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 
Tuesday November 8, 2005 
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1636606,00.html
http://tinyurl.com/dqelv

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.

Article continues 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.



		
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