In These New Times

(Thecatsdream)
The British Medical Journal published a few days ago “Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: analysis of data from the world health survey programme”

In the study’s abstract, the conclusions read: “War causes more deaths than previously estimated, and there is no evidence to support a recent decline in war deaths.”

The lead researcher, Ziad Obermeyer, a research scientist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, in Boston, says:
“There is a notion in political thought that the number of deaths due to war has been declining in recent years,” Obermeyer noted. “That is attributed to a lot of different things, but among them technological innovations like ‘smart’ bombs and different strategic priorities. This idea appears to be supported by media reports. But what we are finding is these reports are not a reflection of reality.” Contemporary media reports of deaths are not to be fully trusted, Obermeyer added. “The reason we should be skeptical of media reports is that they are subject to political pressures and cannot always be verified,” he said. “These numbers can be pushed up or down, depending upon what kind of political pressure is being exerted.”
Now, compare and contrast this with what John Sloboda, executive director of the Oxford Research Group and founder of Iraq Body Count said on 17 March 2008 at “Is a Just War Possible?”, a conference held at Cumberland Lodge:
“How many people have died in Iraq since the 2003 invasion? No-one knows how many have died in Iraq, not even the governments concerned, because their efforts to find out have ranged from half-hearted to non-existent. (…) It has been largely left to citizen initiatives to enact the moral imperative here implied, such as the volunteer Iraq Body Count (IBC) project, which has accumulated details on nearly 90,000 publicly documented deaths to date. Last week (beginning 9 March), another 352 were added to that meticulously compiled total, built from day-by-day scanning of the outputs of hundreds of press and media sources. More imprecise, sample-based surveys carried out in different ways and at different times have provided estimates ranging all the way up to 1.2 million.
The sheer weight of numbers overwhelms and numbs us. As Joseph Stalin is believed to have said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic”. Losing the details of individual victims behind anonymous and easily disputed “expert estimates” dehumanises them, and contributes to a growing indifference to the truth. Iraqi dead have simply “ceased to count” for many of us.” [PDF Link]
Mr. Sloboda could hardly be more misleading, could he? Iraq Body Count has been continuously quoted by the warmongers – Bush’s “30,000, more or less”, remember? – and the state-corporate media; even more disgracefully, IBC is also been the darling of the Western so-called anti-war movement, its think-tanks and alternative media. The hypocrisy is overwhelming!

Just two recent examples – among many – of this deadly hypocrisy.

Robert Fisk, known as the best British reporter, wrote a few days ago, “tens of thousands dead in Iraq”, when the best estimates tell us that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the Nuremberg’s supreme international crime, may have slaughtered well over 1.2 million Iraqi citizens.

Why does Robert of Arabia, the Middle East correspondent of the British Independent, keep deceiving his readers on the most important point of the most outrageous scandal of our times, the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq?

In a recent correspondence with Human Rights Watch, I was told: “We do not do any numbers on this, as it would be just guessing – no one really knows how many have died.”

Human Rights Watch’s hypocrisy is nauseating if only one considers the efforts they put for well over a decade in promoting the story of Saddam’s genocide against his own people. The propaganda is thick and repeated as a mantra; for a different take, here some material you may want to read:

A Glimpse of The Past: A War Crime or an Act of War?
Stephen C. Pelletiere – NYTimes

Report Suppressed: Iran Gassed Kurds, Not Iraq
Raju Thomas, Times of India

Saddam Hussein Did Not Commit Genocide
Jude Wanniski

What Happened at Halabja?
Jude Wanniski

In Defense of Saddam Hussein
Jude Wanniski

In Defense of ‘Chemical Ali’
Jude Wanniski

Human Rights Watch had a leading role in the Empire’s propaganda to brainwash the public opinion both in the preparation for the invasion of Iraq (and after, in normalizing its occupation) and, more broadly, in selling the oxymoronic “humanitarian interventions”. Read for example:

Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party

Lynching Saddam – Part 7: the Myth of Human Rights

Watching Human Rights Watch
Open Letter to Kenneth Roth, Executive Director Human Rights Watch

We live inside the Great Mirage, the most sophisticated illusion-machine ever created by humankind: a ruthless, immoral, greedy global empire of Anglo-American flavour, hidden behind a façade of liberalism and fake opposition. In these hours the machine is working to serve the next delusion, Barack Obama, with the complicity of the self-deluded Lib-Left, because – as an Italian wrote last century – “Everything has to change so that nothing changes”.