ACTION ALERT: A propaganda train called Iraq Body Count (& friends)

ACTION ALERT: A propaganda train called Iraq Body Count (& friends)
By Gabriele Zamparini

The Weekly Standard, the voice of the Neo-Con in Washington and whose Editor, William Kristol, is also Chairman of the Project for the New American Century, has published this brilliant endorsement of Iraq Body Count

HOLLYWOOD HATES THE TROOPS

"We've killed over 400,000 of their citizens." That's what actor Tim Robbins thinks U.S. troops have been doing in Iraq. He made the claim last week in an appearance on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

He's wrong, of course. American soldiers have not been slaughtering 300 Iraqis a day for the last four years. Even for one of Hollywood's most feculent personalities, this is an appalling slander of U.S. troops.

The Iraq Body Count is an antiwar website that tallies all civilian deaths in Iraq as reported in the news media. Theirs is a comprehensive count that seeks to hold the United States and Britain accountable for a wide range of civilian deaths. As explained at iraqbodycount.org: "The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion."

The antiwar group's "maximum count"? At the moment, 77,555. That's one-fifth the number concocted by Robbins's overactive imagination.

On December 2005, replying to a question in Philadelphia, US President George W. Bush said:

“How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq.”

It was December 2005. One year earlier the first Lancet’s had been published and immediately buried together with its findings, those 100,000 Iraqi killed in the first year and half alone of the US-led war of aggression, the supreme international crime for which the major Nazi war criminals were hanged in Nuremberg.

Iraq Body Count (from where those “30,000, more or less” came from) got then the official blessing of the establishment responsible for that carnage and the definitive endorsement of the state-corporate media worldwide.

People should ask themselves why IBC is endorsed by all the warmongers, the Bushes, the Blairs, the state-corporate media that still keep ignoring the Iraqi carnage, the neo-con... The same people then should ask themselves why the Lancets have been ignored since the beginning with preposterous excuses and shameful sophistry.

Are you aware of all the times IBC discredited the two scientific studies conducted by the world leaders in the field of epidemiology and published as peer-reviewed scientific papers in the world's leading medical journal, the Lancet? It's become the first occupation of this bunch of ambitious and unscrupulous amateurs.

If you are new to this debate, please take a look at the following links just to start:

Speculation Is No Substitute: A Defence Of Iraq Body Count
Executive Summary by Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda and Josh Dougherty
May 02, 2006
Iraq Body Count

From this article published on ZNet:

"In an ill-informed and antagonistic campaign spearheaded by the web-based pressure group Media Lens, it has been vehemently claimed that we are grossly undercounting deaths; that we severely underrepresent the deaths caused by the US military; and that we do nothing to advertise these gross errors or to correct them. This article shows the first two claims to be false, and therefore the third claim becomes irrelevant.

Our critics are united by a deep distrust of Western media, and an ardent advocacy of the views of epidemiologist Les Roberts, a co-author of the respected Iraqi mortality study by Johns Hopkins University published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2004.

The media stand accused by our critics of failing to give the Lancet study the priority it deserves, and for citing IBC figures in preference to it. Our critics demand that we give Lancet preference over our own ongoing work and insist that we have a moral obligation to instruct the media to do the same.

The Lancet study makes an important contribution to knowledge. However, our critics rely on highly misleading and speculative conclusions drawn from that study and its lead author, which this article analyses and rebuts."

***

More from the real voice of IBC:

"The figure 655,000, which you seem to have accepted without explaining why, is taken from the Lancet medical journal in October 2006. This, in our view, is quite problematic and there is considerable cause for scepticism regarding these estimates."

***

The great humanitarian projest:

"Recent public debate has rather focused on the number of deaths we don’t record, and how much of an undercount that might be. Our own view is that the current death toll could be around twice the numbers recorded by IBC and the various official sources in Iraq. We do not think it could possibly be 10 times higher." - Iraq Body Count [John Sloboda, Josh Dougherty, Hamit Dardagan]

***

A notorious BBC interview:

BBC’s question: Your critics claim that your work is a vast undercount, how do you answer that?

IBC’s John Sloboda’s answer: The claim (that our work is a vast undercount) is made basically on the back of some quite shaky extrapolations from a single study that was carried out with a particular methodology in 2004. That is the celebrated Lancet study. (…) Some critics of the Lancet study have said it's like a drunk throwing a dart at a dartboard. It's going to go somewhere, but who knows if that number is the bulls eye. Unfortunately many many people have decided to accept that that 98,000 figure is the truth - or the best approximation to the truth that we have.

There are many, many, many more examples of IBC’s struggle for the just cause.

IBC is actively helping the Bush junta to carry on this genocidal carnage because it actively helps the huge propaganda campaign aimed at making people ignore the scale of that carnage.

After more than a month of correspondence and pressing initiated on 8 August 2007 ZNet finally published an excellent article written by Just Foreign Policy’s Patrick McElwee and Robert Naiman.

During this month I had to accept to be vilified, insulted and derided by Michael Albert and the ZNet’s tribe

Preposterous excuses after preposterous excuses, sophistry after sophistry, Zamparini has been a pain in the neck for too long and for too many and needed to be discredited and then ignored.

Finally the excellent article on ZNet by Just Foreign Policy’s Patrick McElwee and Robert Naiman, who wrote:

Unfortunately, the debate over whether the U.S. military should end its occupation of Iraq remains largely uninformed by accurate estimates of Iraqi deaths, at least here in the United States. Worse, there seems to be a lack of interest in how many Iraqis have been killed even as many who oppose withdrawal warn of the deaths that would ensue if the troops left. As a result, the American public is completely uninformed as to how many Iraqis have been killed. An AP poll in February asked Americans how many Iraqis had died as a result of the war. The median response was just under 10,000.

The best estimate indicates that more than a million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation. It is reasonable to suppose that if politicians and news media in the United States were forced to confront this reality, pressure for the end of the war would increase dramatically, and cavalier discussions of new military actions in Iran and Pakistan would be less likely.

I congratulated the authors and Michael Albert on the same day the article was published.

The day after, another appalling surprise, always on ZNet, always coming from those who should be the first to inform the public on the huge crimes against humanity of our ruthless leaders. An article by United for Peace and Justice reads:

Leslie Cagan, National Coordinator of UFPJ, says, "We feel it is essential to provide a true picture of what the shattered lives of the 25 million Iraqis look like today. For four years now we have been hearing the same false claims that the U.S. is making important gains, but they have never been true. Prepared by Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver, researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies, Iraq: The People's Report, takes an honest look at what this war has cost the people in Iraq and our communities here in the U.S."

Through the link provided I went to the actual report. The UFPJ report reads [PDF]:

COST TO IRAQ:

IRAQ CIVILIAN CASUALTIES: ESTIMATES RANGE FROM 71,017-600,000+

Once again I wrote to Phyllis Bennis, Leslie Cagan and many other intellectuals and activists.

I have spent the past three years writing to mainstream journalists and media and anti-war activists around the world on the need to focus on the real extent of the carnage inflicted upon the Iraqi people and to highlight the only scientific studies on the mortality in invaded and occupied Iraq.

On 10 April 2006 I published a correspondence with Phyllis Bennis on this topic.

Among other preposterous excuses, she wrote me:

“I am less concerned with which figures get cited as the wars consequences than in finding a good strategy for ending it altogether.
many thanks for your ideas.
phyllis bennis”

and

“There are plenty of estimates out there. No one is hiding anything.”

One million plus Iraqi deaths later, there are still "plenty of estimates out there" and her job and the job of UFPJ seems to be to confuse the public and conceal the truth.

Two scientific studies conducted by the world leaders in the field of epidemiology and published as peer-reviewed scientific papers in the world's leading medical journal. Articles, e-mails, debates, alerts… and large and important sectors of this so-called anti-war movement are still hiding the real extent of the Iraq genocide. Is there a word for this shame?

As Howard Zinn teaches us, You can't be neutral on a moving train.

What you can do?

Every time you read, watch or hear on your local or national mainstream or alternative media figures that downplay the genocidal carnage in Iraq, write to the editors to inform them and kindly ask them to issue a correction;

Every time you read, watch or hear from your local or national anti-war and peace groups figures that downplay the genocidal carnage in Iraq, write to those groups to inform them and kindly ask them to issue a correction;

Every time you read, watch or hear a local or national politician downplaying the genocidal carnage in Iraq, write to those politicians to inform them and kindly ask them to issue a correction;

Every time you find an Iraq Body Count counter on the Web, write to the website’s editor and webmaster to inform them and kindly ask them to replace it with the Just Foreign Policy counter

P.S. To all those sending nasty e-mails, insults, and trying to discredit my name and my work, please note: My conscience is clear.