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Where did the flag come from?

"I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do," Lynch said, in a television interview to be broadcast in the US on Tuesday. "I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that's the last I remember."

... "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," Lynch told interviewer Diane Sawyer. "Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, 'yeah, I went down shooting'. But I didn't."

Asked if the Pentagon's portrayal of her rescue bothered her, Lynch replied, "Yeah, it does. It bothers me that they used me as a way to symbolize this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong."

This is a soldier Americans can be proud of.

=Rebecca=

All this flimflam wasn’t Jessica Lynch’s doing. She was used right from the first -- a frail prop in the Pentagon’s public-relations campaign to sell the war to the American people and to encourage their daughters to join up and be heroes.

To keep the truth under wraps, the Army concocted another whopper: “She suffers from amnesia.”

A senior officer from V Corps (the unit that eventually awarded her the BSM), who has asked to remain anonymous, comments that there was “tremendous pressure right from the get-go to award Pvt. Lynch a Silver Star. But the high brass here concluded, ‘There was no evidence of heroism on her part,’ and told the pushers to back off.”

But when the propagandists conned the highly respected Washington Post into reporting on how Lynch was shot and stabbed but continued to kill Iraqis until her last round was spent, heroic stuff that would make Audie Murphy look like a slacker -- which the Post then took several months to correct -- other media were fast to pick up the fairy tale, and the Army was besieged by proud Americans demanding that Jessica be awarded the Medal of Honor. ...

The rescue of Jessica Lynch defined the Iraq war -- and now defines what it was not.

"We're really not supposed to talk about that subject," her father, Greg Lynch, said during a news conference at the family's rural West Virginia home. "It's still an ongoing investigation and we can't talk about nothing like that."

But at another point, he said: "Nobody has told us not to talk about it. Our main concern is to get Jessi in good health."

An investigation by the BBC's Correspondent program said the story of Jessica Lynch's rescue in Iraq was "one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived."

None of the details that the doctors provided Correspondent with made it to the video or to any subsequent explanations or clarifications by US authorities. I asked the Pentagon spokesman in Washington, Bryan Whitman, to release the full tape of the rescue, rather than its edited version, to clear up any discrepancies. He declined. Whitman would not talk about what kind of Iraqi resistance the American forces faced. Nor would he comment on the injuries Lynch actually sustained. "I understand there is some conflicting information out there and in due time the full story will be told, I'm sure," he told me.

Has anybody else noticed anything odd about the widely-circulated photograph taken during the daring rescue of Private Jessica Lynch by Special Forces last week? In a photo that is sure to become a mainstream iconographic image of this war, we have the pretty blonde Jessica Lynch, just moments after being snatched away from the cruel confines of an Iraqi hospital, smiling bravely at the camera while lying on a stretcher and covered in... an American Flag.

Hmmm.... In my mind this raises the obvious question: where did the flag come from?

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