U.S. Media Ignores Estimate of 1 Million Iraqi Deaths

U.S. Media Ignores Estimate of 1 Million Iraqi Deaths | By Robert Naiman | Aug 17, 2007, 19:37

Yesterday a radio interviewer in South Africa asked me what had been the response of the "mainstream media in the United States" to Just Foreign Policy's ongoing estimate of the Iraqi death toll from the U.S. invasion and occupation, which on Thursday crossed the one million mark.

Sadly, I had to report that it has been ignored by mainstream media, even the wire services. But this is hardly surprising. A main motivation for constructing the web counter was to keep the "Lancet study" alive. The "Lancet study," you'll recall, was a study published last fall in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. The media largely buried the Lancet study when it was published - and have largely ignored the question of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion - so it's little surprise that they have ignored our attempt to shine a light on this question. ...
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Note that the number we focus on is the Lancet estimate of excess deaths due to violence. Thus, we understate the death toll by ignoring, say, increased deaths due to cholera which could be attributed, at least in part, to the destruction resulting from the U.S. invasion and occupation. ...

Army Suicides at record level: "Very often a young soldier gets a 'Dear John' or 'Dear Jane' e-mail and then takes his weapon and shoots himself,"

Aug 16, 7:27 PM EDT | War Stress Pushing Army Suicides Higher | By PAULINE JELINEK | Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Repeated and ever-longer war-zone tours are putting increasing pressure on military families, the Army said Thursday, helping push soldier suicides to a record rate.

There were 99 Army suicides last year - nearly half of them soldiers who hadn't reached their 25th birthdays, about a third of them serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Col. Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, told a Pentagon press conference that the primary reason for suicide is "failed intimate relationships, failed marriages."

She said that although the military is worried about the stress caused by repeat deployments and tours of duty that have been stretched to 15 months, it has not found a direct relationship between suicides and combat or deployments.

"However, we do know that frequent deployments put a real strain on relationships, especially on marriages. So we believe that part of the increase is related to the increased stress in relationships," she said.

"Very often a young soldier gets a 'Dear John' or 'Dear Jane' e-mail and then takes his weapon and shoots himself," she said. ...

British Criticize U.S. Air Attacks in Afghan Region ... more civilians killed by US and allies than by Taliban ...

British Criticize U.S. Air Attacks in Afghan Region By CARLOTTA GALL Published: August 9, 2007

SANGIN, Afghanistan — A senior British commander in southern Afghanistan said in recent weeks that he had asked that American Special Forces leave his area of operations because the high level of civilian casualties they had caused was making it difficult to win over local people.

Other British officers here in Helmand Province, speaking on condition of anonymity, criticized American Special Forces for causing most of the civilian deaths and injuries in their area. They also expressed concerns that the Americans’ extensive use of air power was turning the people against the foreign presence as British forces were trying to solidify recent gains against the Taliban.

A precise tally of civilian deaths is difficult to pin down, but one reliable count puts the number killed in Helmand this year at close to 300 civilians, the vast majority of them caused by foreign and Afghan forces, rather than the Taliban.
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In just two cases, airstrikes killed 31 nomads west of Kandahar in November last year and another 57 villagers, half of them women and children, in western Afghanistan in April. In both cases, United States Special Forces were responsible for calling in the airstrikes. ...

something of a whiff of racism in claiming that the Iraq War is not going too badly because American casualties are lower while yet more Iraqis dies

War Going Horribly—for Iraqis | By Amitabh Pal, August 4, 2007

There’s something of a whiff of racism in claiming that the Iraq War is not going too badly because American casualties have been marginally lower last month.

On purpose or otherwise, this analysis misses the larger purpose of why U.S. troops are meant to be in Iraq: to make life better for the Iraqis.

As the numbers show, U.S. troops are spectacularly failing in this regard. July was a month that saw a whopping 23 percent increase in Iraqi violent deaths over June, with at least 2,024 Iraqis killed. And yet, the same AP story that pointed this out led with the U.S. troop statistic, starkly exposing the priorities of the media.

The decline in U.S. casualties from June to July, according to numbers at icasualties.org, was 20. In the same timeframe, however, the number of Iraqi casualties increased by 384. Is one American life worth more than twenty Iraqi lives?

The same disregard for Iraqis is shown in a New York Times analysis piece by Mark Mazzetti that cites the contrasting figures as a “good news, bad news” scenario. But surely, the spectacular rise in Iraqi killings (topped off on August 1, the day the analysis was written, by a series of bombings in Baghdad that killed scores) more than offsets any decline in U.S. troop casualties. Or is the putatively liberal New York Times also revealing how it weighs American versus non-American lives?
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deployed for 13 months or more in a three-year period were more likely to have symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ...

Overstretched UK troops face mental problems-study | 03 Aug 2007 08:37:57 GMT | By Paul Majendie

LONDON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - Overstretched British troops face escalating mental problems the longer they stay on frontline duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, a study showed on Friday.

Those deployed for 13 months or more in a three-year period were more likely to have symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the King's College London research revealed.

They also suffer greater psychological distress, marital problems and alcoholism once they come home, it said after studying the responses of more than 5,500 combat personnel.

"The principal conclusion was that if you go above a certain amount of deployments in a three-year period you are at greater risk of having mental health problems," said psychiatry professor Matthew Hotopf. ...

27 civilians, 37 Taliban killed in NATO strikes

27 civilians, 37 Taliban killed in NATO strikes Agence France Presse Asadabad, July 11:

A local investigation has found 27 civilians were killed in NATO-led air strikes in northeast Afghanistan, a provincial governor said today.
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“Four volunteers, for polio vaccination campaign were killed in the bombing. The campaign has been postponed in the area,” an official with the United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO) told AFP.They were volunteers, the official said but asked not to be named.
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“We investigated the incident and found out that 27 civilians and 37 Taliban were killed,” the governor told AFP.