Pentagon Still Lowballing Number of Dead Iraqis

It was truly insulting to anyone with a conscience who cared about the Iraqi people when General Tommy Franks informed the world in 2003, 'We don't do body counts,' followed by this glowing review of America's arsenal:

"With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war, yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent," he said.

As we all know by now, Franks was horribly wrong about those so-called precision weapons and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have indeed been killed. Not only that, we learned some two years after Frank's speech that the Penatgon had been keeping a secret count of the dead, contrary to what he had asserted.

And now, the Pentagon is once again intentionally misleading the world about the number of dead in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country's sectarian violence.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Johnson declined to provide an actual number for the U.S. tally of August deaths or for July, when the Baghdad city morgue counted a record 1,855 violent deaths.

And that only accounts for the deaths in the Baghdad area - a number that has tripled.

The reason for this glaring ommission on the part of the Pentagon is obvious: it is in a fierce battle with the public to deny that a civil war in underway in Iraq because it has said before that US troops would not stay in Iraq if an internal war broke out.

Media censorship in Iraq has also affected what we are allowed to know about the truth on the ground while the Pentagon is planning to waste $20 million on a project to track news stories about Iraq. Apparently, its propaganda efforts (which had cost $96 billion as of 2004) to control the Arab and US media have failed.

With the media finally doing their job, which they neglected in the runup to the war, the snow job by the Pentagon to cover up the number of deaths in Iraq is finally being investigated and exposed with the help of Baghdad's morgue personnel. One fact remains, however: we may never know how many innocent civilians have been lost in Iraq because it's far too late to catch up on 3 years worth of figures now.