It appears the BBC/Guardian article was almost certainly false on one crucial issue: if the rescue team used blanks or live ammunition.
Dr. Anmar Uday said:
It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions.
As documented
here, there are a number of reasons why it is almost impossible that the special forces were using blanks. The summary (although you should read the link if at all interested) is that the guns used by the American military cannot use blank ammunition without a special attachment (
picture), which is prominent enough to have been easily visible both to the witnesses at the hospital (it's brightly colored as an added safety measure) as well as on the video the Pentagon released.
Moreover, the attachment takes several minutes to remove which would make using them in unsecured enemy territory unbelievably dangerous. (Even if, as the article stupidly asserts, the Americans "should have known" that no Iraqi soldiers were at the hospital, does anyone honestly think they would go in so defenseless given the off chance that some Fedeyeen might have shown up in response to a mission in the middle of a city they controlled?)
Thus we can reasonably conclude that the bit about firing blanks is completely false. Beyond impugning the credibility both of the supposed witness who made this assertion--who is, incidentally, one of a grand total of two sources for the article (the other being his supposed colleague)--and of the reporter and editors who are so wholly ignorant of the military they profess to be covering that they accepted and printed an egregious mistake without question, this might seem to be only a minor detail.
But when you think about it further, you realize the question of whether the rescue team used blanks or not is actually at the crux of the entire accusation. If, indeed, they went in with blanks instead of live ammunition, than it seems obvious that the rescue was indeed staged, as they would have to have been confident that they would not be meeting any resistence. If, on the other hand, they went in with live ammunition, then the story changes from "the rescue was purposely staged, ostensibly for propoganda purposes" to "the rescue team prepared for more resistence than they actually met". Read carefully: despite the thick innuendo throughout, the alleged use of blanks is the only piece of evidence in the article to support the theory that the special forces' tactics were anything but standard, prudent operating procedure for such a mission.
The only other significant claim in the article (other than the preposterous elitist pander that the release of the videotape was somehow influenced by Jerry Bruckheimer and/or reality TV, bad art, and possibly genetically modified foods) is that the Iraqis tried to return Lynch but were turned away at a checkpoint. This is an interesting and IMO somewhat plausible claim, albeit one which I am reluctant to accept from a fraudulent report. Of course, if true this would have been no more than a slightly tragic but quite understandable mistake. (There was a war going on, remember?)
Instead, the article appears to suggest that perhaps the Americans shooed away the ambulance so as not to have their staged rescue foiled. (To its credit--and I use the term very lightly--the Guardian article reveals, upon a suitably close reading, that when the doctor "arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance," the "arrangement" was with the ambulance driver, not with the Americans who indeed had no way of guessing that an Iraqi ambulance could have any legitimate reason for trying to cross a checkpoint into American-held territory.) Of course, to even entertain such an accusation you'd need to be an anti-American paranoid with no grounding whatsoever in reality...but then again, you are getting your news from the BBC or The Guardian, so perhaps that's not such a bad bet.
