Body Count - Casualty Figures After 10 years of the "War on Terror"

[Skinski7]

The Physicians for Social Responsibility have released a study entitled, 'Body Count - Casualty Figures After 10 years of the "War on Terror."'

The study documents that approximately two million people have been killed since the "War on Terror" began and that approximately 4 million have been killed in wars the United States has participated in since 1991 when the Gulf War began.

The few leaks that have occurred over the years like the "Collateral Murder" video pale in comparison to what is extensively documented in this report.

I am not aware of any western news source reporting the release of this document.

The report can be read here...

http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf

Information on the PSR can be found here...

Physicians for Social Responsibility - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The report clearly documents the underreporting of the casualties of non-US personnel in these conflicts, in particular that of the civilian population.

Here are a few extracts...

Officially ignored are casualties, injured or killed, involving enemy combatents and civilians. This, of course, comes as no surprise. It is not an oversight but a deliberate ommission. The U.S. authorities have kept no known records of such deaths. This would have destroyed the arguments that freeing Iraq by military force from a dictatorship, removing Al-Quada from Afghanistan and eliminating safe-havens for terrorists in Pakistan's tribal areas has prevented terrorism from reaching the U.S. homeland, improved global security and advanced human rights, all at "defendable" costs.

However, facts are indeed stubborn. Governments and civil society know now that on all counts these assertions have proved to be preposterously fake. Military battles have been won in Iraq and Afghanistan but at enormous costs to human security and trust among nations. One must not forget the financial costs. The 21st century has seen a loss of innocent civilian life at an unprecendented scale, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nobody should even dare to ask the question whether it was worth it! As independent U.S. journalist Nir Rosen noted, "the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis are not better off, [...] the children who lost their fathers aren't better off, [...] the hundreds and thousands of refugees are not better off.

The IPPNW Body Count publication must be seen as a significant contribution to narrowing the gap between reliable estimates of victims of war, especially civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and tendentious, manipulated or even fraudulent accounts. These have in the past blurred the picture of the magnitude of death and destitution in these three countries. Subjective and pre-conceived reporting certainly is a serious matter. This includes the dissemination of deliberatly falsified information. In the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, there are many examples of manipulated "facts." The U.S. Department of Defense's short-lived (2001/02) Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) is one stark example of government-generated mis- and dis-information meant to influence public opinion in supporting its Iraq policies.

pgs 6-7

...should the number of Iraqis killed from the 2003 U.S. invasion until 2012 actually be around one million, as the analysis of the existing scientific studies presented in the present study suggests, this would represent 5% of the total population of Iraq - a number which additionally indicates the extent of the corresponding damage inflicted upon society and infrastructure. Such numbers become imaginable only by relating them to known facts: In fact, during World War II Germany lost around 10% of its population.

pgs 12-13

In reality, the term generally used for this operation, "targeted killings," is already a deliberate deception: Only in a few exceptional cases are people murdered because, according to the assessment of the U.S. administration, they hold an important position in the hierarchy of al-Qaeda or any other group of local insurgents. A study on Pakistan by the Longon-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism published in August 2011 concluded that only around 5% of those killed are known by name. This means that overwhelmingly the attacks are entirely random. In the parlance of U.S. institutions, this practice is accurately and graphically described as "crowd killing": People have to die because they happen to be in the midst of a group or crowd of people whom the drone operators consider to be a worthy target. Under the cover of anonymity, some administration officials even justify the practice by claiming that it has already resulted in the deaths of more "high-level targets" by mere accident than was achieved by systematically hunting them down.

Festive Parties as Target
For these "crowd killing" the CIA, which directs the attacks, prefers to exploit collective events. These can be collective meals on festive occasions, often during Ramadan or on other religious holidays, and also funerals. For instance, in June 2009, more than a hundred people were killed when attending the burial of drone victims from the previous day. According to Pakistani media reports, 40 of the killed were "low-level militants" without any rank. The other victims were described as "civilians." Apparently, ten of the killed were children between five and ten-year old. In March 2011, Obama authorized an attack against a tribal assembly that gathered to settle a conflict on property rights. At least 45 participants were killed, while most of the others were severely wounded.

The presence of noncombatents at these entirely peaceful assemblies is totally ignored. Frequently, the first drone attack is followed by a second one an hour or two later, directed against people who are searching for survivors and trying to find the dead in order to bury them.

To justify this practice, it is insinuated that the insurgents consist of groups totally isolated from the population who never mingle with anyone else. That way, each person present at such an occasion can automatically be assumed to be, in the infantilized language of many U.S. officials, a "bad guy."

pgs 93-94

 

[dcontroversal]

Well there is a day of reckoning and the guilty will be held to account!

 

[Viligant_Warrior]

PSR and Iraq Body Count have long been in collusion to artificially inflate civilian casualties while ignoring the fact most civilian deaths in Iraq occurred at the hands of the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard prior to Saddam's fall, and at the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS since.

PSR speaks irresponsibly and without statistical support not just relative to war casualities since 9/11 but also regarding nuclear power, vaccinations, government-controlled and -sponsored healthcare, and a myriad other "hot button" issues for which they always manage to champion the most controversial, least-supportable position.

I trust PSR and Iraq Body County just about as far as I can throw Iraq.

 

[Desdichado]

I trust PSR and Iraq Body County just about as far as I can throw Iraq.

That's a bingo.