BLOOD PRICE

Now while Tony & Dubya’s Spinmen are churning out gruesome bodycounts, let’s not forget the actual cost of the war. And we’re not talking freelance mercenaries and paid professional soldiers here, its civilians.

The numbers are stacking up as David Peterson wrote in Z Blog in August:

“Ever since Ahmed Janabi’s report first surfaced on english.aljazeera.net that an “Iraqi political group,” indeed, an expatriate Iraqi political group based in Britain, contends reports that approximately “37,000 Iraqi civilians were killed between the start of the US-led invasion in March 2003 and October 2003” (That’s already ten months ago), I have been watching and waiting to see which English-language medium in the States, the U.K., Canada or Australia was going to mention the fact that somebody, somewhere, had produced such an estimate. If only to denounce the estimate as uncorroborated fabrication, for Christ’s sake. “

Anybody seen that figure qouted in the UK media?

The group stated: “We are 100% sure that 37,000 civilian deaths is a correct estimate. Our study is the result of two months of hard work which involved hundreds of Iraqi activists and academics. Of course there may be deaths that were not reported to us, but the toll in any case could not be lower than our finding,” said Muhammad al-Ubaidi.

The planning ministry is due to hold a census in January 2005

“For the collation of our statistics we visited the most remote villages, spoke and coordinated with grave-diggers across Iraq, obtained information from hospitals, and spoke to thousands of witnesses who saw incidents in which Iraqi civilians were killed by US fire,” he said.

Oh well, things can only get better eh?

Full article here: Z Net Blogs