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October 17, 2003

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PR Watch reported the following on Wednesday:

“Expect lots of media hype soon over the first Jessica Lynch-related book by Iraqi Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief. According to some reports he told U.S. Marines the location of the captured Private Lynch. He and his family were then granted U.S. asylum. Along with the chance for U.S. citizenship, al-Rehaief received $300,000 from Rupert Murdoch’s Harper Collins for his new book about the Lynch rescue. He also was given a job at the Livingston Group, a high-powered D.C. lobby firm. His book "Because Each Life Is Precious: Why an Iraqi Man Came to Risk Everything for Pvt. Jessica Lynch" is being promoted by his Livingston Group colleague Lauri Fitz-Pegado. She is infamous for her work at Hill & Knowlton PR in 1990 coaching the Kuwaiti girl called "Nayirah" in her shocking but phony testimony on Congressional hill that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies. That stunt helped propel the U.S. to war against Iraq in 1991. Fitz-Pegado’s client was the ruling family of Kuwait and the baby-killing claims were later shown to be false. The new book is well timed since it will precede by a few weeks Jessica Lynch’s own book, half-a-million copies of which will hit bookstores on Veterans Day, November 11th."

• John Stauber, co-founder of PR Watch and co-author of the book, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq. which takes a look at how the Bush administration’s highly successful public relations campaign sold the Iraqi war to the American public.