Nygaard Notes

Nygaard Notes
Independent Periodic News and Analysis
Number 322, March 1, 2006

On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/

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This week: Special Edition on the Media and Iraq

1. Imagine. Two Stories About U.S. Bombs
2. The Daily Airpower Summary
3. Why Reporting from Iraq is So Bad

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Greetings,

I sent out this issue and the next to the paper subscribers as a single issue: “Number 322-323 Special Antiwar Edition.” But it was really long, so I am splitting up the “super-issue” into two issues for you electronic readers. The content is the same, but the timing is different. This is the first time that the paper and electronic versions have been different, if anybody cares. I can’t imagine anyone does, but I have to point out these things. So, think of this issue and the next (which I plan to put out on Friday) as one big issue—the biggest Nygaard Notes ever, in fact.

I don’t know why, but I think it’s a good and important issue. Some of you are in the habit of forwarding Nygaard Notes to your friends and associates. I hope you will forward this particular issue, and I hope that some of you who never forward the Notes will consider forwarding this one. The fact that our country is at war (declared or not) and this is not considered THE major story in every day’s news cycle is completely and totally amazing to me. The unusual length and detail in this issue of Nygaard Notes is, I guess, my small attempt to address this shocking deficit in our public discourse. As I often do, I focus on the media because that—like it or not—is how almost all of us learn about the world and how our government is acting in that world.

Despite the criminal negligence of the corporate media in reporting the reality of the ongoing occupation of Iraq by the United States and its assistants, polls continue to show increasing numbers of United Statesians opposed to the war. A Zogby poll released today reveals that
72% of troops in Iraqi bases said the US should withdraw in 2006, while the latest CBS News polling shows that only 34 percent of Americans now approve of the job the “President” is doing, with 59 percent of those surveyed disapproving.

Those numbers are a remarkable tribute to the ability of “average people” to figure out what is going on, despite the media performance that I lay out in this issue. Yet one has to consider how much sooner this war could end—and whether we might be able to prevent the next war—if we had better information offered to us on a daily basis. That’s why the need for media activism has never been greater.

By the way, I did notice (after I mailed it out), that I published a list of things in last week’s issue that was numbered “1, 2, 3, 5.” For the record, I do know how to count to five, and I realize that something is missing there. And, as always, I hope people see this sort of error as part of the charming informality of this sort of publication. The facts are good, even if the proofreading isn’t always!

For an end to war,

Nygaard

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1.
Imagine. Two Stories About U.S. Bombs

On January 4th the news agency Agence France Presses reported that the United States had bombed a residential house in northern Iraq—specifically, in the city of Baiji—killing the family of Ghadban Nahd Hassan. According to Hassan, rescue workers recovered eight bodies from the debris after the bombing— those of a nine-year-old boy, an 11-year-old girl, three women and three men.

The attack was also reported in the U.S. press, where the number killed was reported as 12. The New York Times reported that nine were killed.

The Washington Post reported that “A Washington Post special correspondent watched as the corpses of three women and three boys who appeared to be younger than 10 were removed Tuesday [January 3] from the house.” The Post added that the “bodies were recovered in the nightclothes and blankets in which they had apparently been sleeping.”

Following standard practice, the Post reported that “The U.S. military says that it does not count civilian deaths from American attacks and that investigating deaths caused by any one strike is often impractical in dangerous areas.”

Here’s the official report of the event, as reported by the Post: “A U.S. military statement said that an unmanned U.S. drone detected three men digging a hole in a road in the area. Insurgents regularly bury bombs along roads in the area to target U.S. or Iraqi convoys. The three men were tracked to a building, which U.S. forces then hit with precision-guided munitions, the statement said.”

“Officials said six surrounding houses were damaged and two residents in the area were wounded seriously enough to require treatment. Officials and other people at the scene said there had been no insurgents in the house targeted.”

A week later, on January 13th, the U.S. again dropped bombs that killed more civilians. This time it was in Pakistan—specifically, in the village of Damadola—and the attack destroyed three homes and killed at least seventeen people. Various news services carried headlines like “Pakistanis Say 17 Killed in Airstrike” and “Fourteen Killed in Pakistan Tribal Blast: Residents.” The U.S. press, in contrast, ran headlines like “U.S. Airstrike Targets Al Qaeda's Zawahiri” (Washington Post), and “Top Qaeda Aide Is Called Target In U.S. Air Raid” (NY Times). It turned out that Zawahiri was not there, and most of the dead were simply “villagers.” This attack provoked nationwide protests of untold thousands in the streets of Pakistan, as well as a formal protest from the Pakistani government.

Here’s an ethics exercise for you: Imagine, if you can, that “intelligence” revealed some activity in, say, London, and “intelligence officials” believed might be someone planting a bomb. Imagine, further, that this “someone” retreated into the home of the Smith family. Now imagine that the U.S. air force flew in and bombed the Smith’s house. Finally, try to imagine that reports in the U.S. press couldn’t even find out how many were killed, and that the U.S. air force said they didn’t care enough to count, as it was “impractical.” Can one imagine anything like this ever happening? If not, why not?

The fact that these two incidents merited headlines and, in the case of Pakistan, major protests, indicates that the killing of innocent civilians by the occupation forces of the United States is newsworthy and upsetting, at least to some. The U.S. media, however, has failed—and continues to fail—to report on innumerable incidents like this that are likely occurring every week. I cannot say for certain that these things are happening, but it seems very likely. Exactly why it seems very likely is the subject of the rest of this issue of Nygaard Notes, and the next one.

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2.
The Daily Airpower Summary

Last week I examined one week of coverage of the U.S. occupation of Iraq in the Star Tribune and the New York Times. Never, during that week, did the phrases “air war” or “air strike” appear in reference to Iraq (nor to Afghanistan, which is another crucial story). But just because most of the consequences of the U.S. air war in Iraq are not reported should not lead one to believe that this is because all of the activities of coalition air forces are kept secret from the U.S. press. Far from it.

Although most “consumers” of the media are likely not aware of it, the U.S. Central Command Air Forces, or CENTAF, releases a “Daily Airpower Summary” five days a week, access to which is available to anyone in the world with access to the internet. (Go to http://www.af.mil/news/ and see for yourself.)

Just to get a hint of the war news that we are not getting in the major media in this country, I went and looked through the “Daily Airpower Summaries” for the week of February 6-12, the one that I examined last week in these pages. Here’s a tiny fraction of what I found:

During that week, CENTAF reported that “Coalition aircraft flew 42 close-air-support missions Feb. 9th,” 32 missions on Feb 8th, 55 on the 7th, 52 on the 6th, 57 on the 5th, 56 on the 4th, and 28 on the 3rd. That’s 322 missions in one week aimed at what CENTAF bizarrely refers to as “anti-Iraqi forces.” These “anti-Iraqi forces” are actually 90 to 98 percent Iraqis, whose activities might reasonably be described as resistance to the occupation of their country by a foreign military. CENTAF refers to their activities, not surprisingly, as “terrorist activities.” (CENTAF doesn’t report on the weekends, so the dates are the closest I could get to the week I covered. And some number of these missions apparently took place in Afghanistan, but it’s hard to tell how many; not most of them.)

To conduct these strikes, the “coalition forces” led by the U.S. used equipment like the Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II, the Navy EA-6 Mercury, the RAF GR-7 Tornado, the Air Force F-15 Eagle, the F-16, the Navy F/A-18 Hornet, the Navy F-14 Tomcat, the Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcons.

The CENTAF reports included air strikes or activities of some sort all over Iraq, in or near the cities of Baghdad, Balad, Fallujah, Hit, Salman Pak, Samarra, Tall Afar and Tikrit, Deh Rawood, Asadabad, Al Hawijah, Al Iskandariyah, Al Miqdadiyah, Al Mahmudiyah, and Baquba, Al Musayyib, Al Taji, Ramadi, Bermal, Jalalabad, and Mosul. (There were also reports of activities in Gardez, Gereshk, Khowst, and Orgun-E, all in Afghanistan.)

How many people died as a result of these activities? No one in this country knows, since casualties at the hands of U.S. forces are not reported, but the attacks do not appear to be as “precise” as some may want to believe. For instance, on February 8th, says CENTAF, “An F-16 successfully expended a precision guided munition against a suspected enemy position.” In other words, U.S. forces in this case “precisely” targeted they-know-not-who, just like in Baiji. How often does this happen? And who, actually, was hit? The U.S. media doesn’t tell us, so nobody knows. Another attack involved the strafing of a target in Afghanistan with “approximately 230 cannon rounds” fired by A-10s. Who was hit by these rounds? Again, no one knows.

The unavoidable conclusion: There are large, and tremendously important, aspects of the story of the U.S. occupation of Iraq that people in the United States are not getting. Why? Keep reading...

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3.
Why Reporting from Iraq is So Bad

Last week I did a little case study of media reporting from Iraq, and showed (I hope) how limited and misleading it has been. I didn’t go into why that should be the case, so here are seven reasons why reporting back to the United States from Iraq is so bad. There are undoubtedly more reasons than this, but this newsletter is too short to even attempt to be comprehensive. I’ll list just these seven, and follow the list with brief explanations of each one.

The List

Some of the reasons why reporting from Iraq is so incomplete and misleading are:

1. There are relatively few journalists reporting from Iraq;

2. Foreign news coverage in general, and high-risk wartime journalism in particular, is expensive, and news corporations continue to cut back on needed newsgathering resources;

3. Many of the reporters who are there are “embedded,” with all the distortions that go with that;

4. The security situation makes standard reporting (that is, talking to “non-offical” sources or actually witnessing the results of military engagements) extremely difficult in Iraq;

5. An unknown percentage of U.S. military operations are intentionally kept out of the view of reporters, especially independent ones;

6. News “consumers” in the U.S. don’t seem to be clamoring for better coverage of the occupation (or, if they are, the news corporations are not letting on);

7. As in any war, both sides engage in propaganda.

The List Explained

1. LACK OF REPORTERS: Many news organizations don’t even bother to send reporters to Iraq. I mentioned last week that my local paper the Star Tribune has 4 reporters in Italy for the Olympics, and none in Iraq. Is this typical? It seems so. On January 17th Paul McLeary of the Columbia Journalism Review filed a report of his conversation with an acting bureau chief for an American newspaper. Here’s what he said: “As [the bureau chief and I] were discussing the state of reporting in Baghdad and Iraq in general, he told me that I was a little late to the game. These days, more American reporters are leaving Iraq than arriving. In large part, for the U.S. press, ‘The party's pretty much over.’”

2. LACK OF RESOURCES. The overall cutbacks in the budgets of news organizations for foreign news is almost certainly affecting the willingness, if not the absolute ability, of smaller news organizations to place reporters in Iraq. A recent study on the embedding of reporters in Iraq by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) found that Iraq reporting is costly, with estimates of $10,000 to $50,000 per embedded reporter on life insurance, $1,000 to $1,500 per person on body armor and helmets, and more than $575 each for vaccinations for smallpox, anthrax, and other potential diseases. Other costs for the news outlets included airfare of about $1,500 one way, $200 to $300 per night for hotel rooms prior to embedding, and satellite phones running from $1,000 to several thousands dollars each. It’s a lot cheaper to cover the Olympics, I’m guessing.

3. EMBEDDING. Some of the news organizations that DO have reporters in Iraq have chosen, for a variety of reasons, to have their reporters “embedded” with U.S. troops there. I am in the process of doing research for a story on this “embedding” business, but for now I’ll just say that the IDA study referenced above found that the embedding of U.S. journalists “was deemed an almost unqualified success by both military officials and journalists who participated” in the study. As of last week, 28 news agencies officially had reporters embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, including National Public Radio, the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, USA Today, the LA Times, and others. Who are they? Hard to say. I contacted NPR, for instance, and they told me that “our policy is to not give out information on reporters that are currently embedded.” Not even their names, apparently.

4. LACK OF SECURITY. The Columbia Journalism Review’s McLeary reports that many journalists “either left the country after the December elections or were pulled out by their publications, which have been cutting back on Baghdad staff as things have gotten progressively more dangerous.” Those that remain are often afraid to venture too far outside of the U.S.-controlled “Green Zone” because, as NPR recently reported, “the conflict in Iraq is the deadliest one for journalists since the Vietnam War.” The Boston Globe reports that “U.S. military forces in Iraq have killed as many as 13 journalists since the U.S. invasion in 2003.”

5. SECRECY. Much of the “action” in Iraq, as I spell out elsewhere in this issue, is conducted out of the view of U.S. reporters, and the people who know—the U.S. military—are not about to help reporters understand the true magnitude of the suffering caused by the U.S. occupation. U.S. air strikes, for example, are rarely seen by reporters, nor are the targets of those strikes. Some number of permanent U.S. bases are likely being constructed, but reports on them are infrequent, so details are sketchy. Civilian casualties? For the most part, out of sight, out of mind.

6. MARKET FORCES. If there were sufficient “demand” for hard-hitting news from Iraq on the part of “news consumers,” the media corporations might attempt to respond to it, so as to attract an audience to sell to advertisers. Apparently the demand is not sufficiently high for such “market forces” to produce high-quality wartime journalism.

7. PROPAGANDA. The occupation forces and the U.S. administration are actively involved in propaganda efforts aimed at tilting the reporting of the occupation toward a “good news” perspective.



Sneak preview of the next issue of Nygaard Notes:
1. The “Lesson of Vietnam;” Reduce the Troops, Increase the Bombs
2. U.S. Bases and “Imperial Intentions” in Iraq
3. Human Suffering As A Result of the U.S. Occupation: The Numbers
4. Sources for More Information On Iraq, March 2006
5. More Untold Stories From Iraq

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Nygaard Notes
Independent Periodic News and Analysis
Number 323, March 3, 2006

On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/

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This week: Special Edition on the Media and Iraq, Part II

1. The “Lesson of Vietnam;” Reduce the Troops, Increase the Bombs
2. U.S. Bases and “Imperial Intentions” in Iraq
3. Human Suffering As A Result of the U.S. Occupation: The Numbers
4. Sources for More Information On Iraq, March 2006
5. More Untold Stories From Iraq

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Greetings,

As I said in the last issue’s editor’s note, I sent out a combined version of #322 and #323 as one giant issue last Wednesday. So, there is no editor’s note for this electronic version (beyond these words), since it would seem kind of unfair to have some people get another editor’s note when some people do not get one. Don’t you think?

So, that’s all for now. See you in #324.

Nygaard

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1.
The “Lesson of Vietnam;” Reduce the Troops, Increase the Bombs

As I pointed out in “The Satanic Is The Guilty” The Roots of Modern War Propaganda” (Nygaard Notes #184), there is a “lesson of Vietnam” that has been learned well by the warmakers of subsequent U.S. governments. And that lesson I think is best summed up by social scientist Harold Lasswell in his 1927 book entitled “Propaganda Technique in the World War.” He puts it like this: “The justification of war can proceed more smoothly if the hideous aspects of the war business are screened from public gaze.”

As I wrote in that issue (in December 2002, three months before we attacked Iraq) “this Bush administration can be expected to enforce the unprecedented restrictions begun in the [1991] Gulf War of keeping journalists away from combat zones, while the public will be fed computerized images of ‘smart bombs’ doing their job with no blood or gore to disturb the dinner hour.”

We’ve gone from “smart bombs” to “precision guided munitions,” but the prediction of “sanitized” war reporting has so far been accurate. Since the attack in 2003 every effort has been and is being taken to “screen from public gaze” not only “the hideous aspects of the war business” in Iraq, but whole categories of aspects, hideous or not. We don’t even get computerized images now. Essentially the only reports of “violence” in Iraq that make it into the newspapers are reports of violence by “the enemy.”

Drawing Down the Troops

In Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address of January 31st, he promised that “As we make progress on the ground [in Iraq]... we should be able to further decrease our troop levels...” Such a promise is to be expected, and two recent articles in the press illustrate why.

On January 31st the Wall Street Journal reported on a just-completed Wall Street Journal/NBC News opinion poll that showed that “Two-thirds [of United Statesians] say it is time to reduce troop levels in Iraq, while just 28% support maintaining existing troop levels.” Furthermore, the Journal said that “on Iraq, Mr. Bush's most important policy initiative, 45% of Republicans say it's time to reduce troop levels, up from 32% a year ago,” adding that “Those sentiments haven't been lost on Mr. Bush, who has signaled his intent to reduce troops...”

That same day, January 31st, the New York Times (All The News That’s Fit To Print!) ran a major (1,400-word) story headlined “Iraqi Official Says Foreign Forces Could Fall Below 100,000 This Year.” Not only that, says the article, but “an overwhelming majority [of U.S. troop] could be out in two years.”

Note that no one is promising less violence and suffering for the people of Iraq this year. The promises are simply about reductions in troop levels. But won’t that mean less suffering for Iraqis? Not likely. Fewer troops on the ground = more bombs from the air.

The “Secret” Bombing of Iraq

Independent journalist Seymour Hersch, writing in the December 5th, 2005 issue of the New Yorker tells us that, “A key element of the plans [to reduce troop levels], not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower.” Hersch adds that “military experts have told me...that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.”

Ten months earlier, back in February of 2005, independent journalist Dahr Jamail wrote the first widely-distributed article (that I know of) on the subject of what might almost be called the “secret” air war being conducted as part of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Writing in the online news portal “Electronic Iraq,” Jamail referred to “the oftentimes indiscriminate use of air power by the American military,” which he claimed was “one of the least reported aspects of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.” My recent investigation bears out his claim that “The Western mainstream media has generally failed to attend to the F-16 warplanes dropping their payloads of 500, 1,000, and 2,000-pound bombs on Iraqi cities—or to the results of these attacks.”

A database search of the English-language media for the words “Iraq” and “air war” for the month ending February 16th, for instance, yielded only a single article. A similar search of NPR transcripts for the SIX months ending February 16th also yielded but a single reference, and that was not an independent NPR investigation, but an interview with Seymour Hersch on the Weekend Edition program.

The U.S. air strike that killed the 12 innocents in Baiji on January 4th did receive coverage in the U.S. press, perhaps because a Washington Post special correspondent happened to be present when the bodies were carried out of the rubble. Since it’s now so dangerous for U.S. reporters to leave their hotels—and almost never do they leave Baghdad—such on-the-scene reporting of the consequences of the U.S. air war is extremely rare, and likely will continue to be rare. And, as Hersch reports, “The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War.” So the likelihood of the ongoing air war appearing on your front page is very low, absent some serious media work by grassroots peaceworkers.

In the week following the Baiji bombing there were, as usual, almost no references in the U.S. media to the U.S. air war, but there were various references to U.S. air “strikes,” which were said to be increasing in frequency and intensity, although the numbers were reported differently in different media, making one wonder where, exactly, the numbers were coming from. The Boston Globe, for instance, claimed that “US and British forces carried out eight air attacks in January 2005”, while the Washington Post said the number at 25. The monthly number of air strikes at the end of 2005 had gone up, maybe to 50 (Boston Globe) or maybe to 54 (NY Daily News) or maybe it was 120 (Washington Post). Whatever. The variations reveal the casual nature of reporting by the corporate media on what should be a huge news story.

Whatever the actual numbers, UPI reported on January 1st, citing a London Sunday Times story, that “the tempo of [U.S.] air strikes is expected to increase” in 2006 to a number even greater than the highest estimate for December, which was 150. And, as the Knight Ridder News Service reported on January 10th, “Since Iraq doesn't have a working air force, U.S. jets are expected to provide air cover for Iraqi troops for at least several more years.”

Casualties that result from these missions are not included in the Daily Airpower Summary released by the U.S. military. But here is Stonybrook University sociologist Michael Schwartz, writing in the online publication TomDispatch: “If the U.S. fulfills its expectation of surpassing 150 air attacks per month, and if the average air strike produces the (gruesomely) modest total of 10 fatalities, air power alone could kill well over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006.” To this, Schwartz notes, we must “add the ongoing (but reduced) mortality due to other military causes on all sides...”

The prospect of more than 20,000 Iraqi civilian deaths for “several more years” is the prospect to which we now turn.

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2.
U.S. Bases and “Imperial Intentions” in Iraq

The question of whether or not the United States is planning to stay in Iraq for the long haul is crucial to understanding the conflict there. As Sam Graham-Felsen put it in a July 2005 article on Alternet, “the issue of permanent bases is one that cuts to the heart of not only how long we intend to stay in Iraq, but why we got there in the first place.”

Foreign policy establishment heavyweights ranging from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright to retired general and erstwhile presidential candidate Wesley Clark have called for a public U.S. declaration forswearing permanent bases in Iraq. And, on February 17, 2005, Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee, that “we have no intention, at the present time, of putting permanent bases in Iraq.”

Such declarations not likely to be believed in Iraq. And the most likely reason was stated clearly by Larry Diamond, Hoover fellow and former advisor to Paul Bremer, speaking at UCLA this past February, where he said, “[W]e could declare ... that we have no permanent military designs on Iraq and we will not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. This one statement would do an enormous amount to undermine the suspicion that we have permanent imperial intentions in Iraq. We aren't going to do that. And the reason we're not going to do that is because we are building permanent military bases in Iraq.”

Much earlier, back in March of 2004, the Chicago Tribune published an article headlined “14 ‘Enduring Bases’ Set in Iraq ; Long-term Military Presence Planned.” Here’s the lead sentence from that article: “From the ashes of abandoned Iraqi army bases, U.S. military engineers are overseeing the building of an enhanced system of American bases designed to last for years.” At that time, the Tribune reported, “U.S. engineers [were] focusing on constructing 14 ‘enduring bases,’ long-term encampments for the thousands of American troops expected to serve in Iraq for at least two years. The bases also would be key outposts for Bush administration policy advisers.” That “two years” is just about up. No word yet on dismantling the bases.

On page 9 of their August 31, 2005 report “The Iraq Quagmire The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops,” the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy In Focus state that “Currently, the U.S. operates out of approximately 106 locations across the country. In May 2005, plans for concentrating U.S. troops into four massive bases positioned geographically in the North, South, East and West were reported and the most recent spending bill in Congress for the Iraq War contained $236 million for building permanent facilities.”

The spending bill, they say, “actually spells out the permanent nature of new construction. A
justification document states: ‘This proposal will allow the Army to provide temporary facilities, and in some very limited cases, permanent facilities.... These facilities include barracks, administrative space, vehicle maintenance facilities, aviation facilities, mobilization-demobilization barracks, and community support facilities.’”

The London Telegraph of February 11th pointed out that, starting last summer “reports began to emerge that plans had been drawn up to create four ‘super-bases’ [in Iraq], giant camps that would house tens of thousands of US soldiers similar to other sprawling military facilities around the world.”

The Telegraph reports that one of the “super-bases” in Iraq, the U.S. airbase at al-Asad, “increasingly resembles a slice of US suburbia rather than the front line in a war zone.” The article concludes by telling us that “[U.S.] Servicemen ... confidently predict that they will be rotating through the base for at least a decade.”

A week earlier, on February 4th, an article in the Washington Post appeared with the headline “Biggest Base in Iraq Has Small-Town Feel.” The base in this case is Balad Air Base, which the Post describes as “a small American town smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq.” Most of the 20,000 U.S. soldiers at the base “never interact with an Iraqi, and some never see one,” we are told. “The town's [sic] most distinctive feature is the long runway that bisects it,” the Post declares, which “is now one of the world's busiest.” In fact, it is “behind only Heathrow right now,” according to the commander at the base.

[In this context I just have to mention a 1972 Randy Newman song called “Political Science,” in which a part of the lyrics went like this: “And every city the whole world round/ Will just be another American town/ Oh, how peaceful it will be/ We'll set everybody free!” At the time, this was understood to be satire.]

In what may be an ominous sign of things to come, there are now reports—few and far between, but credible—of an expanding network of U.S. military bases in South America, particularly in Paraguay, which borders on two countries that seem to bother the Bush administration, Argentina and Bolivia.

Any attempt to understand the nature of the U.S. bases in Iraq, as well as any attempt to assess the credibility of official U.S. denial that they are “permanent,” should be done

The presence of U.S. bases in Iraq, and the credibility of U.S. denial that they are “permanent,” should be understood in light of the fact that “the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and has another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories,” according to Asia scholar Chalmers Johnson. The “super-bases” in Iraq, important as they are, are only a small part of a “new form of empire,” in which the United States maintains a “vast network” of military bases on every continent except Antarctica

The Friends Committee on National Legislation has proposed a resolution for adoption by the U.S. Congress called the “STEP” resolution (“Sensible Transition to an Enduring Peace”), which calls on the Congress to state that “it is the policy of the United States to withdraw all U.S. military troops and bases from Iraq.” Learn more about this resolution at http://www.fcnl.org/iraq/

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3.
Human Suffering As A Result of the U.S. Occupation: The Numbers

An ominous, and damning, sentence led off a Washington Post front-page article on February 28. Here it is: “Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue.”

The key phrase here is “outside of major U.S. offensives.” Clearly, although the death toll in the days since the attack on the Shiite shrine in Samarra has been horrific, the toll from some previous actions by the United States forces has been even worse. When I say that this sentence is “damning,” I am referring to the fact that such carnage has remained almost entirely unreported in this country up to the present. In fact, Ellen Knickmeyer, one of the authors of the sentence I am quoting (which was reprinted in my local paper, the Star Tribune) was the author of perhaps the only front-page report on the victims of U.S. air power in Iraq in a major paper. (The story was in the Post’s December 24th edition with the headline “U.S. Airstrikes Take Toll on Civilians.”)

This failure to report on consequences of the U.S. air war is only one part of an even larger failure, which is the lack of honest and ongoing investigative reporting into the actual levels of suffering in Iraq as a result of the actions of the U.S. government, including, but not limited to, the air war upon which I report elsewhere in this article.

Whatever numbers have been reported in the U.S. corporate media about the death toll resulting from the U.S. attack on Iraq—direct, indirect, at the hands of whomever—the actual numbers are almost certainly far higher. When one factors in not only the direct victims of violence, but also the indirect effects of the U.S. invasion and occupation—the collapse of the health care system, the well-documented breakdowns in public utilities, and so forth—the human suffering and death likely approach nearly unimaginable levels.

Factoring in all of this was the point of a major study done by a team led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and published in the British medical journal The Lancet. That report, which came out on October 29th, 2004, was “a study of post-war mortality in Iraq which estimated that at least 100,000 excess civilian deaths had occurred since the 2003 invasion; that most were caused by violence; and that most of those violent deaths were caused by coalition air strikes.”

While the Johns Hopkins study was reported here and there in the U.S. press, it only made the inside pages, and included attacks on its merit by British and U.S. officials. The office of the British Prime Minister, for example, stated that it was “important to treat the figures with caution because there were a number of concerns and doubts about the methodology that had been used.” The Washington Post, in one of the few U.S. stories on the study, was able to find a source to comment that “These numbers seem to be inflated.” No data was given to back this up.

It is my opinion that the Johns Hopkins group’s numbers are accurate and, if anything, understated. Patrick Cockburn, writing in the January 9th, 2006 issue of CounterPunch, says that “The true number [of Iraqis who have died as a result of U.S. actions] is probably hitting around 180,000 by now, with a possibility ... that it has reached as high as half a million.” Cockburn then goes on to make a strong case for the higher number, citing extensively a statistician named Pierre Sprey.

Rather than argue the case here, I’ll just refer you to the Sources for More Information on Iraq, elsewhere in this issue of the Notes. Because, although officials and media workers can quibble with the methods of the Johns Hopkins team, the fact remains that their study is—to the best of my knowledge—the ONLY serious attempt to grasp the true scope of the ongoing suffering being endured by the Iraqi people as a result of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The true shame of this fact is captured in a comment by the authors of the Johns Hopkins study, who pointed out that their study “shows that with moderate funds, four weeks and seven Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilian deaths could be obtained.” In light of this fact, the claim by the government of the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world that the counting of the victims of its actions “is often impractical in dangerous areas” is beyond despicable.

This shamelessness on the part of a belligerent nation’s leaders should be no surprise—such claims are a part of war. That’s why there is a constitutionally-protected independent sector in this country whose job it is to uncover the facts needed to counter official lies, propaganda, and secret operations of our leaders. It’s called The Free Press. Where are they?

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4.
Sources for More Information On Iraq, March 2006

Very limited, but a good start, I think.

On the U.S. air war in Iraq:

“Living Under the Bombs,” February 4, 2005, by Dahr Jamail. Find it on the website “Electronic Iraq” at http://electroniciraq.net/news/1860.shtml

“Up in the Air: Where Is the Iraq War Headed Next?” December 5th, 2005, by Seymour Hersh, found at the website of the New Yorker Magazine: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051205fa_fact

An Increasingly Aerial Occupation,” December 13, 2005, again by Dahr Jamail, this time published by TomDispatch.com (with comments by Tom Engelhardt) and found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=42286

“A Formula for Slaughter: on the American Rules of Engagement in the Iraqi Air War,” January 11, 2006, by Michael Schwartz, found on the website of Mother Jones magazine at http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/01/formula_for_slaughter.html


On the permanent U.S. military bases:

Sam Graham-Felsen’s article on Alternet about permanent U.S. bases was called “Operation: Enduring Presence,” and can be found at http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/23755/

For a great list of articles on the phenomenon of permanent military bases in Iraq, go to
http://www.comw.org/warreport/iraqarchive5.html and click on “Permanent Basing.”


On the human suffering caused by the invasion and occupation:

The Lancet report citing 100,000 deaths in Iraq cannot be accessed without subscribing to The Lancet. However, if you want a copy of the nine-page report, send me a couple of bucks and I’ll send it to you.
The group “Iraqanalysis.org” put out a “BRIEFING NOTE” when the Lancet story was published, explaining and defending it. That can be found on the internet at:
http://www.iraqanalysis.org/local/041101lancetpmos.html .

Patrick Cockburn’s article analyzing and critiquing the Lancet story can be found on the Counterpunch website at http://www.counterpunch.org/andrew01092006.html)


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5.
More Untold Stories From Iraq

This issue of the Notes focuses on three major stories that have been, in effect, censored out of U.S. news reports on Iraq: the U.S. air war, permanent U.S. military bases, and the degree of human suffering caused by the ongoing occupation. By no means do I wish to give the impression that these are the only forgotten and/or neglected stories of import from Iraq. So, for the record, here are a few others that I don’t have time to go into:

1. Credible reports have been filed of the use by U.S. forces of a chemical agent known as “white phosphorus. When this agent is used as a weapon—as reports claim has been done by the U.S. in Iraq—it is considered a war crime. Few in this country know about this. See The Independent, a London daily newspaper, of November 15th, 2005.

2. Two weeks ago reports were filed on the emergence of death squads forming in Iraq. The phenomenon of death squads is familiar to anyone who followed the U.S. war against Nicaragua in the 1980s. What is the U.S. role, if any, in this latest emergence?

3. Reports come out now and again indicating that U.S. forces may have deliberately targeted journalists working in Iraq. True? Where are the journalists investigating this story?

4. Reports on the deliberate placing by U.S. forces of propaganda in the Iraqi media continue to come out, but details are hard to come by. The nation would be well-served by more investigation and detailed reporting on the nature of these operations.

5. I can’t, obviously, comment on the numerous things that remain completely unreported. That’s why it would be nice to have fewer U.S. journalists covering the Olympics and more hanging around in Iraq. More eyes means more things are seen. The need for media activism has never been greater. Let’s get to work.

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