`We don’t do body counts’
“I don’t do body counts,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told CBS News in March, 2002, in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. “This country tried that in Vietnam, and it didn’t work. And you’ve not heard me speculate on that at all, and you won’t.” A few days later, General Tommy Franks, holding a news conference to announce an “unqualified and absolute success” in the latest ground battle in Afghanistan, more famously told reporters who wanted to know about enemy casualties, “You know we don’t do body counts.”
Except that we do.
The organization Iraq Body Count, which has tried to keep record of civilian casualties in Iraq, said the Pentagon documents released by WikiLeaks last week reveal an estimated 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths. This is a preliminary estimate based on a sample; Iraq Body Count said it will take months to do a specific count. Based on the new information, Iraq Body Count estimates 150,726 Iraqi civilian and enemy deaths through violence since March 2003 – with more than 80 percent of the victims civilians.
“WikiLeaks has made it possible for Iraq Body Count to prove that the Pentagon has, indeed, secretly always known the names and details of how many died,” columnist Pratap Chatterjee writes in The Guardian, one of the papers that received the documents from WikiLeaks.
The Pentagon has been trying to claim the moral high ground in its battle with WikiLeaks by maintaining that the release of the records could lead to more bloodshed. But it needs to come clean on why it claimed not to keep records of civilian and enemy deaths when it in fact did. And what more can be said about Donald Rumsfeld & Co.?
“The Pentagon has been trying to claim the moral high ground in its battle with WikiLeaks by maintaining that the release of the records could lead to more bloodshed. But it needs to come clean on why it claimed not to keep records of civilian and enemy deaths when it in fact did.”
Yes. I am sure that without this leak of official documents, the friends and families of these dead people would have no idea that they were officially dead.
And what more can be said about Donald Rumsfeld & Co.?
Richard Nixon called him a “Ruthless little b_stard.”
Nor did Nixon think he should be Secretary of Defense. http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-10-15/opinion/17314695_1_longtime-bush-loyalists-laura-bush-bush-administration
The body count of the unemployed in America today is rather staggering. With two wars, American troops stationed all over, professional jobs now gone to India, China and other countries, it beginning to look like a really tsunami. Extremely troubling. http://www.cbs.com/primetime/60_minutes/video/?pid=nyFawm0GKOJ2l9jxl9NWdcQD3gv6ZNaX&vs=homepage&play=true
^What the hell does that have to do with the actual deaths of people in Iraq? What a petty, bitch-faced way to co-opt this issue.
Nothing more can or needs to be said about Rumsfeld and Co. — other than that the lot of them should be hauled in front of a war crimes tribunal at the Hague. Which won’t happen in part because the gutless Obama Administration will neither investigate nor prosecute them.
As for the “revelations,” ho-hum. Some of us knew back in the fall of 2002 where all of this would lead. But few listened, of course, because we were the Irresponsible Left.