Selling Pvt. Lynch

But despite the right's fervent wishes that she'd go away, Lynch has been everywhere lately. Last week was book rollout week, which meant getting photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair's year-end Hall of Fame issue. And it meant sharing Glamour magazine Women of the Year honors with Britney Spears, who's out promoting her own product this week -- a new CD -- and who also sat down, exclusively, for a Sawyer interview of her own. (On ABC Tuesday night, we learned Lynch was a "prissy" child. On ABC Thursday night, we learned from the Madonna-kissing Spears that "when I was younger, I used to run around my house, naked, when I was 13.")

The fact POW Lynch kept bumping into pop tart Spears out on the marketing matrix wasn't the week's only absurdity. Watching competing media outlets scrap over Lynch was sadly amusing. Time magazine devoted 22 pages, complete with 19 photos and illustrations, to the Lynch saga, while online Time.com asked readers, "Is Jessica Lynch a hero? Yes or no?" So, in a classic jab, rival Newsweek, trying to piss on Time's Lynch bonanza, committed just 500 words to her in this week's issue, opting with the dismissive lead, "The Jessica Lynch blitz isn't a feel-good celebration for everyone."

As for the book, "I Am a Soldier, Too," Time magazine managed to condense it to 4,500 words, without losing much in the process. Bragg does his best to rev up the story and give it a real country holler feel ("Bad luck followed the little caravan like a hungry dog"). But he seems to be straining just to spread the story out over 207 pages. And that where's-the-beef quality served to highlight the one sensational allegation Bragg makes -- that during a three-hour block between the time her Humvee crashed and she was brought to the hospital, Lynch, unconscious, was tortured and raped by her captors. The passage, which takes up just two paragraphs in the book, grabbed headlines around the world.

Lynch told Sawyer upfront the whole rape notion was "questionable," but Bragg said Lynch's parents wanted it included in the book. Still, the red-hot allegation, stuck inside an otherwise sleepy read, couldn't escape the whiff of publishing desperation that accompanied it.

As one furious Philadelphia Inquirer book reviewer put it, "Last week's revelation that she was sexually assaulted during those lost three hours, timed specifically to promote this book and her appearances, is repugnant, virtually unparalleled in the rancid history of publicity. It's rape as a marketing tool."

Whether Lynch was in fact sexually assaulted may never be known. (Iraqi doctors who examined her insist she was not.) But it's hard to attribute lofty journalistic motives to a publisher who decided to introduce such an inflammatory accusation, based on relatively sketchy evidence, into a story that's already drowning in contradictions and revisions.

Likewise, NBC had high hopes for its Lynch movie. "This story is Mission: Impossible, but it's real," one NBC insider told Daily Variety last spring, before some of the shine began to fade. "It's as good a story as you can get from this war. It's uplifting, heroic, compelling and dramatic."

But in the end, after seven script revisions, the disclaimer that popped up on the screen Sunday night said it all: "This motion picture is based on a true story. However, some names have been changed and some characters, scenes and events in whole or part have been created for dramatic purpose."

That's because NBC failed to get the rights to Lynch's story, and had to rely on the tale of a 32-year-old Iraqi attorney, Odeh al-Rehaif, and his tell-all book, "Because Each Life Is Precious: Why an Iraqi Man Risked Everything for Private Jessica Lynch." Clearly al-Rehaif put his life, and the life of his family, in danger by alerting U.S. troops to Lynch's whereabouts in an effort to get her rescued. And in the end he was rewarded with political asylum in the States, a job at a Republican-run lobbying firm in Washington, as well as a handsome, six-figure book deal. (Not to mention the fact NBC turned al-Rehaif into a dashing Andy Garcia-like star, not the Jon Lovitz look-alike he is in real life.)

On-screen, al Rehaif came across as Ahmad Chalabi's long-lost cousin; a native Iraqi who laid out the kind of script Pentagon war planners dreamt about. But like Chalabi and his rosy pre-war prediction that U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators in Iraq and resistance would crumble with Saddam's collapse, al-Rehaif's tale of an Iraq desperate for U.S. intervention, of Iraqis with an almost insatiable love of Americans, had some holes in it. It's not Swiss cheese holes like Chalabi's fantasy, but al-Rehaif's claim that his wife worked as a nurse in the hospital where Lynch was treated have been dismissed by others on staff there. "He's a big liar who should be hung by his ears," one Iraqi nurse told ABC.

And al-Rehaif's most chilling, dramatic claim, that while peering through a glass panel into her room he saw a Fedayeen soldier slap Lynch during an interrogation, was denied by a hospital staffer in a Washington Post report this summer: "Never happened. That's some Hollywood crap you'd tell the Americans."

Tuesday on ABC, Lynch herself denied al-Rehaif's graphic account of a beat-down, telling Sawyer it never happened. That may explain why Lynch refused to meet with al-Rehaif last month when he come calling in Palestine, W.Va., in search of an audience with the former POW on the heels of his own book release.

Wednesday morning on the "Today," show, Lynch softened her tone, saying she wants to meet with al-Rehaif and thank him, but that she "want[ed] to do it on my own time, whenever there's no media around."

As soon as the current marketing rollout wraps up and al-Rehaif and Lynch send the press away, they should be able to get some time to themselves.

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