Word: civilian
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...even as the killing of a single Iraqi, purported to be an insurgent, in a Fallujah mosque dominated almost a week of U.S. media coverage, the claim in the report in the respected British medical journal Lancet that the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the U.S. invasion may number as many as 98,000 rated hardly a mention even in news outlets that had been relatively critical of the war. The Lancet study, of course, was a scientific guesstimate based on incomplete data - the U.S. and its coalition partners have never kept a record of Iraqi civilian deaths...
...significantly lower total is reported by the organization Iraq Bodycount, which has tabulated news reports that show a total of around 15,000 civilian casualties since the war began. Even if that lower total was accurate, it suggests that Iraq has suffered at least five times the impact of 9/11 - and the fact that its population is one tenth that of the U.S. would magnify the impact to more like 50 times that of 9/11...
...civilian death toll can be routinely dismissed as an unfortunate by-product of war, an even more uncomfortable aspect for the U.S. of the Lancet study is the conclusion that the majority of the violent deaths had been caused not by terror attacks, but by U.S. air strikes. The use of air power in urban areas has become a routine part of the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, and such attacks are typically reported as "air strikes against rebel positions." But civilian casualties are pretty much inevitable when air power is used in cities, despite the best intentions and technological capabilities...
...Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs points out, the U.S. media has for the most part ignored or downplayed not only the Lancet study, but the issue of civilian casualties more generally. The New York Times has been involved in a running debate with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, not published except on the activist group's web site, on the paper's reporting of the question of civilian deaths in Fallujah. And in a perceptive commentary in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing suggests that part of the reason much of the media has avoided some...
Sites, the civilian who knows the most about what happened that day, has said little since his initial reports aired on NBC. A network spokeswoman says he expects to be deposed. But three days before the shooting, Sites, 42, an experienced war correspondent, had posted a telling dispatch on his weblog. "The Marines are operating with liberal rules of engagement," he wrote. As the unit entered Fallujah, a staff sergeant announced that "everything to the West is weapons free." That meant, Sites explained, the Marines could "shoot whatever they see." Many of the Americans were grieving and exhausted, he wrote...