The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10914.htm
The reporting of the Iraqi death toll -
both in its scale and account of who is doing the killing - is
profoundly dishonest
By George Monbiot
11/08/05
"The
Guardian" -- -- We were told that the Iraqis don't
count. Before the invasion began, the head of US central command,
General Thomas Franks, boasted that "we don't do body counts". His
claim was repeated by Donald Rumsfeld in November 2003 ("We don't do
body counts on other people") and the Pentagon last January ("The
only thing we keep track of is casualties for US troops and
civilians").
But it's not true. Almost every week the
Pentagon claims to have killed 50 or 70 or 100 insurgents in its
latest assault on the latest stronghold of the ubiquitous monster
Zarqawi. In May the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said that
his soldiers had killed 250 of Zarqawi's "closest lieutenants" (or
so 500 of his best friends had told him). But last week, the
Pentagon did something new. Buried in its latest security report to
Congress is a bar chart labelled "average daily casualties - Iraqi
and coalition. 1 Jan 04-16 Sep 05". The claim that it kept no track
of Iraqi deaths was false.
The report does not explain what
it means by casualty, or if its figures represent all casualties,
only insurgents, or, as the foregoing paragraph appears to hint,
only civilians killed by insurgents. There is no explanation of how
the figures were gathered or compiled. The only accompanying text
consists of the words "Source: MNC-I", which means Multi-National
Corps - Iraq. We'll just have to trust them.
What the chart shows
is that these unexplained casualties have more than doubled since
the beginning of the Pentagon's survey. From January to March 2004,
26 units of something or other were happening every day, while in
September 2005 the something or other rose to 64. But whatever it is
that's been rising, the weird morality of this war dictates that it
is reported as good news. Journalists have been multiplying the
daily average of mystery units by the number of days, discovering
that the figure is lower than previous estimates of Iraqi deaths,
and using it to cast doubts on them. As ever, the study in the line
of fire is the report published by the Lancet in October last
year.
It was a household survey - of 988 homes in 33 randomly
selected districts - and it suggested, on the basis of the mortality
those households reported before and after the invasion, that the
risk of death in Iraq had risen by a factor of 1.5; somewhere
between 8,000 and 194,000 extra people had died, with the most
probable figure being 98,000. Around half the deaths, if Falluja was
included, or 15% if it was not, were caused by violence, and the
majority of those by attacks on the part of US forces.
In the
US and the UK, the study was either ignored or torn to bits. The
media described it as "inflated", "overstated", "politicised" and
"out of proportion". Just about every possible misunderstanding and
distortion of its statistics was published, of which the most
remarkable was the Observer's claim that: "The report's authors
admit it drew heavily on the rebel stronghold of Falluja, which has
been plagued by fierce fighting. Strip out Falluja, as the study
itself acknowledged, and the mortality rate is reduced
dramatically." In fact, as they made clear on page one, the authors
had stripped out Falluja; their estimate of 98,000 deaths would
otherwise have been much higher.
But the attacks in the press
succeeded in sinking the study. Now, whenever a newspaper or
broadcaster produces an estimate of civilian deaths, the Lancet
report is passed over in favour of lesser figures. For the past
three months, the editors and subscribers of the website Medialens
have been writing to papers and broadcasters to try to find out why.
The standard response, exemplified by a letter from the BBC's online
news service last week, is that the study's "technique of sampling
and extrapolating from samples has been criticised". That's true,
and by the same reasoning we could dismiss the fact that 6 million
people were killed in the Holocaust, on the grounds that this figure
has also been criticised, albeit by skinheads. The issue is not
whether the study has been criticised, but whether the criticism is
valid.
As Medialens has pointed out, it was the same lead
author, using the same techniques, who reported that 1.7 million
people had died as a result of conflict in the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC). That finding has been cited by Tony Blair, Colin
Powell and almost every major newspaper on both sides of the
Atlantic, and none has challenged either the method or the result.
Using the Congo study as justification, the UN security council
called for all foreign armies to leave the DRC and doubled the
country's UN aid budget.
The other reason the press gives for
burying the Lancet study is that it is out of line with competing
estimates. Like Jack Straw, wriggling his way around the figures in
a written ministerial statement, they compare it to the statistics
compiled by the Iraqi health ministry and the website Iraq Body
Count.
In December 2003, Associated Press reported that
"Iraq's health ministry has ordered a halt to a count of civilians
killed during the war". According to the head of the ministry's
statistics department, both the puppet government and the Coalition
Provisional Authority demanded that it be stopped. As Naomi Klein
has shown on these pages, when US soldiers stormed Falluja (a year
ago today), their first action was to seize the general hospital and
arrest the doctors. The New York Times reported that "the hospital
was selected as an early target because the American military
believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties".
After the coalition had used these novel statistical methods to
improve the results, Blair told parliament that "figures from the
Iraqi ministry of health, which are a survey from the hospitals
there, are in our view the most accurate survey there
is".
Iraq Body Count, whose tally has reached 26,000-30,000,
measures only civilian deaths which can be unambiguously attributed
to the invasion and which have been reported by two independent news
agencies. As the compilers point out, "it is likely that many if not
most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media ... our own
total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position,
because of gaps in reporting or recording". Of the seven mortality
reports surveyed by the Overseas Development Institute, the estimate
in the Lancet's paper was only the third highest. It remains the
most thorough study published so far. Extraordinary as its numbers
seem, they are the most likely to be true.
And what of the
idea that most of the violent deaths in Iraq are caused by coalition
troops? Well according to the Houston Chronicle, even Blair's
favourite data source, the Iraqi health ministry, reports that twice
as many Iraqis - and most of them civilians - are being killed by US
and UK forces as by insurgents. When the Pentagon claims that it has
just killed 50 or 70 or 100 rebel fighters, we have no means of
knowing who those people really were. Everyone it blows to pieces
becomes a terrorist. In July Jack Keane, the former vice chief of
staff of the US army, claimed that coalition troops had killed or
captured more than 50,000 "insurgents" since the start of the
rebellion. Perhaps they were all Zarqawi's closest
lieutenants.
We can expect the US and UK governments to seek
to minimise the extent of their war crimes. But it's time the media
stopped collaborating.
http://www.monbiot.com
©
Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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