Too hot to handle-Counting Iraqi Casualties -- and a Media Controversy

Counting Iraqi Casualties -- and a Media Controversy

The author commissioned the "Lancet" study recently attacked in a National Journal report and by the Wall Street Journal. He calls the criticism a "hatchet job," fraudulent or based on innuendo.

By John Tirman

The topic of the war’s exceptional human costs, now inflamed by these calumnies, appears to be too hot to handle. Even with all this fuss in January, no explorations of the Iraqi mortality from the war have appeared in the major dailies. No editorials, no examination of the methods (or the danger and difficulty of collecting data), no sense that the scale of killing might affect the American position, or might shed some light on U.S. war strategy, or might point to honorable exits and reconstruction obligations. Remarkably, no curiosity at all about the dead of Iraq, and what they can tell us.

That, in the end, may be the biggest injustice of all.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003711142

and we aren't allowed to consider the actual cost of this war now that we are in the middle of it.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

government is an Evil Empire... and the American people are also immoral as well.... We can not blame our ignorance and lack of caring on the media alone!!!

I have constantly tried to remind people of this... here on DU as well...

but get a lack of sincere caring whenever I bring up the subject!!

america is considering electing a new president that wants to invade yet another country (Pakistan), even if uninvited, and kill more innocent people.

This is why Obama will never get my vote and I've been a faithful democrat for 45 years.

"when strains on military families turn deadly (the body count they DON"T count)

(these victims, alas, are NOT part of the body count, but they are casualties of this illegal, unjust and immoral war, just as surely as the military in iraq, more souls laid to the account of bushco)

War Torn
When Strains on Military Families Turn Deadly





By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and DEBORAH SONTAG
Published: February 15, 2008

A few months after Sgt. William Edwards and his wife, Sgt. Erin Edwards, returned to a Texas Army base from separate missions in Iraq, he assaulted her mercilessly. He struck her, choked her, dragged her over a fence and slammed her into the sidewalk.




As far as Erin Edwards was concerned, that would be the last time he beat her.

Unlike many military wives, she knew how to work the system to protect herself. She was an insider, even more so than her husband, since she served as an aide to a brigadier general at Fort Hood.

With the general’s help, she quickly arranged for a future transfer to a base in New York. She pressed charges against her husband and secured an order of protection. She sent her two children to stay with her mother. And she received assurance from her husband’s commanders that he would be barred from leaving the base unless accompanied by an officer.

Yet on the morning of July 22, 2004, William Edwards easily slipped off base, skipping his anger-management class, and drove to his wife’s house in the Texas town of Killeen. He waited for her to step outside and then, after a struggle, shot her point-blank in the head before turning the gun on himself.

During an investigation, Army officers told the local police that they did not realize Erin Edwards had been afraid of her husband. And they acknowledged that despite his restrictions, William Edwards had not been escorted off base “on every occasion,” according to a police report.