Why
Is The American Press Silent On The Report Of 655,000 Iraqi Deaths?
By Joe Kay &
Barry Grey
14 October 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
US media is virtually silent on a new scientific study that estimates
the Iraqi death toll from the US war at 655,000. The study, conducted
by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health
and funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was posted
Wednesday on the web site of the British medical journal, the Lancet.
The study is the only systematic
estimate of the number of Iraqi civilians and military personnel to
have died as a result of the US invasion and occupation to be brought
to the attention of the American and international public.
Unlike previous estimates,
which were based on reviews of media reports or tallies made by the
US-backed Iraqi government, the Johns Hopkins study was carried out
by Iraqi physicians who interviewed—often at great personal risk—nearly
2,000 families spread across the country, utilizing standard and widely
used statistical methods to arrive at an objective estimate of the death
toll from the war and occupation. The vast majority of the reported
deaths were substantiated by death certificates.
The study concluded with
a 95 percent degree of certainty that the number of “excess deaths”
in Iraq since the invasion—the number of people who have died
in excess of the number that would be expected on the basis of pre-invasion
mortality rates—is between 393,000 and 943,000. The figure of
655,000 is given as the most likely number. This represents an astonishing
2.5 percent of the entire Iraqi population.
The researchers further estimated
that about 600,000 of the deaths were due to violence in some form,
including gunshots, air strikes and bombings. They concluded that US
and allied military forces directly caused at least 31 percent—or
186,000—of the violent deaths.
Some 336,000 people, or 56
percent of those killed in violent actions since the invasion, died
from gunshot wounds. The study also found that the number of violent
deaths in Iraq has steadily increased every year since the invasion.
In the period from June 2005 to June 2006, the researchers found a nearly
four-fold increase in the mortality rate relative to pre-invasion levels.
There can be no legitimate
doubts about the credibility of the study. Lancet is one of the oldest
and most prestigious peer-reviewed medical publications in the world.
The Johns Hopkins public health school is the largest in the world,
and regularly ranks as the top public health school in the United States.
The journal article was reviewed and approved for publication by four
independent scientific experts in the area.
It is difficult to overestimate
the significance of the report, even if one assumes its low-end estimate
of 393,000 Iraqi deaths to be correct. It demonstrates that the American
intervention in Iraq has produced a social and humanitarian catastrophe
of historical dimensions, with vast political implications not only
in the Middle East, but throughout the world and, above all, in the
United States itself.
By any objective standard,
the report merits front-page coverage in every major newspaper in the
country and extensive discussion and reporting on television news broadcasts.
Yet the response of the US press has been to virtually ignore the report
and limit its coverage to news accounts on inside pages which report,
uncritically, unsubstantiated statements by government and military
officials dismissing the report as “not credible.”
In burying the story, the
New York Times and Washington Post have played a particularly significant
role. The original articles published by these newspapers on Wednesday
were relegated to the inside pages: in the Times on page 8, in the Post
on page 12.
The Post decided to bury
the story in its back pages despite the fact that the article it published
vouched for the scientific validity the Johns Hopkins study, noting
that it, and an earlier report on Iraqi deaths published by the same
team, “are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific
methods.” The “cluster sampling” technique used by
the scientists, the newspaper wrote, “is used to estimate mortality
in famines and after natural disasters.”
Minimal coverage in the press
continued on Thursday, despite the fact that the issue was raised by
a reporter at a White House press conference on Wednesday. President
Bush contemptuously dismissed the report, stating that it was not credible.
He was not challenged and the question was not followed up by any of
the other reporters at the news conference.
Bush’s remarks were
followed by statements from various supporters and architects of the
war similarly dismissing the Johns Hopkins study’s casualty figures.
General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, admitted that
he had not bothered to read the report, but nevertheless concluded that
it did not have “much credibility at all.”
A spokesman for British Prime
Minister Tony Blair said that the figure of 655,000 killed is “not
one we believe to be anywhere near accurate.” Iraqi government
officials likewise declared that the figure was “exaggerated.”
On Thursday, neither the
Times nor the Post published an editorial on the Johns Hopkins report,
or even a follow-up article on the report and the response of the Bush
administration.
There was not one challenge
in the establishment media to the official attempts to disparage the
report. Instead, the minimal coverage on Thursday was largely devoted
to reporting the statements by Bush, Casey, Blair and the Iraqi stooge
regime. The Los Angeles Times, for example, published a story on its
inside pages, “Iraq Disputes Claim of 600,000 War Dead,”
reporting the statements by the Iraqi government. The newspaper added
its voice to the chorus by remarking that it had conducted its own survey
and reached a figure of 50,000 killed.
The attempts to discredit
the report are not backed up by any factual or methodological arguments.
The administration and its supporters assume, correctly, that they can
simply make unsubstantiated claims and the media will not challenge
them.
Lee Roberts, a co-author
of the study, noted in an interview with the radio program Democracy
Now! on Thursday that the cluster survey approach the researchers used
“is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries
where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war.”
He pointed out that both the United Nations and the US government have
used the method in determining mortality, including after the Kosovo
and Afghan wars. “Most ironically,” he said, “the
US government has been spending millions of dollars per year... to train
NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times
of wars and disasters.”
With its silence, the media
is once again taking its cue from the government. It does not challenge
Bush’s ignorant and cold-blooded dismissal of the Johns Hopkins
report, just as it did not challenge Bush’s offhand remark at
a December, 2005 press conference that 30,000 Iraqis, “more or
less,” had been killed since the March, 2003 US invasion—an
absurdly low estimate.
The corporate-owned-and-controlled
media have buried this story because they do not want the American people
to know the truth of what is happening in Iraq.
They want to conceal this
truth—as they have done consistently since the war began—because
they are complicit in a massive war crime in Iraq, and continue to support
the bloodletting by the US military.
The Johns Hopkins report,
by revealing the colossal dimensions of the death and destruction wreaked
by the United States in Iraq, shatters the edifice of lies that has
been erected in an attempt to deceive the people and justify the war—from
the phony claims of weapons of mass destruction and Iraq-Al Qaeda ties,
to the current claims of a war for “freedom and democracy”
and the overarching deception of the “war on terrorism.”
The report inevitably highlights
the culpability of the media itself, which has combined an acceptance
of unprecedented censorship by the military with self-censorship and
deliberate misinformation in order to whitewash an imperialist war for
oil and geo-strategic domination of the Middle East.
The scale of mass killing
revealed in the Johns Hopkins study published by the Lancet stands as
an indictment of the entire American ruling elite, both of its political
parties—Democratic no less than Republican—and all of its
official institutions, among which the media has played a particularly
sordid role.
What the corporate, political
and media establishment fear are the explosive social and political
implications of growing popular revulsion over the crimes of US imperialism
in Iraq and around the world, combined with mounting anger over relentless
attacks on working people’s social conditions and democratic rights.
The entire political system is being exposed and discredited before
the eyes of the people. Such a process inevitably brings with it revolutionary
consequences.
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