Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
U.S. Military Has Killed Up to 238,000 Iraqi Civilians
A just-released study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, published in the current issue of the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, reports that the U.S. invasion
and occupation of Iraq has led to the deaths of between 426,000 and
794,000 Iraqis. This is a substantial increase over the 100,000 dead
that the same research group found through 2004, based upon a smaller
survey, and it represents an astonishing 2.5 percent of the country's
total population.
The grim news was widely--though not universally--reported in the U.S.
media (my local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, blacked it out), but
few news organizations reported the most disturbing finding of the
study, which was that 31 percent of those killed were acatually slain
by U.S. and "coalition" forces (actually by U.S. forces, since most of
the other foreign forces working with the U.S., with the exception of
the British, have not played combat roles, and even the British have
largely operated in the south where fighting has been much less severe.
That means U.S. forces have, since the March 19, 2003 invasion, killed between 132,000 and 246,000 Iraqis.
It should be recalled that the
Pentagon has estimated that the insurgency numbers perhaps 20-40,000
individuals, and they have only succeeded in killing a fraction of
them. Assuming generously that the military has succeeded in killing
maybe a quarter of the enemy fighters, that would be 10,000 people at
most, leaving the U.S. civilian death toll at 122,000-236,000. The
Christian Science Monitor, no radical rag, once did a survey and found
that U.S. forces were killing civilians in Iraq at a rate of 30 for
every enemy fighter slain. At that rate, it would appear, if the
peer-reviewed Lancet study is correct, that the U.S. invasion and
occupation forces have killed between 127,000 and 238,000 civilians. At
least a third and perhaps a half of those killed, various studies of
Iraqi casualties have made clear, have been children.
This is the grand war of liberation and democracy that our bloodstained president hails as his legacy!
This is the war that we are told is making America safer.
Just to put things in a little perspective, the Iraqis killed at the
hands of our "heroes" in uniform on orders of this great commander in
chief represent about one percent of the Iraqi population of 24
million. If a comparable number of Americans were being killed in a
war, it would be as if we had lost between 1 million and 1.9 million
people! Imagine Americans referring to any army that did such a thing
as a "liberator"! Anyone who thinks that we are making friends this way
in Iraq has to be an idiot.
It boggles my mind how the U.S. share of this slaughter could have been
kept out of the report offered in the New York Times or USA Today. (The
Times did run some small pie charts that showed in a dark shade the
share of deaths caused by U.S. forces, but because no numbers or
percentages were provided, and because no such figures appeared in the
accompanying story, the impact was greatly diminished.)
What made the Times article, which ran on an inside page, particularly
offensive, was a page-one story that ran on the same day, headlined
"3rd Iraq Death Has One town Shaken to Core." This piece looked in
detail about how the deaths in Iraq of three servicemen from the New
York hamlet of Highland, had caused such widespread grief and anguish
in a small American town. How on earth could editors give that
story--excellent and poignant as it was in its own right--such
prominence while burying a report about the wholesale slaughter of a
people by U.S. forces? Don't the editors realize that every one of
those Iraqi deaths was producing the same kind of grief and anger in
towns and villages across Iraq?
Americans still haven't grasped the horror that American troops are
inflicting upon the Iraqi people, and hiding these numbers--and the
American military's direct responsibility for nearly a third of
them--is an example of why.
The Bush administration has carefully seen to it that Americans will
not see the evidence of American deaths and injuries. Coffins are flown
in to Dover Airbase, a closed military compound in Delaware, at night.
The administration has also blacked out Iraqi deaths by refusing to
provide body counts from U.S. military actions, and by preventing
reporters from operating in Iraq unescorted.
The Lancet study has burst that veil of secrecy, at least partially,
though the U.S. media continues to cooperate for the most part, it
appears, in keeping the ugliest truth--the U.S. civilian casualty rate
in Iraq--out of their reports. If you want that kind of information,
you have to go to the Lancet report itself or to the British
newspapers, like The Guardian, which have it stated clearly.
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