Introduction

Abstract

On April 2, 2003, a success story from the military conflict in Iraq made the international headlines. For the first time since the Second World War, an American prisoner of war (POW) had been successfully rescued from enemy hands. Private First Class Jessica Lynch, ‘a young, blond, pretty’ American soldier deployed with the 507th Maintenance Company in Iraq and who had been held as a POW at Saddam Hussein hospital in Nasiriyah since March 23, was rescued by Task Force 20, a covert US special operations unit responsible only for the highest American priorities in Iraq such as ‘hunting for weapons of mass destruction, weapons scientists and Baath party leaders’ (Priest 2003) and whose primary goal was to capture or kill so-called high-value targets. Not only did the unit carry a night-vision video camera and record the rescue at the request of the military public affairs office, but it also apparently staged a firefight inside the hospital. The building had actually been abandoned by the Iraqi military personnel, and even ‘her Iraqi guards had long fled’ (Kampfner 2003). Nevertheless, US President George Bush two days later publicly thanked those ‘Marines and Special Operations forces [who] set out on a daring rescue mission’ (Bush 2003).