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last Saturday I saw Stone Phillips on Dateline interview at great length the survivors of the 507th, including the black woman whose name escapes me (Shoshana Johnson?). They described how Lynch, Lori Piesterwa (sp?), and two others were involved in a crushing Humvee accident. Piesterwa was driving and Lynch was sitting next to her. Going full speed, they hit the vehicle in front of them which had come to a complete stop. The soldiers being interviewed told how they had gone to check on the soldiers in the crashed Humvee and were certain that all of them were dead. Only Lynch was still moving, and that was only a twitching of one foot, which the soldiers thought was just a post-mortem muscular reaction. When they later learned that Lynch had survived, they were -- to put it mildly -- astonished and overjoyed. More was said in that interview and in the official reports, but ABSOLUTELY NOTHING has been suggested which would support your rank speculation of rape or torture of anyone, and especially not Lynch. Some POWs have reported that they were beat up immediately after being captured, but that's about it.

If you watched all of that Dateline interview, you also saw the group shut Pfc. Patrick Miller up quickly when he began to talk about what the Iraqis did to him after his capture, so the former POWs were clearly under orders to not say certain things. Pfc. Lynch was unconsious when they saw her in the humvee, but she must have regained consiousness before her capture, because this Newsweek article reports that "NEWSWEEK has learned, however, that U.S. military intelligence officers believe Lynch's injuries were inflicted after she and other survivors surrendered. "This poor girl," said one Special Forces captain involved in her rescue. He's among three military intelligence sources who say she was standing when she surrendered, and had minor injuries at most. That was confirmed by Mehdi Kafaji, the Iraqi orthopedic surgeon who was in charge of her treatment at the hospital in An Nasiriya. "She had blunt-force trauma not consistent with what you'd expect from a car accident," Kafaji says. He adds that there was no sign of bullet wounds on her body, and her injuries appeared to have been inflicted by a severe beating, probably with numerous rifle butts. Her Fedayeen captors then took her to An Nasiriya's Saddam General Hospital. She told doctors she had not been sexually assaulted." At least she wasn't raped, at least as far as she can remember, but she was beaten so severely that after 4 months in a world class hospital she is still confined to a wheelchair. I would call that torture. As far as the witness seeing her slapped around by one of her captors it would be asking a lot of coincidence to assume that when he happened to be looking was the first and only time they were slapping her around, so it is safe to assume that after being beaten to the point that she had multiple broken bones, she was subjected to frequent minor (by comparison) beatings while in that hospital.

Thank you for posting this. Of course, I am certain some posters will not consider this torture (acts in the heat of war don't you know-extreme sarcasm). The girl was apparently beaten so severly as you point out that after four months in a hospital, she still can not walk. She will suffer from these injuries to some extent for the rest of her life, but the retired military types quoted in this article and some freepers apparently think she doesn't deserve a medal- she should be "embarrassed". Well, I am embarrassed for those who denigrate our young men and women (without any evidence) and belittle their sacrifices-in some cases the last full measure..... from the comfort of their armchairs: completely comfortable and completely smug. LOL

Yes, I did see Pfc Miller start to say something about his capture, but I assumed that he wanted to tell about getting beat up. Their pictures after capture looked like they could have been roughed up pretty good.

I haven't seen the Newsweek article you quoted, but I don't give it any credence. If the 507th survivors are to be believed (and why not?), Pfc Lynch was unconcious and did not surrender and was not standing. That article sounds like more gratuitous sensationlism to me.

There are no injuries which Lynch has been said to have sustained which are not explainable by the Humvee accident which the survivors described. Other soldiers have suffered similar injuries in similar accidents in this war, and many died. I don't see how the doctor could say that a broken bone was caused by being hit by a rifle butt as opposed to the accident which we know that she endured. This was not just your ordinary car accident.

When someone is injured as severely as Lynch was in the Humvee accident, it is not at all surprising that she is still recovering and needs to use a wheelchair at times four months later. She has many months if not years of recovery ahead of her, but I am betting that she will fully recover because she is young, strong, motivated, has a good mental outlook, and a strong support system.

I don't sense that you -- unlike others on these Lynch threads -- are stretching to try to reach a conclusion about torture. But I hope and pray that there was no torture, for Lynch's sake as well as others and the armed forces as a whole, and will not believe that there was torture until someone knowledgable says that there was. And, yes, I am defining torture to mean something other than a spontaneous a$$-kicking or a slap -- neither of which are acceptable but not by my definition torture.