Lynch said no one among the staff at the Iraqi hospital was abusive to her, "no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing … I mean, I actually had one nurse, that she would sing to me."
Either the Washington Post or the military was lying here, (Or she is lying now).
I think this merits at the minimum, an in house investigation at the Washington Compost of the two reporters. Either the reporters are Jayson Blair clones, or administration officials were lying in a most blatant manner.
Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed. Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be assessed. Pentagon officials said they had heard "rumors" of Lynch's heroics but had no confirmation.
That's exactly how I remember hearing it. The military never said it happened that way, and repeatedly cautioned that they couldn't verify stories of her fighting. The source was an intercept of an Iraqi radio signals about someone fighting back, possibly a female, and some chuckleheads jumped to the conclusion it was Lynch. That's the classic situation of getting confusing reports from a battlefield or firefight, and no grounds to claim a conspiracy or some campaign of disinformation.
As for the reports of her getting abused in the hospital, that information again was attributed to that Iraqi lawyer who claimed to have helped her. It's entirely possible that he lied about that, but that's not the military's fault since they identified him as the source of the info.