April 8, 2015
IMAGE SOURCE: ysamarsinsights.wordpress.com
By Anita Stewart for Challenging the Rhetoric and Wise Women Media
“We don’t do body counts,” said General Tommy Franks in 2003, in the early days of Gulf War II, you know, “Shock and Awe.”
What followed that bold statement were countless reports and news stories from corporate and independent media on just how the counts were conducted, but no one knew for sure how this huge endeavor was being carried out.
Franks’ statement was the catalyst for the creation of the website [that is still live] IraqBodyCount.net. The data on the site is full of stats and is rather macabre, but if people reviewed it and saw the casualties for themselves perhaps this data would change the public opinion about wars and occupations?
Democracy Now had one of the first reports on the General’s statement and the website that was one of the first sites about the Iraq War itself; one that you to share the casualty data by inserting a widget box onto other pages, blogs and websites. It was quite brilliant.
IMAGE SOURCE: hrw.org
The Body Count Report
Not reported by corporate media and sadly forgotten or under-reported by alternative/independent media, “The Body Count Report: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the “War on Terror” is 101 pages that was released in March of 2015 and included information from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. It should have made international news and front pages everywhere.
Data was collected by the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), thePhysicians for Global Survival (PGS) and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and included stats from September 11th, 2001 up until the end of 2013. The report is linked here for download as a PDF file.
Omission Of The Facts Means They Don’t Exist
Officially ignored are casualties, injured or killed, involving enemy combatants and civilians…” wrote Doctor Hans-C. Von Sponeck in his preface to the Body Count Report.
Von Sponeck is a former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq.
“…This, of course, comes as no surprise. It is not an oversight but a deliberate omission. The U.S. authorities have kept no known records of such deaths. This would have destroyed the arguments that freeing Iraq by military force from a dictatorship, removing al-Qaeda from Afghanistan and eliminating safe havens for terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas has prevented terrorism from reaching the US homeland, improved global security and advanced human rights, all at ‘defendable costs.’”
IMAGE SOURCE: cursor.org
The Report Doesn’t Exist If YOU Can’t Find It
Independent researcher and American, David Peterson — co-author of ‘The Politics of Genocide,’ noted the following a week ago:
“I just ran a Factiva database search (on MediaLens) for mentions of the (Body Count) report. As best I can tell, within the universe of wire services and newspapers archived by the Factiva database, only four different English-language media have reported the existence of this document, and in these cases, two reports were picked up by twomedia.”
The Real Numbers [Add Up]
Per the report around a million casualties would be considered a conservative estimate. More than two million would be more realistic. Not counted would be numbers of casualties submitted from other Middle East countries and some of those displaced and living in refugee camps. The UN and NGO’s also have provided some of the data.
The real numbers are not provided to the general public because “collateral damage” is not considered technically as bad as a ‘casualty.’ The pogroms, endless wars and occupations must continue in order for corporations to profit. How much are you depositing today?
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