"He died in a US Army combat surgical hospital where he was surrounded by his mates, who draped his body in an Australian flag and with a paratrooper's beret on his chest as they said The Lord's Prayer." These words of Jake Kovco's death appeared on the Melbourne Herald Sun's website on the weekend following his death.

Who wrote this crap? Surely to any reader that's been following the Kovco Inquiry the wag-the-dog-style imagery written here is WRONG.

The lines came from an ADF media release issued on April 23rd of last year. They're the only lines I've read throughout this whole sorry saga that don't say that Kovco wasn't dead on his barracks room floor from the bullet lodged in his head.

I can easily believe that later, at the US hospital, the body was brought out, draped with a flag, and the religious ceremony enacted. What I'm suggesting is that Kovco may have already been dead for a very long time.

The visual image of Kovco's death portrayed here bears the hallmarks of a spin by a writer from the Rendon Group. They're fairly fond of flags. One of their best photo-ops was of the various nationalities of the Coalition as they gathered at the Kuwait border to invade Iraq. The soldiers didn't have flags from their home countries in their hands by accident. Rendon put them there.

The same sort of thing happenned when Saddam's statue fell.

So why re-stage Kovco's death scene? Was it just to make a more "appropriate" picture o an Australian digger's death in Iraq?

If my theory holds true, then there are probably many other event recreations that we'l never get to know about.

Personally, I'd like to know why we were lied to.