How can Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and colleagues remain silent?

The state-corporate media keep deceiving you. While celebrating five years of media failure with books, articles, comments, TV and radio shows and happy birthday cakes, the same media are hiding the Iraq genocide in the most dreadful way.

Here is today's Independent:

Iraq: Who won the war?
Not the 90,000 Iraqi civilians or the 4,200 US and UK troops killed since 2003. The big winners are the money men who have made billions. Raymond Whitaker and Stephen Foley report

The Independent
Sunday, 16 March 2008


(...) So, five years on, who can be said to have won the war? Certainly not Iraqi civilians, at least 90,000 of whom have died violently since 2003, at the most conservative estimate. Other studies have multiplied that figure by five or six.

How can Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn remain silent while their newspaper so shamefully participate to this genocide with lies and propaganda? How can all the professional, decent journalists at the Independent, the Guardian, the BBC and all over the media remain silent while their work is used to carry on this bloodbath?

Please, support a call for a media investigation over the issue of Iraq mortality estimates.

UPDATE - The same day, Patrick Cockburn signed another piece on the Independent. This is a comment Medialens' Editors posted on their message board:

Cockburn writes:

"The Iraqi government tries to give the impression that normality is returning. Iraqi journalists are told not to mention the continuing violence. When a bomb exploded in Karada district near my hotel, killing 70 people, the police beat and drove away a television cameraman trying to take pictures of the devastation. Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February. But the fall in the death rate is partly because ethnic cleansing has already done its grim work and in much of Baghdad there are no mixed areas left."

Try working this out: the government is violently pressuring journalists to under-report the violence, and yet Cockburn writes confidently: "Civilian casualties have fallen from 65 Iraqis killed daily from November 2006 to August 2007 to 26 daily in February."

That's all he has to say of the impact of the invasion on civilians after 5 years. That's the beauty of our system - no beatings or physical pressure required.

Eds