The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq

[Briar]

The media are minimising US and British war crimes in Iraq

The reporting of the Iraqi death toll - both in its scale and account of who is doing the killing - is profoundly dishonest

George Monbiot

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.

... 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.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1636543,00.html

[leftchick]

1. the media will never stop....

excellent piece, thank you....

<snip>

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.

:(

[Briar]

2. Yes

it's not as though the truth isn't out there. But where it conflicts with the official narrative, darn it if they don't print the official narrative, time and again.

Just why is it that the media see themselves as part of the establishment, not of the people as a whole?

[leftchick]

3. It is pretty simple really

The media is owned by large corporations that are concerned with their own interests. The people don't matter.

[katty]

4. the media and supermedia whores are told what to say and

when and how-that's why they keep paying their salary.