populace for $24.95 in hardback, and, boom, Range Rover City.

Jessica Lynch. You know the one. The sweet, American-pie 19-year-old soldier and kindergarten-teacher wanna-be whose army squad took a wrong turn in Iraq and was, apparently, ambushed.

And some of her comrades were killed and she was taken prisoner, full of stab wounds and bullet holes, and she was whisked off to a ragged Iraqi hospital and held for eight days by vicious Iraqi guards and ostensibly abused, and later supposedly "rescued" in the most daring and macho made-for-TV moment of the war by elite teams of hunky U.S. Army Rangers and U.S. Navy SEALs. Wow.

Except that it never really happened that way. Except that Lynch herself doesn`t remember a single thing and all the nurses and doctors and eyewitnesses on the scene say the Iraqi fedayeen guards had fled the day before the "rescue," and there was no danger whatsoever, no resistance of any kind, the U.S. forces could just walk right in, and they knew it.

And the hospital doors were wide open, and the nurses and doctors had gone out of their way to provide decent care for our precious Jessica, considering the circumstances, and doctors even tried to return Lynch to U.S. forces themselves.

And despite U.S. claims, Lynch had no knife wounds or bullet holes at all, just a few broken bones, and the dramatic and violent "rescue" was really just inane and silly and entirely faked and yet America bought it, hook, line and Rumsfeld, because it was on TV.

And now, here we are. Jessica and disgraced N.Y. Times reporter Rick "Oh my God do I need a gig" Bragg just inked a $1 million book deal to tell her nonstory, titled "I`m a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story," not "Oh My God You Are Such a Sucker for Buying This Book I Mean Wow."

Because this is how we fabricate our history. This is how we spin our patriotism, how we bake our jingoistic cake, the Lynch tale the most apt and definitive myth of the war so far.

Because Jessica`s story, much like WMDs and Saddam`s nukes and biotoxins and Orange Alerts and our imminently prosperous economy and Jenna Bush`s ostensible prowess with a beer bong, does not rely on truths. We do not rely on first-hand reports. We do not rely on anything so piffling and small and dangerous as honesty.

We rely, simply, on PR. We believe the TV images of the bogus "rescue" at the expense of common sense because we are a nation drunk on the idea that the U.S. can do no wrong and TV would never lie.

And goddammit if Hannity and Rush and O`Reilly say it happened like that, it must be true, and damn you America-hating libs for daring to question the integrity of our armed forces when they are out there right now protecting us from, uh, what was it again? Higher gas prices? Israel`s scorn? Dick Cheney`s pallid sneer? Something like that.

Look, there is no war without spin. There is no war without outright lying to the populace, without trying to coerce a wary nation into supporting our unprovoked savagery by way of Hollywood-style set pieces performed specifically to deflect attention from the brutality and the decapitated children and the still-dying U.S. soldiers and the burning bodies by the side of the road.

This is nothing shocking. This is nothing even remotely unusual or uncommon. The fabric of war consists not of gallant battles fought by hardy soldiers for some noble collective good yay yay go team, but of manufactured tales of valiant brotherhood and purebred heroism designed to make the vile pill slightly less bitter.

War is, of course, vicious and primitive and disgustingly violent and not the slightest bit gallant, and America has rarely been more thuggish in its short history than when we annihilated Afghanistan and Iraq lo these past few years, the world`s greatest bloated superpower hammering down on two nearly defenseless, piss-poor nations in the name of, well, petrochemical rights and strategic political positioning. It`s not a war, it`s a gang beating. Uncle Sam wants you.

And, hence, we need the sugar. We desperately need the sweet, teary-eyed images of flags and salutes and stunning "rescues" to make it all go down smoothly, to suppress the collective recoil, the national gag reflex. After all, who wants to see burning babies and crying mothers and hot screaming death on prime time? Show me Old Glory waving in slo-mo! Ahh, that`s better.

We need, in short, pretty 19-year-old memory-impaired soldier girls being rescued by manly SEALs wearing bitchin` night-vision goggles and yelling "Go! Go! Go!" with lots of explosions and helicopters and maybe a cameo by Bruce Willis looking squinty and tough, with the Pentagon cameras rolling and everyone`s adrenaline pumping like at a horse race, except for maybe the baffled Iraqi hospital personnel who were calmly taking care of Ms. Lynch when the U.S. storm troopers swooped in and knocked them down.

Of course, this isn`t about Jessica herself at all. She has served her country bravely and is probably very sweet and childishly articulate and is just in it for the quick wad of cash, and what the hell she doesn`t remember a damn thing about the rescue anyway, which makes her the perfect one to write a whole book about it, with Bragg along to, ahem, "fill in the blanks." Ain`t that America.

And we can just imagine how the Pentagon brass doubtlessly winked at Jessie and said hey sweetie, you go girl, take the book deal, and the movie deal, and the commemorative plates by the Franklin Mint, it would be good for the country if you go along with the ruse, there there now, that`s a good little soldier.

Jessica Lynch is but a puppet, a toy, a convenient TV-ready canvass onto which we can project our impotent myths of patriotism and war, spit forth by the BushCo military machine to ease America`s pain, to assuage that increasingly nagging fear that we have committed this horrible thing, this irreversible atrocity.

In short, Jessica`s myth helps numb the idea that we have removed a pip-squeak, nonthreatening tyrant from power and left behind a reeking miasma of violence and bloodshed and thousands of dead citizens, more rabid anti-U.S. sentiment and mistrust and global instability than Saddam (or Osama) could`ve ever dreamed.

And little Ms. Lynch, she is America`s new doll. She is our little G.I. Jessica, all safe and clean in her homecoming fatigues, her imaginary story ready to grace the nightstands of the happily gullible across America.

Because really, why bother with all that icky messy nonfiction, all that violent unsavory fact, when straight fiction is so much more, you know, patriotic?


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Mark Morford`s Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

[borazon]

Die Sache scheint den Neid-Komplex von Joerver ja schier unglaublich zu beschäftigen.