Freedom of Speech

Dear Henry Tinsley,

I have read on Media Lens Message Board the following letter you sent to Media Lens:

Dear Davids,

I note from your website that you list the Tinsley Charitable Trust as a donor. Please remove our name from your website.

While we did make a donation some years ago, we will not be making further contributions in the future (apart from anything else, we're told that our trust cannot legally give to you).

More seriously, I am unable to support your work when you spend your time attacking good guys like John Sloboda of the IBC. I would have thought you would have something better to do.

I also supported the Bosnian war which ensured that Milosevic and his henchmen were belatedly forced to stop their mass murder. Do you really believe that the Serbian regime(s) were not responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and that something had to be done to stop this? It's a shame Milosevic died before his trial was completed.

Regards,

Henry Tinsley

You must have been ill-informed.

On Iraq Body Count’s website, you may read: “It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media.” Being a media watch-dog, Media Lens has been monitoring the use made by the media of the IBC’s data.

A very interesting open debate developed, as it should be in a healthy and democratic society.

A few days ago, the Independent wrote:

“But IBC admits that with the increasing inability of journalists to move around and report freely, its method of monitoring civilian deaths is becoming increasingly inaccurate. What evidence has emerged indicates that a widely ridiculed study published in The Lancet in autumn 2004, estimating that at least 100,000 civilians had died violently since the war began, might not be so inaccurate.” (“Iraq: The reckoning” , Patrick Cockburn and Raymond Whitaker , The Independent, 12 March 2006)

The Financial Times, on November 19, 2004 wrote:

“This survey technique has been criticised as flawed, but the sampling method has been used by the same team in Darfur in Sudan and in the eastern Congo and produced credible results. An official at the World Health Organisation said the Iraq study ‘is very much in the league that the other studies are in ... You can't rubbish (the team) by saying they are incompetent‘”. (Stephen Fidler, 'Lies, damned lies and statistics,' Financial Times, November 19, 2004)

On 29 October 2004, the British medical journal The Lancet published ‘Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey’:

Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths. (Interpretation)

Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. (Findings)

Source: Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey, The Lancet, Published online October 29,2004

According to Les Roberts (Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one of the world’s top epidemiologists and lead author of the Lancet report) there might be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths (Do Iraqi Civilian Casualties Matter?, By Les Roberts, AlterNet, February 8, 2006)

To know more about The Lancet study, please read Researchers Who Rushed Into Print a Study of Iraqi Civilian Deaths Now Wonder Why It Was Ignored, by LILA GUTERMAN, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 27, 2005

About the other topic, you may want to read again that Media Alert. But even if you happen to disagree with this or that of the Media Lens’s works, do you really believe that this gives you the (moral and intellectual) right to punish it? The money is yours, so legally nulla questio. But don’t you think that if you decided once to help Media Lens’ project, withdrawing your support would be against that very Freedom of expression that should characterize the Waging for Peace, of which you are the founder Director, the Carter Centre UK, where you sit in the Board of Trustees, the Tinsley Charitable Trust and any liberal-democratic society in its whole?

Media Lens has distinguished itself for acting accordingly and supporting intellectual honesty, openness, compassion, freedom and democracy. The debates that promotes are always public, open, rational, extremely polite and intellectually stimulating.

Please, I urge you to think again of your decision and to keep supporting Media Lens.

Thank you.

Kind regards,
Gabriele Zamparini