Project Censored
How many Iraqis have died? - by Amanda WitherellThe daily dispatches and nightly newscasts of the mainstream media regularly cover terrorism, but rarely how fear of attacks is used to manipulate the public and set policy. That’s the common thread of many of the unreported stories last year, according to an analysis by Project Censored.
Since 1976, Sonoma State University has released an annual survey of the top stories the mainstream media failed to report or reported poorly. Culled from worldwide alternative news sources, vetted by students and faculty and ranked by judges, the stories may not have been overtly censored. But their controversial subjects, challenges to the status quo or general under-the-radar subject matter might have kept them from the front pages. Project Censored recounts them, accompanied by media analysis, in a book published annually by Seven Stories Press.
“This year, war and civil liberties stood out,” Peter Phillips, who's been director of the project since 1996, says of the top stories. “They're closely related and part of the War on Terror that has been the dominant theme of Project Censored for seven years, since 9/11.”
Whether it’s preventing what one piece of legislation calls “homegrown terrorism” by federally funding the study of radicalism; using vague concerns about security to quietly expand the North American Free Trade Agreement; or refusing to count the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war, the threat of terrorism is being used to silence people and expand power.
“The war on terror is a sort of mind terror,” says Nancy Snow, one of the project's 24 judges and an associate professor of public diplomacy at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Snow — who has taught classes on war, media and propaganda — elaborates: “You can’t declare war on terror. It’s a tactic that’s used by groups to gain publicity and it will remain with us. But it’s unlikely that [the number of terrorist acts] will spike. It spikes in the minds of people.”
She points out that terrorist attacks have declined worldwide since 2003. Some use the absence of fresh attacks as evidence that the so-called “war on terror” is working, but a RAND Corporation study for the Defense Department that was released in August said the war on terror hasn’t effectively undermined Al Qaeda. The study suggested the phrase be replaced with the less loaded term “counterterrorism.”
Both Phillips and Snow agree that comprehensive, contextual reporting is missing from most of the coverage. “That’s one of my criticisms of the media,” Snow says. “They spotlight issues and don’t look at the entire landscape.”
Nobody knows exactly how many lives the Iraq War has claimed. But even more astounding is that few journalists have mentioned the issue or cited the top estimate: 1.2 million.
During August and September 2007, Opinion Research Business, a British polling group, surveyed 2,414 adults in 15 of 18 Iraqi provinces and found that more than 20 percent had experienced at least one war-related death since March 2003. Using common sociological study methods, they determined that as many as 1.2 million people had been killed since the war began.
The U.S. military, claiming it keeps no count, still employs civilian death data as a marker of progress. For example, in a September 10, 2007, report to Congress, General David Petraeus said, “Civilian deaths of all categories, less natural causes, have also declined considerably, by over 45 percent Iraq-wide since the height of the sectarian violence in December.”
Whose number was he using? Estimates have ranged wildly and are based on a variety of sources, including hospital, morgue and media reports, as well as in-person surveys.
In October 2006, the British medical journal Lancet published a Johns Hopkins University study vetted by four independent sources that counted 655,000 dead, based on interviews with 1,849 households. It updated a similar study from 2004 that counted 100,000 dead. The Associated Press called it “controversial.”
The AP began its own count in 2005 and by 2006 said that at least 37,547 Iraqis have lost their lives due to war-related violence, but called it a minimum estimate at best and didn't include insurgent deaths.
Iraq Body Count, a group of U.S. and UK citizens who aggregate numbers from media reports on civilian deaths, puts the figure between 87,000 and 95,000. More recently, in January 2008, the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government did door-to-door surveys of nearly 10,000 households and put the number of dead at 151,000.
And the 1.2 million figure is out there, too, which is higher than the Rwandan genocide death toll and is closing in on the 1.7 million who perished in Cambodia's Killing Fields. It raises questions about the real number of deaths from U.S. aerial bombings and house raids and challenges the common assumption that this is a war in which Iraqis are killing Iraqis.
Justifying the higher number, Michael Schwartz, writing on the blog AfterDowningStreet.org, pointed to a fact reported by the Brookings Institute that U.S. troops have, over the last four years, conducted about 100 house raids a day — a number that has increased recently with assistance from Iraqi soldiers.
Brutality during these house searches has been documented by returning soldiers, Iraqi civilians and independent journalists. Schwartz suggests the aggressive, “element of surprise” tactics employed by soldiers is likely resulting in several thousands of deaths a day that are going unreported or categorized as insurgents being killed.
The spin is having its intended effect: A February 2007 AP poll showed Americans gave a median estimate of 9,890 Iraqi deaths as a result of the war, a number far below that cited in any credible study.
Sources: “Is the United States killing 10,000 Iraqis every month? Or is it more?” Michael Schwartz, After Downing Street, July 6, 2007; “Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian killing fields,” Joshua Holland, Alternet, Sept. 17, 2007; “Iraq conflict has killed a million: survey,” Luke Baker, Reuters, Jan. 30, 2008; “Iraq: Not our country to return to,” Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service, March 3, 2008
The other nine Project Censored stories appear in the full article at: http://www.inlander.com/index.php
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posted by TheOldMan @ 2:59 PM
