In cold blood

THE BODY OF a victim of the Haditha massacre being carried to a truck. The human rights group that gave Reuters the video that contained this scene said the entire family had been shot dead by U.S. Marines. - HAMMURABI HUMAN RIGHTS /REUTERS

American journalists are callously silent on the civilian casualties of the war in Iraq.

ON December 12, 2005, President George W. Bush visited Philadelphia. At a gala event, a reporter had the nerve to ask: "Since the inception of the Iraqi war, I'd like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed. And by Iraqis I include civilians, military, police, insurgents, translators." Bush replied, "How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis." The journalist thanked him, and Bush continued, "I'll repeat the question. If I don't like it, I'll make it up." The guests and journalists laughed and burst into applause.

By July 2005, two Iraqi groups had documented far larger death tolls. Dr. Hatim Al-Alwani of Iraqiyun, a humanitarian group based in Baghdad, calculated 128,000 violent deaths since March 2003. The group only tallied those deaths that could be confirmed by relatives (the thousand who are missing were not added to this total). Between September and October 2003, an Iraqi political group (the People's Kifah) counted 37,000 deaths (its survey had been curtailed - a Kurdish militiaman captured one of the researchers).

In late 2004, the British medical journal The Lancet reported that "by conservative assumptions, we think about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq... . Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children." While the resistance also targeted innocent civilians, The Lancet argued, "eighty-four per cent of the deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces." On February 8, 2006, Les Roberts (the lead author of the The Lancet's report) said that the number of Iraqi civilian deaths had now risen to 300,000. According to the Baghdad-based journalist Dahr Jamail, "the Baghdad central morgue alone accounts for roughly 30,000 bodies annually." In mid-July, Dr. Liqa Makki, a former Baghdad University journalism professor, reported, "The director of the Forensic Medicine Department said publicly some months ago that his department was receiving 70 bodies a day. But he was reprimanded and a statement was published in the Iraqi press prohibiting the announcement of any kind of body count."

If Iraqi human rights organisations continue to bother the forensic workers at the morgues, the U.S. press followed the Iraqi prohibition to the letter. Rarely does the U.S. press report on Iraqi casualties, which is what made the question to Bush so remarkable. His joke reveals his callousness and the media silence tells us a little of the press release culture of contemporary journalism. Too many reporters have become stenographers of powerful institutions, unwilling to take on establishment wisdom.

In 1925, American writer H.L. Mencken wrote, "The charm of journalism, to many of its practitioners, lies in the contacts it gives them with the powerful and eminent. They enjoy communion with men of wealth, high officers of state, and other such magnificoes."

Iraq has been a dangerous assignment for reporters. Thus far, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, almost 100 reporters and support staff have been killed in the melee (including the alleged targeted assassination of journalists such as Al-Jazeera's Tareq Ayyoub and Telecinco's Jos Couso by U.S. forces). For protection, reporters remain embedded. This arrangement protects their lives but cements the bonds between them and the occupation forces. There are always a few reporters who doggedly get to the story, regardless of the overwhelming pressure to avoid reportage on civilian death or what is inconvenient to the powerful. When they do, however, the Bush administration has been quite strict about exercising its authority. On May 21, U.S. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales told the press that the government had the authority to prosecute journalists if their revelations compromised "national security". Lucy Daglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press responded on a national radio show: "I can't imagine a bigger chill on free speech and the public's right to know what its government is up to - both hallmarks of democracy - than prosecuting reporters."

One of the good journalists is Tim McGirk, who covered South Asia first for The Independent (United Kingdom) and then for Time magazine. After a brief period in Latin America, McGirk went to Iraq where he joined Aparisim Ghosh, Time's senior correspondent for the past three and a half years, on a landmark story. McGirk and Ghosh spent 10 weeks following up a story from the anti-occupation stronghold of Haditha and published their findings in the March 27 issue of Time magazine. Entitled "One Morning in Haditha," the story opens in November 19, 2005, when a roadside bomb strikes a U.S. Marine humvee. The Marines reported that the bomb killed one of their own and 15 Iraqi civilians (the latter by the blast and when "gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire").

The U.S. armed forces and media filed this story under normal and counted these deaths as the handiwork of the resistance. There is precedence for this, because on April 20, 2005, the resistance killed 19 Iraqi soldiers in the town and buried them in a stadium.

Shortly after the Marines' guns went silent, a roused community went to their Mayor, Emad Jawad Hamza. The Mayor led an angry delegation to the camp set up by Kilo Company (3rd Battalion, 1st Marines) beside the Euphrates river. A Marine captain met the citizens, and later Hamza told Time: "The captain admitted that his men had made a mistake. He said that his men thought there were terrorists near the houses, and he didn't give any other reason." It turns out that the bomb killed one Marine and enraged the others. Eyewitnesses say that the Marines dismounted from their vehicle, entered some homes on the streets and massacred innocent civilians.

A nine-year-old child, Eman Waleed, told Time that the Marines entered her family's living room. "I couldn't see their faces very well - only their guns sticking into the doorway. I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny." The Marines then shot at her and her eight-year-old brother. In another house, Ahmed Ayed recalls, "the Americans gathered my four brothers and took them inside my father's bedroom to a closet. They killed them inside the closet."

Time got this story because an intrepid Iraqi journalist student videotaped as much as possible from a local mosque. The tape was handed over to Hammurabi Human Rights, a local organisation that works with Human Rights Watch. They contacted Time, who conducted a rigorous investigation and turned over their findings to the U.S. Marine Corps.

The Marines sent an investigator to the city in February. He found the Time story plausible and the Naval Criminal Investigation Services began an inquiry, results of which are expected later this year. Three commanders have already been fired.

The story hit a wall of silence in the U.S. Journalists asked few questions, the politicians said nothing, with one exception. Representative John Murtha (Democrat, Pennsylvania) spent 37 years in the U.S. Marine Corps (including in Vietnam) and 30 years as the representative of his working-class district.

A well-known defender of the military, Murtha had surprised the country with his strong condemnation of the Iraq war last year. When the Haditha story broke, Murtha called a news conference on May 17. The Marines, Murtha said: "killed innocent civilians in cold blood. It is much worse than was reported in Time magazine."

Murtha's condemnation laid the blame elsewhere than on the Marines. "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them." Overstretched and over stressed, these Marines have already spent three tours of duty in Iraq. As the Occupation continues, and as the intensity of the resistance grows, the U.S. soldiers struggle. It is this pressure-cooker atmosphere, Murtha argued, that led to the My Lai-type massacre.

Tony Swindell, who served in Vietnam, wrote in Counterpunch, "Begin paying attention to stories from Iraq like the very recent one about U.S. Marines killing a group of civilians near Baghdad. This is the next step in the Iraq war as frustration among our soldiers grows - especially with multiple tours... . Our descent into hell has begun." Army Times and Marine Corps Times followed up the story, but the mainstream corporate media abjured it.

If the Lancet numbers are right, or if Bush is to be believed, then a per cent of the Iraqi population is no more. Either way, these are very large numbers and the social mayhem they have produced will lay waste to a generation or more. The U.S. population is gradually made numb to the statistics in the same way as the Indian population reacts to the numbers of those killed in disasters ("hundred dead as bus falls into ravine"). The killings "in cold blood" are perhaps more numerous than are being reported.

Behind the statistics of death and mayhem in Iraq lie a thousand stories. These are not reported largely because journalists are unwilling or unable to get to them. Even the Time team did not travel to Haditha. It remained in Baghdad, where survivors and human rights activists came to them.

The major news organisations now hire intrepid young Iraqis. Bessam Sebti, 26, is the reporter for The Washington Post. He recently reflected on his experiences for the Committee to Protect Journalists, "A few months after I joined the press corps, after I told these stories [of death and danger] every day over dinner, my parents begged me to quit. By then, it was too late. I am infected by this job. I believe that my country needs me and that journalism is a noble profession, a mirror in which people can see what is happening in their world. As Jackie Spinner, a friend and former Baghdad colleague, says in her book Tell Them I Didn't Cry, `We drive into hurricanes, not away from them.' Here, the hurricanes are bombs. We go toward them, warily, determinedly." Sebti brings the story, but who is going to publish it or read it?