When life doesn’t count. The Iraq Body Count’s genocide denial and the grave responsibility of the anti-war movement

"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." - George Orwell, Animal Farm

The state-corporate media in the West, including Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn’s Independent, keep using Iraq Body Count (IBC) to deny the Iraq genocide the governments of the United States and United Kingdom have been inflicting upon the Iraqi people.

It seems Stop the War Coalition UK welcomes IBC’s co-founder John Sloboda within its ranks but it keeps quiet on the IBC scandal. Are they silent because Sloboda is part of Stop the War Coalition? Are they silent because Stop the War don't want to address the state-corporate media problem? I would like to know, and I guess many others.

IBC - a bunch of amateurs with no scientific background - have been doing all they could to denigrate serious scientific studies published on peer reviewed journals. Through press releases, articles and interviews to the BBC, CNN and other state-corporate media all over the world, IBC gave the most precious help to the warmongers in Washington and London; genocide is what Washington and London are responsible for and their first propaganda priority is to deny this genocide. Iraq Body Count has been actively helping the warmongers and the state-corporate media in this genocide denial business.

The anti-war movement in the United States and in the United Kingdom has a very grave responsibility in helping Iraq Body Count to carry on this genocide denial.

ZNet stopped publishing my articles since I started to write about Iraq Body Count. Michael Albert wrote to one of his correspondents that I was “contemptable”. I wonder if he ever used this term to describe what his friends at IBC were doing. It took me dozens of e-mails to United for Peace and Justice, ZNet, Michael Albert, Phyllis Bennis, Antiwar.com and many, many others before they stopped using the IBC’s misleading data to focus instead on the serious scientific studies they would keep ignoring. Yet, Michael Albert’s ZNet still has IBC propaganda online.

In the United Kingdom, Stop the War Coalition, the most important anti-war group, has never been interested in this Iraq Body Count scandal. Every time this issue was brought to their attention, the usual reply from an old manual: IBC is not the enemy. What that's supposed to mean is unclear but it sounds well, isn’t it? Stop the War should know better: the real enemy here is the Propaganda; human beings are never enemies!

The celebrations for the fifth anniversary of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq are over but the genocide continues and so does the genocide denial coming from the warmongers and the state-corporate media. Iraq Body Count is the main source of this genocide denial. Why is the anti-war movement still silent on the Iraq Body Count scandal?

This anti-war movement has been a complete failure and most of its leadership is pathetic, at best. One can't help to think that this anti-war movement has been more a business or something to manage dissent than an instrument of change. Millions of people in the US and UK do believe in it and do want change but the leadership of this anti-war movement is the problem and makes me think of the end of George Orwell's Animal Farm.