Re: Hypocrisies
And while we're at it, here's another: the whole story is at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,622000,00.html
which gives the lie to the idea that civilian casualties have
been minimal but regrettably necessary. Note he doesn't include
military casualties or deaths by starvation and cold or other
by-products of war.
It's an obscene balancing, but a necessary one. If the wtc
victims were innocent, so were these.
A
The innocent dead
in a coward's war
Estimates suggest
US bombs have killed at least 3,767 civilians
Seumas
Milne
Thursday December 20, 2001
The Guardian
The price in blood that has already been paid for America's war
against terror is only now starting to become clear. Not by Britain or
the US, nor even so far by the al-Qaida and Taliban leaders held
responsible for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
It has instead been paid by ordinary Afghans, who had nothing whatever
to do with the atrocities, didn't elect the Taliban theocrats who
ruled over them and had no say in the decision to give house room to
Bin Laden and his friends.
The Pentagon has been characteristically coy about how many people it
believes have died under the missiles it has showered on Afghanistan.
Acutely sensitive to the impact on international support for the war,
spokespeople have usually batted away reports of civilian casualties
with a casual "these cannot be independently confirmed", or
sometimes simply denied the deaths occurred at all. The US media have
been particularly helpful. Seven weeks into the bombing campaign, the
Los Angeles Times only felt able to hazard the guess that "at
least dozens of civilians" had been killed.
Now, for the first time, a systematic independent study has been
carried out into civilian casualties in Afghanistan by Marc Herold, a
US economics professor at the University of New Hampshire. Based on
corroborated reports from aid agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV
stations, newspapers and news agencies around the world, Herold
estimates that at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs
between October 7 and December 10. That is an average of 62 innocent
deaths a day - and an even higher figure than the 3,234 now thought to
have been killed in New York and Washington on September 11.
Of course, Herold's total is only an estimate. But what is impressive
about his work is not only the meticulous cross-checking, but the
conservative assumptions he applies to each reported incident. The
figure does not include those who died later of bomb injuries; nor
those killed in the past 10 days; nor those who have died from cold
and hunger because of the interruption of aid supplies or because they
were forced to become refugees by the bombardment. It does not include
military deaths (estimated by some analysts, partly on the basis of
previous experience of the effects of carpet-bombing, to be upwards of
10,000), or those prisoners who were slaughtered in Mazar-i-Sharif,
Qala-i-Janghi, Kandahar airport and elsewhere.
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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