Will The Slaughter Of Iraqis By The US Military Ever Be Reported?

Will The US Government And Media Finally Report The Slaughter Of Iraqis By The US Military?

I recently received a set of questions from Le Monde Diplomatique reporter Kim Bredesen about the 2007 Project Censored story about 1,000,000 Iraqi deaths due to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The questions and answers are, I think, useful in framing both the untold story of the slaughter in Iraq and the failure of the U.S. media to report on its extent or on U.S. culpability for the deaths of 4% of the Iraqi population.

Bredeson : I observed recently that your story on Iraqi deaths caused by US occupation became story no. 1 in this year's listing by Project Censored. I wondered if I could ask you a few questions on e-mail regarding this issue?

Regards,
Kim Bredesen, Le Monde diplomatiqe (Norway)

These are my questions.

1.Do you expect that the new administration under Barack Obama will acknowledge the validity of the statistics concerning Iraqi deaths caused by the US occupation force?

It is always difficult to predict the political future, but even if the Obama administration pursues a very different policy in Iraq and the Middle East, I doubt it will acknowledge the amount of violence caused by the war during its first six years. Historically, the U.S. government has a poor record of acknowledging its responsibility for death and/or destruction of other peoples, beginning with the genocide against Native Americans (never officially acknowledged), continuing through two hundred years of the slave trade and slavery (there has actually been a limp official apology), and culminating in the ongoing refusal to acknowledge one to three million deaths in Vietnam caused by the U.S. attempt to conquer that country.

2.You mention in your update to Censored 2009 that there is a media blackout about the dramatic statistics in US mass media. Do you think this will change?

I think that the U.S. mainstream media has a poor record of acknowledging the many instances in which it has (collectively) failed to maintain its constitutionally mandated independence from government policy, and instead has ignored or written false reports supporting government malfeasance and tyranny. It was refreshing that the New York Times and Washington Post acknowledged their failure to report the contrary evidence to the US government claims about WMDs in Iraq, but this is a rare moment that has not led to more independent reporting on other U.S. government action in the Middle East.

I think that we can expect the U.S. mainstream media to continue to compromise its journalistic integrity in reporting on Iraq, and this will mean failing to report its own suppression of the Lancet studies and continuing to misreport the U.S. role in the Iraq war. This expectation is, of course, speculation, but the best evidence for this speculation is the fact that the major media have been withdrawing their personnel from Iraq, instead of taking advantage of more favorable security conditions to send reporters to locations that were previously inaccessible and therefore more thoroughly report the impact of the war on Iraqi life.

3.How have you experienced the coverage about the issue in other Western or international media, have they taken the situation in Iraq more seriously?

I find the reporting in Al Jazeera, the British national press, other international media, and independent U.S. media far more comprehensive in their coverage of the Iraq war. I would not say that they take the situation more "seriously," -- there has never been a problem with the U.S. media taking the war seriously. The differences are in very specific parts of the coverage: reporting on U.S. involvement in deaths and destruction, reporting on Iraqi resistance to the U.S. presence; reporting on the economic and social chaos caused by U.S. military, political, and economic policies in Iraq; reporting on who is fighting against the U.S.; reporting on the actual reality of life under U.S. occupation; and reporting on the day-to-day antagonism of Iraqis to the U.S. presence.

I should add, however, that these failures are not so much failures of U.S. mainstream reporters, but of the editors and publishers who assign reporters to particular stories and not to others. There are many reporters who fit information about all these issues into assignments that are aimed at other subjects. One small example will illustrate what I mean. In reporting about the U.S. offensive in Haifa Street in January 2007, mainstream reporters (for McClatchy and the Washington Post, if memory serves me) whose assignment was to report on the successful capture by U.S. troops of an insurgent stronghold also described the destructiveness of the U.S. attack and mentioned that U.S. soldiers stood idly by while Shia death squads cleansed the neighborhood of Sunnis. This information appeared toward the end of published reports, but it was published nevertheless. In contrast, a CBS report on the overarching destructiveness of the offensive and of the anger of residents at U.S. military actions was not broadcast and was only made public because of the protests of the censored reporter.

4.The journalist Joshua Holland compared the mass killings in Iraq with Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia. Is this an accurate comparison in your opinion?

Holland's purpose in this comparison is the same as my purpose in comparing the deaths in Iraq to those in Darfur: we are trying to give people a sense of the scale of the violence wrought in Iraq by the U.S. military. The mass murders in Cambodia under Pol Pot and the displacements and genocide in Darfur -- as well as so many other recent and more distant instances of such violence -- all have different sources, intentions, and outcomes from the Iraq violence and from each other. The point of making these comparisons is to point out the magnitude of the slaughter in Iraq, not to make analytic comments about the dynamics of the war.

5. Do you believe it is appropriate that the Bush administration should face trial for their actions?

In The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara said to the camera that if the U.S. had lost World War II, then he and other American leaders would have stood trial as war criminals for the terrorist fire bombings of Japanese and German cities by the U.S. air force. Certainly the actions of U.S. political leaders and military commanders in ordering their troops to attack civilian targets in Iraq (for example the destruction of the city of Falluja -- well publicized everywhere in the world except in the United States) fall under the same definition of war crimes that McNamara was considering in making this statement, and so it would be perfectly appropriate for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and the various commanding generals to stand trial for these actions.

But take note that McNamara said that trials would have taken place if the U.S. had "lost." This statement has actually turned out to be a kind of half truth. In World War II, the Japanese and Germans certainly lost, but only a relative handful of those responsible for their war crimes stood trial (the Japanese Emperor, for example, was actually restored to his throne). In the Vietnam War, most observers say that the U.S. "lost" the war, but no U.S. leaders stood trial for the many war crimes they committed during that long conflict. There is no predicting the future, but I expect that, no matter how the Iraq war ends--with either McCain's "victory" or with the "defeat" that President Bush has repeatedly warned the U.S. citizens about--there will be no war crimes trials of U.S. political and military leadership.

Comments

[CaptainStormfield]

http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?documentid=4104&programID=37&from_page=../friendlyversion/printversion.cfm
New Report on Civilian Casualties in Iraq ( from 2007) Center for Defense Information

"426,369 to 793,663 (neither number is a typo) estimated in a survey released in 2006 by The Lancet, a British medical journal. Some rush to discount the Lancet"s statistical survey; however, it is notable that the chief scientific adviser in the UK Ministry of Defense described The Lancet"s work as "close to best practice" and "robust."

[Ramirez]

There is no "media blackout" on Iraqi casualty figures. The problem is that the Lancet figure of 1million doesn't make sense. It is based on polling a section of the population and it is unsupported by any concrete evidence such as mass graves or hospital or burial documentation.

[research]

press is not allowed at bomb sites.

[zepfan81]

Slaughter? Wow, that's a tough word. Has there ever been a war were civilians didn't die? In war EVERYBODY dies. This is something we need to think about before we commit. There hasn't been a war in the past 100 years that there weren't more civilian casulties than combat.

[LollieDotCom]

It's an accurate word. Which is so rare in our culture of transformational vocabulary. What if we'd called this thing what it was all along, an invasion and occupation. It was "Red Dawn" all over again, only in this movie we were the invaders, they were the invaded.

Are you saying it's okay to kill a million civilians? 'Oops' covers it? But it was our troops did it so we can't call it an ugly word no matter how true? Is that what you're saying? You have been a member of the United States of Halliburton too long.

If the Bush administration isn't charged with war crimes I will go to my grave believing they cut an amnesty deal with Obama that included the endorsement of Obama by Powell and the endorsement of McCain by Cheney. It was the one - two punch that insured Obama would be our 44th potus. We'll never know. I don't care. If that's what happened, it was valuable insurance and I'm glad we had it. Still, nothing says to the world we've really changed for the better like putting those monsters on trial for the unnecessary murder of a million people, let alone the murder and permanent injuries of our own soldiers.

[jmpurser]

One of the herd of elephants in our national living room is military complicity in the Bush Administration lies. The pentagon has been involved in faking intelligence leading up to the war, propaganda about the "rescue" of Jessica Lynch, lies about the death of Pat Tillman, the cover up of Abu Ghraib torture, the Haditha cover up, the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the deaths of Afghanistan civilians.....

Like the Justice Department, the Military is now been hijacked by the GOP and it will take a long period to cleanse them before they can be trusted again.

[LollieDotCom]

I'll trust them before I trust our own news media again. ha That's easy. I'll never trust the news media again. I'll bet Ted Turner had no idea what a monster he was creating. Too bad for everyone.

[vinny]

I support any effort to bring Bush, Cheney and the rest to justice for the civilian deaths in Iraq.

They can no longer hide behind the US Government.

Let's keep making noise about this.

[jurr]

US casualties are a lot higher than reported. Bush is doing his best to hide that fact but talk to any Iraq vet & they will tell you the real story.

[Itchybiscuit]

While US politicians describe the Iraq war as 'the good guys Vs the bad guys', any mention of atrocities commited by their troops will remain unspoken. There is no such thing as a 'good war'. There are wars which are unavoidable and those which are not. Iraq wasn't only avoidable, it was actively promoted with Saddam as the bogeyman. Shame he wasn't the bogeyman when Donald Rumsfeld was shaking his hand and selling him weapons.

There was money to be made in Iraq. Period. When ordinary people come between corporations, their political proxies and profits, they become casualties.

One more thought. Has anyone seen the 80's film 'Red Dawn' when the Russians invade America? The rednecks grabbed their guns and went a-shooting. Is it any different from Iraqis doing exactly the same thing when America invaded them?

Think about it.....

[LollieDotCom]

I know. I think that movie should be required viewing by the whole country every time there's talk of invading another country. Anyone who hasn't seen it, should see it now. It's a timeless story and it will never get old. I made my grandson watch it with me right after the "Mission Accomplished" bs story broke.

Insurgents! Of the seven dirty words, which one has made so much wholesale slaughter look that innocuous? Not even all seven combined can compare. Like I always say, most people wouldn't know a dirty word if it jumped of the nightly news and bit them in the bass.

[research]

The Iraq Invasion and occupation is a war crime.

[ebbtide]

Does anyone even care? Bush and his entourage will be scott free, in spite of the murders and lies. Does anyone even care anymore about the deaths of innocent human beings caused by George Bush? Teach your children this, eh?. Cheat to become president, then kill at your leisure and lie about the reasons. It's oK, kids. Get away with whatever you can and if you are rich, the chances are you will get away with even murder. Even the Democrats will not hold this criminal to task.

[dadw5boys]

Teach your children that everytime there is a Bush in the Whitehouse there is a banking collaspe!

[Sapphdia]

More importantly, teach your children history, so that they recognize the patterns.

[CyrusBeaucephus]

To deny the damage we have caused brings further shame upon this country. Its amazing how many people in America still support this disasterous illegal war for purely partisan reasons. They usually like to frame it in terms of "good guys & bad guys" as well. I am so happy that proponents of this shallow mentality were soundly defeated. Now lets get the h*ll out of Iraq