http://musliminsuffer.wordpress.com/
bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
U.S. Military Has Killed 127-238,000 Iraqi Civilians
A just released study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University,
published in the current issue of the prestigious British medical
journal The Lancet, reports that the U.S. invasion and occupation of
Iraq has led to the deaths of between 426,000 and 794,000 Iraqis. This
is a substantial increase over the 100,000 dead that the same research
group found through 2004, based upon a smaller survey, and it represents
an astonishing 2.5 percent of the country's total population.
The grim news was widely--though not universally--reported in the U.S.
media (my local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, blacked it out), but
few news organizations reported the most disturbing finding of the
study, which was that 31 percent of those killed were acatually slain by
U.S. and "coalition" forces (actually by U.S. forces, since most of the
other foreign forces working with the U.S., with the exception of the
British, have not played combat roles, and even the British have largely
operated in the south where fighting has been much less severe.
That means U.S. forces have, since the March 19, 2003 invasion, killed
between 132,000 and 246,000 Iraqis. It should be recalled that the
Pentagon has estimated that the insurgency numbers perhaps 20-40,000
individuals, and they have only succeeded in killing a fraction of them.
Assuming generously that the military has succeeded in killing maybe a
quarter of the enemy fighters, that would be 10,000 people at most,
leaving the U.S. civilian death toll at 122,000-236,000. The Christian
Science Monitor, no radical rag, once did a survey and found that U.S.
forces were killing civilians in Iraq at a rate of 30 for every enemy
fighter slain. At that rate, it would appear, if the peer-reviewed
Lancet study is correct, that the U.S. invasion and occupation forces
have killed between 127,000 and 238,000 civilians. At least a third and
perhaps a half of those killed, various studies of Iraqi casualties have
made clear, have been children.
This is the grand war of liberation and democracy that our bloodstained
president hails as his legacy!
This is the war that we are told is making America safer.
Just to put things in a little perspective, the Iraqis killed at the
hands of our "heroes" in uniform on orders of this great commander in
chief represent about one percent of the Iraqi population of 24 million.
If a comparable number of Americans were being killed in a war, it would
be as if we had lost between 1 million and 1.9 million people! Imagine
Americans referring to any army that did such a thing as a "liberator"!
Anyone who thinks that we are making friends this way in Iraq has to be
an idiot.
It boggles my mind how the U.S. share of this slaughter could have been
kept out of the report offered in the New York Times or USA Today. (The
Times did run some small pie charts that showed in a dark shade the
share of deaths caused by U.S. forces, but because no numbers or
percentages were provided, and because no such figures appeared in the
accompanying story, the impact was greatly diminished.) Even NPR, in its
10/11 story on the Lancet figures, tiptoed around the issue of how many
of the dead died at the hands of American forces, and the 31 percent
figure in the study never made it onto the air, not did any totals.
Somehow the idea that a lot of people have died in the wake of the U.S.
invasion is okay, but not the idea that people were actually shot dead,
bombed, burned or run over by our guys.
What made the Times article, which ran on an inside page, particularly
offensive, was a page-one story that ran on the same day, headlined "3rd
Iraq Death Has One town Shaken to Core." This piece looked in detail
about how the deaths in Iraq of three servicemen from the New York
hamlet of Highland, had caused such widespread grief and anguish in a
small American town. How on earth could editors give that story--
excellent and poignant as it was in its own right--such prominence while
burying a report about the wholesale slaughter of a people by U.S.
forces? Don't the editors realize that every one of those Iraqi deaths
was producing the same kind of grief and anger in towns and villages
across Iraq?
Americans still haven't grasped the horror that American troops are
inflicting upon the Iraqi people, and hiding these numbers--and the
American military's direct responsibility for nearly a third of them--is
an example of why.
The Bush administration has carefully seen to it that Americans will not
see the evidence of American deaths and injuries. Coffins are flown in
to Dover Airbase, a closed military compound in Delaware, at night. The
administration has also blacked out Iraqi deaths by refusing to provide
body counts from U.S. military actions, and by preventing reporters from
operating in Iraq unescorted.
The Lancet study has burst that veil of secrecy, at least partially,
though the U.S. media continues to cooperate for the most part, it
appears, in keeping the ugliest truth--the U.S. civilian casualty rate
in Iraq--out of their reports. If you want that kind of information, you
have to go to the Lancet report itself or to the British newspapers,
like The Guardian, which have it stated clearly.
source:
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/2006.10.01_arch.html#1160582541048
===
-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
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