Saturday, December 04, 2004

"We don't do body counts"

In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, journalists - who dares to count the bodies.

The question is: what happens to the people who insist on counting the bodies - the doctors who must pronounce their patients dead, the journalists who document these losses, the clerics who denounce them? In Iraq, evidence is mounting that these voices are being systematically silenced through a variety of means, from mass arrests, to raids on hospitals, media bans, and overt and unexplained physical attacks.

Naomi Klein, in the Guardian, outlines how American military forces came to choose unusual targets as part of their strategy to control information and images beamed around the world.

The estimate of civilian Iraqi casualties is 100,000.
They can't eliminate all the witnesses.