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Respecting Military Service

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jhungary

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I wonder should military service of all nation should be respected? I get that some member here don't like a particular country, but saying the military service is all cold blooded murderer irrespective of the fact seems a bit insulting.

Comment like this

Only stupid like you will resort to these kind of comparisons ...

all those years quoted ...and the conflicts that took place were forced on India...India always carried itself with exemplary restraint ....

The chauvinist nationalist like you will never understand the difference ...

In 5000 years of its existence India never invaded any country , annexed any country , subjugated any country ...

while in its 400 years of existence US has waged thousands of battles , annexed countries after countries ...killed millions and millions innocents ....

Stupid trigger happy soldiers like you can't discuss the facts of the matter reasonably ....it is not your domain .

Sadist soldiers like you can be only good in aiming and shooting ....

Killing is only fun for you...have not we seen in that Apache attack helicopter video ...???

American soldiers are the worst kinds of ones ....

Other soldiers kill for their country...American soldiers kill for their fun ....

Nothing better can ever be expected from frustrated soldiers like you ....have not we seen what you have done to Iraqi prisoners ...

Photos of Abu gharib prison etc tell real truth about US and US soldiers ....You are just one of them !

So, did my grandfather join the Army and killing Nazi is for fun?

I can take he calling me a bigot or sadistic or stupid, but comment after comment like this


There you go ...after I have coaxed you ....you have confessed ultimately .

As you rightly said ....you are cold blooded murderer who won't mind killing young kid based on just suspicion ...

It is true that US soldiers are trigger happy. Don't we ?

Thanks to the Apache helicopter video leaked by Julian Assange ....we know how inhuman trigger happy US soldiers are .

they kill for mere fun ....they discern no difference between killing animals and killing innocent men , women and kids ...


You are no different than those terrorists who behead their captives alive ....!!!

Lol when I try to reason with him using my own experience, he then say I am a monster in human skin lol.

Seriously, I don't really mind he insult me, or my country, even I hate America sometime, but to say American Soldier are all trigger happy monster like people kill other for fun. Lol isn't it a bit much?

I mean this being defence forum and all
 
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I wonder should military service of all nation should be respected? I get that some member here don't like a particular country, but saying the military service is all cold blooded murderer irrespective of the fact seems a bit insulting.

Comment like this



So, did my grandfather join the Army and killing Nazi is for fun?

I can take he calling me a bigot or sadistic or stupid, but comment after comment like this




Lol when I try to reason with him using my own experience, he then say I am a monster in human skin lol.

Seriously, I don't really mind he insult me, or my country, even I hate America sometime, but to say American Soldier are all trigger happy monster like people kill other for fun. Lol isn't it a bit much?

I mean this being defence forum and all



You are putting words in my mouth . I had only responded to your assertion how you killed 12 year old kid just because he flagged your convoy ...in suspicion that he was directing you towards minefield ....


where did I condemn military service ....???


As far as trigger happy soldiers are concerned ....that remark was specifically related to Apache helicopter attack video ...where it was amply demonstrated how soldiers were killing civilians for fun ...sort of game !!!

and I am firm about my statements ....
 
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You are putting words in my mouth . I had only responded to your assertion how you killed 12 year old kid just because he flagged your convoy ...in suspicion that he was directing you towards minefield ....


where did I condemn military service ....???


As far as trigger happy soldiers are concerned ....that remark was specifically related to Apache helicopter attack video ...where it was amply demonstrated how soldiers were killing civilians for fun ...sort of game !!!

and I am firm about my statements ....

How about

Other soldiers kill for their country...American soldiers kill for their fun ....
And

Thanks to the Apache helicopter video leaked by Julian Assange ....we know how inhuman trigger happy US soldiers are .

they kill for mere fun ....they discern no difference between killing animals and killing innocent men , women and kids ...


So one video, and all American soldier are trigger happy?

Unless you can explain how that work, I stand by my comment

And I am not even talk about operational detail to people who never served

@WebMaster @Slav Defence @Aeronaut @jaibi
 
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Respecting Military service does not mean eulogizing extra constitutional killings ....

For your kind information.

The extra constitutional killings are prohibited and condemned in all militaries in civilized nations ....only caveat here is it talks about Civilized nations ...not Savage countries that we see bullying other countries around !!!

How about

Other soldiers kill for their country...American soldiers kill for their fun ....
And

Thanks to the Apache helicopter video leaked by Julian Assange ....we know how inhuman trigger happy US soldiers are .

they kill for mere fun ....they discern no difference between killing animals and killing innocent men , women and kids ...


So one video, and all American soldier are trigger happy?

Unless you can explain how that work, I stand by my comment

And I am not even talk about operational detail to people who never served

@WebMaster @Slav Defence @Aeronaut @jaibi


Apache Helicoper attack video is not the only instance ...there are several reports of extra constitutional killings by US soldiers ...

Apache helicopter one is one of the few that were leaked by Wikileaks ....
 
.
Respecting Military service does not mean eulogizing extra constitutional killings ....

For your kind information.

The extra constitutional killings are prohibited and condemned in all militaries in civilized nations ....only caveat here is it talks about Civilized nations ...not Savage countries that we see bullying other countries around !!!

Lol, you insult the whole service above and beyond the action created by some one

I saw news that some Indian soldier raped some one (I think it's an Air Force colonel) then can I say whole Indian Military is scat rapist?

Dude, that's call generalisation and by the way, the dude the apache crew killed were legit, AF control team found RPG7 and AK near the gun site.

Guess wiki leak forgot to tell you that?
 
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Obama's drone wars and the normalisation of extrajudicial murder | Michael Boyle | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Obama's drone wars and the normalisation of extrajudicial murder | Michael Boyle | Comment is free | theguardian.com


Obama's drone wars and the normalisation of extrajudicial murder
Executive privilege has seduced the president into a reckless 'kill first, ask questions later' policy that explodes the US constitution
A-Pakistani-protest-again-008.jpg

A Pakistani protest in June 2012, after two recent US drone strikes killed 12 people. Photograph: SS Mirza/AFP/Getty
In his first campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush administration's approach to terrorism – such as the use of torture, the rendition of terrorist suspects to CIA-run black sites around the globe, and the denial of basic legal rights to prisoners in Guantánamo – and to develop a counterterrorism policy that was consistent with the legal and moral tradition of the United States. In an address at the Woodrow Wilson Center in August 2007, Obama criticized the Bush administration for putting forward a "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand", and swore to provide "our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our constitution and our freedom".
As a candidate, Obama also promised to restore proper legislative and judicial oversight to counterterrorism operations. Rather than treat counterterrorism policy as an area of exception, operating without the normal safeguards that protect the rights of the accused, Obama promised that his approach "will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary."
Four years later, it is clear that President Obama has delivered a very different counterterrorism policy from that which he promised on the campaign trail. (Full disclosure: I was an adviser on the Obama campaign's counterterrorism expert group from July 2007-November 2008.) In fairness, he has delivered on a few of his promises, including closing the CIA-run "black site" prisons abroad and ordering that interrogations of all suspects be conducted according to the US army field manual, which proscribes many of the tactics widely considered torture. And some failures were not wholly his own: Obama's inability to close Guantánamo Bay was due more to congressional opposition and to an array of legal obstacles than to his own lack of initiative.
Yet, contrary to his campaign promises, Obama has left most of the foundations of Bush's counterterrorism approach intact, including its presumption of executive privilege, its tolerance of indefinite detention in Guantánamo and elsewhere and its refusal to grant prisoners in America's jails abroad habeas corpus rights. While the language of the "war on terror" has been dropped, the mindset of the Bush approach – that America is forever at war, constantly on the offensive to kill "bad guys" before they get to the United States – has crept into this administration and been translated into policy in new and dangerous ways.
This fact is clearly demonstrated in a recent New York Times article, which details how President Obama has become personally involved in an elaborate internal process by which his administration decides who will be the next victim of America's drone strikes. The article itself – clearly written with the cooperation of the administration, as the writers had unprecedented access to three dozen counterterrorism advisers – was designed to showcase Obama as a warrior president, thoughtfully wrestling with the moral issues involved in drone strikes, but forceful enough to pull the trigger when needed.
What it instead revealed was that the president has routinized and normalized extrajudicial killing from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America's temporary advantage in drone technology to wage a series of shadow wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Without the scrutiny of the legislature and the courts, and outside the public eye, Obama is authorizing murder on a weekly basis, with a discussion of the guilt or innocence of candidates for the "kill list" being resolved in secret on "Terror Tuesday" teleconferences with administration officials and intelligence officials.
The creation of this "kill list" – as well as the dramatic escalation in drone strikes, which have now killed at least 2,400 people in Pakistan alone, since 2004 – represents a betrayal of President Obama's promise to make counterterrorism policies consistent with the US constitution. As Charles Pierce has noted, there is nothing in the constitution that allows the president to wage a private war on individuals outside the authorization of Congress.
The spirit of the constitution was quite the opposite: all of the founders were concerned, in varying degrees, with the risk of allowing the president to exercise too much discretion when declaring war or using force abroad. For this reason, the constitution explicitly grants the right to declare war to the Congress in order to restrain the president from chasing enemies around the world based solely on his authority as commander-in-chief. The founders would be horrified, not comforted, to know that the president has implicated himself in the killing of foreign nationals in states against which the Congress has not passed a declaration of war.
Beyond bypassing the constitution and the War Powers Act, the Obama administration has also adopted a dangerously broad interpretation of the legal right to use drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad. According to his counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, the legal authority for the drone strikes derives from the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by the Congress in September 2001 to authorize the attack on Afghanistan. He notes that there is "nothing in the AUMF that restricts the use of military force against al-Qa'ida to Afghanistan".
This interpretation treats the AUMF as a warrant to allow the president to use force against anyone at any time in a war without a defined endpoint.
Together with the bland assertion that the US has the right to self-defense against al-Qaida under international law, these legal arguments have enabled the president to expand drone operations against terrorist organizations to Yemen and Somalia, as well as to escalate the campaign against militant networks in Pakistan. To date, Obama has launched 278 drone strikes against targets in Pakistan. The use of drone strikes is now so commonplace that some critics have begun to wonder if the administration has adopted a "kill, not capture" policy, forsaking the intelligence gains of capturing suspects for an approach that leaves no one alive to pose a threat.
This vast, expansive interpretation of executive power to enable drone wars conducted in secret around the globe has also set dangerous precedent, which the administration has not realized or acknowledged. Once Obama leaves office, there is nothing stopping the next president from launching his own drone strikes, perhaps against a different and more controversial array of targets. The infrastructure and processes of vetting the "kill list" will remain in place for the next president, who may be less mindful of moral and legal implications of this action than Obama supposedly is.
For those Democrats who are comforted by the fact that Obama has the final say in authorizing drone strikes and so refuse to criticize the administration, ask yourself: would you be as comfortable if the next decision on who is killed by a drone was left to President Romney, or President Palin?
Also in contravention of his campaign promises, the Obama administration has worked to expand its power of the executive and to resist oversight from the other branches of government. While candidate Obama insisted that even terrorist suspects deserved their due process rights and a chance to defend themselves in some kind of a court, his administration has now concluded that a review of the evidence by the executive branch itself – even merely a hasty discussion during one of the "Terror Tuesdays" – is equivalent to granting a terrorist suspect due process rights. With little fanfare, it has also concluded that American citizens may now be killed abroad without access to a "judicial process".
As the complexity and consequences of the drone strikes have grown, the administration has insisted that it alone should be trusted with the decision about when drone strikes are permitted, and consequently provides only the bare minimum of information to congressional oversight committees about drone activities.
What is also striking about Obama's embrace of drones and targeted killings is that he – who, during his 2008 campaign, displayed awareness that America's reckless actions abroad were damaging to its long-term interests – has become so indifferent to civilian casualties. According to statistics compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, at least 551 civilians have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, though the figure could be much higher. Yet, the Obama administration has consistently argued that almost no civilians are killed in these strikes, despite independent assessments that put the number of civilians killed as much higher.
This claim is only possible because the administration has engaged in an Orwellian contortion of language, which assumes that anyone in the area of a drone strike must be "up to no good" and therefore a militant. This assumption of guilt by association, and the grotesque misuse of definitions to cover up the deaths of innocents, including children, has allowed the administration to inflate the number of successful "hits" it has, while playing down the number of civilian casualties.
Now emboldened by this apparent success and the lack of an outcry over deaths caused by drone strikes, the administration is proposing to loosen the standards for targeting in Yemen even further by approving so-called "signature strikes", in which attacks are launched on patterns of behavior rather than the known presence of a terrorist operative. These signature strikes are almost guaranteed to increase the number of civilian casualties, as they are far more likely to catch innocent people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The drone strikes are portrayed by the administration as successful because they are able to take out high-ranking terrorist operatives, such as Abu Yahya al-Libi . But such a portrayal conflates a tactical victory (killing one al-Qaida commander) with a strategic success (that is, dampening the growth of extremist movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan). It also rarely looks at the other side of the ledger and asks whether the drone strikes have jeopardized the stability of the governments of Pakistan and Yemen, possibly risking more chaos if they are overthrown.
During his first presidential campaign, Obama promised to control counterterrorism operations and to put them in their proper place as one piece of a wider set of relationships with other governments. But he has done the opposite, allowing short-term tactical victories against terrorist networks to overwhelm America's wider strategic priorities and leave its relations with key governments in a parlous state. His embrace of drones and his willingness to shoot first may also be policies that the US comes to regret when its rivals, such as China begin to develop and use their own drones.
Beyond simply failing to live up to campaign promises, the real tragedy of Obama's counterterrorism policy is that he has squandered an unprecedented opportunity to redefine the struggle against al-Qaida in a way that moves decisively beyond the Bush administration's mindset. Instead, he has provided another iteration of that approach, with a level of cold-blooded ruthlessness and a contempt for the constitutional limits imposed on executive power that rivals his predecessor.
Instead of restoring counterterrorism to its proper place among America's other foreign policy priorities, President Obama has been seduced by political expediency and the lure of new technology into adopting a policy that kills first and asks questions later. He may succeed in crippling al-Qaida and preventing some attacks today, but it is now harder than ever to believe that a young child in Pakistan hearing the whirring noises of drones above them will look up and see Obama's America as "the relentless opponent of terror and tyranny, and the light of hope to the world".

Lol, you insult the whole service above and beyond the action created by some one

I saw news that some Indian soldier raped some one (I think it's an Air Force colonel) then can I say whole Indian Military is scat rapist?

Dude, that's call generalisation and by the way, the dude the apache crew killed were legit, AF control team found RPG7 and AK near the gun site.

Guess wiki leak forgot to tell you that?

If Apache helicopter killing was legitimate then why US government try to suppress vedio ???


Lol, you insult the whole service above and beyond the action created by some one

I saw news that some Indian soldier raped some one (I think it's an Air Force colonel) then can I say whole Indian Military is scat rapist?

Dude, that's call generalisation and by the way, the dude the apache crew killed were legit, AF control team found RPG7 and AK near the gun site.

Guess wiki leak forgot to tell you that?


Respecting Military service does not mean eulogizing extra constitutional killings ....

For your kind information.

The extra constitutional killings are prohibited and condemned in all militaries in civilized nations ....only caveat here is it talks about Civilized nations ...not Savage countries that we see bullying other countries around !!!




Apache Helicoper attack video is not the only instance ...there are several reports of extra constitutional killings by US soldiers ...

Apache helicopter one is one of the few that were leaked by Wikileaks ....



Iraq Body Count project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Iraq Body Count project (IBC) is a web-based effort to record civilian deaths resulting from the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Included are deaths attributable to coalition and insurgent military action, sectarian violence and criminal violence, which refers to excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion. As of December 2012, the IBC has recorded 110,937-121,227 civilian deaths. The IBC has a media-centered approach to counting and documenting the deaths. Other sources have provided differing estimates of deaths, some much higher. See Casualties of the Iraq War.
The project uses reports from English-language news media (including Arabic media translated into English), NGO-based reports, and official records that have been released into the public sphere to compile a running total.[2] On its database page the IBC states: "Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence."[3] The group is staffed by volunteers consisting mainly of academics and activists based in the UK and the US. The project was founded by John Sloboda and Hamit Dardagan.
According to Jonathan Steele, writing in The Guardian, IBC "is widely considered as the most reliable database of Iraqi civilian deaths".[4] But some researchers regard it at best as a floor, or baseline for mortality, and that it underestimates actual mortality by potentially several factors.[5]
Contents
[hide]
Project statement[edit]
The IBC overview page states:
"This is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies. The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion."[1]
The project quotes the top US general in Iraq, Tommy Franks, as saying "We don't do body counts [3]". The quotation was from a discussion of the Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan and was referring to counts of enemy soldiers killed, in the context of using enemy body counts as a measure of military success. The website, which omits the context of the quote, could be said to conflate the meaning of "enemy body count" with "civilian deaths caused" and to imply that the US is not interested in the number of civilian deaths its military operations cause.
Biographical information of group members is shown on the group's website.[4]
Method[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Deaths in the database are derived from a comprehensive survey of commercial media and NGO-based reports, along with official records that have been released into the public sphere. Reports range from specific, incident based accounts to figures from hospitals, morgues, and other documentary data-gathering agencies."[6]
Project volunteers sample news stories to extract minimum and maximum numbers of civilian casualties. Each incident reported at least by two independent news sources is included in the Iraq Body Count database. In December 2007, IBC announced that they would begin to include deaths reported by one source, and that they number of deaths provided by such reports would be openly tracked on its database page.[7] Between 3.3 and 3.5 percent of deaths recorded by IBC are currently listed on the database page as derived from a single source.
IBC is purely a civilian count. IBC defines civilian to exclude Iraqi soldiers, insurgents, suicide bombers or any others directly engaged in war-related violence. A "min" and "max" figure are used where reports differ on the numbers killed, or where the civilian status of the dead is uncertain.
IBC is not an "estimate" of total civilian deaths based on projections or other forms of extrapolation. It is a compilation of documented deaths, as reported by English-language media worldwide. See the sources section farther down for more info on the media and their sources.
Some[who?] have suggested bias of sources could affect the count. If a number is quoted from a pro-Iraqi source, and the Allies fail to give a sufficiently specific alternate number, the pro-Iraqi figure is entered into IBC's database as both a maximum and a minimum. The same works vice versa. The project argues that these potential over- and undercounts by different media sources would tend to balance out.[citation needed]
IBC's online database shows the newspaper, magazine or website where each number is reported, and the date on which it was reported. However, this has been criticized as insufficient because it typically does not list the original sources for the information: that is, the NGO, journalist or government responsible for the number presented. Hence, any inherent bias due to the lack of reliable reports from independent or Allied sources is not readily available to the reader.
Sources[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Our sources include public domain newsgathering agencies with web access. A list of some core sources is given below. ... For a source to be considered acceptable to this project it must comply with the following standards: (1) site updated at least daily; (2) all stories separately archived on the site, with a unique url (see Note 1 below); (3) source widely cited or referenced by other sources; (4) English Language site; (5) fully public (preferably free) web-access. ... Note 1. Some sites remove items after a given time period, change their urls, or place them in archives with inadequate search engines. For this reason it is project policy that urls of sources are NOT published on the iraqbodycount site."[1]
Primary sources used by the media are listed in the 2003 to 2005 IBC report. The sources are followed by the number of deaths reported from that source.
  • Mortuaries. 8,913
  • Medics. 4,846
  • Iraqi officials. 4,376
  • Eyewitnesses. 3,794
  • Police. 3,588
  • Relatives. 2,780
  • US-Coalition. 2,423
  • Journalists. 1,976
  • NGOs. 732
  • Friends/Associates. 596
  • Other. 196
Web counters[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Results and totals are continually updated and made immediately available here and on various IBC web counters which may be freely displayed on any website or homepage, where they are automatically updated without further intervention."[1]
Body count[edit]
Deaths in the Iraq war:
DateMinMax
9 April 20039961,174
10 August 20036,0877,798
25 April 20048,91810,769
12 September 200411,79713,806
12 March 200516,23118,510
6 December 200527,35430,863
28 June 200638,72543,140
2 October 200643,54648,343
1 March 200757,48263,421
5 August 200768,34774,753
2 May 200883,33690,897
24 October 201098,585107,594
12 January 2012104,594114,260
The figures above are those that appeared in real time on the IBC counters on or around those dates. However, those in the first line were increased radically in the following days and weeks. IBC's current Max figure for the entire invasion phase, up to 30 April 2003, now stands at 7,299. Because IBC performs analyses (e.g., accounts for multiple reports, eliminates overlaps, etc.), there is always a delay between the date on which incidents occur and the addition of their numbers to the IBC database. Another factor is that some reports emerge weeks or even months later - for instance the emergence of Baghdad city morgue reports for 2005 in early 2006. The 6 December line above was taken from the IBC total as it stood on 6 December 2005, but the emergence of the morgue figures later increased IBC's figures for that period to 31,818 - 35,747.
2006[edit]
The Iraq Body Count project states for the week ending 31 December 2006:[8][9] "It was a truly violent year, as around 24,000 civilians lost their lives in Iraq. This was a massive rise in violence: 14,000 had been killed in 2005, 10,500 in 2004 and just under 12,000 in 2003 (7,000 of them killed during the actual war, while only 5,000 killed during the ‘peace’ that followed in May 2003). In December 2006 alone around 2,800 civilians were reported killed. This week there were over 560 civilian deaths reported."
From the above quote here are IBC yearly death totals (not counting the initial 7000 invasion deaths):
  • 2003: 5,000
  • 2004: 10,500
  • 2005: 14,000
  • 2006: 24,000
March 2003 to March 2005 report[edit]
The IBC released a report detailing the civilian deaths it had recorded between 20 March 2003 and 19 March 2005.[10] From page 26: "The analyses in this dossier cover the first two years of the military intervention in Iraq from 20 March 2003 to 19 March 2005, and are based on data which was available by 14 June 2005."
The report says the US and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attributed to anti-occupation forces (9%), crime (36%), and unknown agents (11%).
Who did the killing?
  • 37%. US-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.
  • 9%. Anti-occupation forces/insurgents killed 9% of civilian victims.
  • 36%. Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.
  • 11%. Unknown agents (11%).
Killings by anti-occupation forces, crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period.
Who was killed?
  • 24,865 civilians were reported killed in the first two years.
  • Men accounted for over 80% of all civilian deaths.
  • Baghdad alone recorded almost half of all deaths.
When did they die?
  • 30% of civilian deaths occurred during the invasion phase before 1 May 2003.
  • Post-invasion, the number of civilians killed was almost twice as high in year two (11,351) as in year one (6,215).
What was the most lethal weaponry?
  • Over half (53%) of all civilian deaths involved explosive devices.
  • Air strikes caused most (64%) of the explosives deaths.
  • Children were disproportionately affected by all explosive devices but most severely by air strikes and unexploded ordnance (including cluster bomblets).
How many were injured?
  • At least 42,500 civilians were reported wounded.
  • The invasion phase caused 41% of all reported injuries.
  • Explosive weaponry caused a higher ratio of injuries to deaths than small arms.
  • The highest wounded-to-death ratio incidents occurred during the invasion phase.
Iraq War Logs[edit]
In October 2010, the group WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs, a set of nearly 400,000 classified US military documents on the Iraq war. IBC was among several media organizations and NGO's given pre-release access to the documents, and IBC co-founder John Sloboda delivered a speech at the press conference for the release by WikiLeaks.[11]
IBC published three pieces on their website detailing their analysis of the war logs.[12][13][14] Among the main findings were that the war logs, "contain an estimated 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths," and that addition of the new material would suggest that, "over 150,000 violent deaths have been recorded since March 2003, with more than 122,000 (80%) of them civilian."
Academic publications[edit]
Between 2009 and 2011, IBC published three papers in peer reviewed academic journals, co-authored with researchers from King’s College London and Royal Holloway, University of London. Each paper uses IBC data to evaluate different aspects of civilian casualties during the war.
The first paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, 2009, analyses civilian deaths between 2003 and 2008 according to weapon types used. Among the findings were that, "execution after abduction or capture was the single most common form of death overall," and that, "events involving air attacks and mortar fire were the most dangerous" to Iraqi females and children.[15]
The second paper, published in PLoS Medicine in February, 2011, analyses civilian deaths between 2003 and 2008 according to perpetrator, weapon, time, and location. The paper found that most deaths during the period were, "inflicted by unknown perpetrators, primarily through extrajudicial executions." The paper also utilized what the authors refer to as the "Dirty War Index" which evaluates the behavior of different perpetrators or weapon types in terms of the proportion of women and children killed, with higher DWI ratios suggesting tactics or weapons that are more indiscriminate toward civilians. The study found that unknown perpetrators firing mortars had the highest DWI ratio, followed by Coalition Forces air attacks, leading the authors to advise that such weapons should not be used in populated areas.[16]
The third paper, published in September, 2011, in a special edition of The Lancet for the 10 year anniversary of the September 11 attacks of 2001, focused on casualties of both civilians and Coalition soldiers specifically by suicide bomb attacks in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. This paper found that there had been at least 12,284 Iraqi civilians and 200 Coalition soldiers killed in at least 1,003 suicide bombings during the period. The study also found that these bombings had "injured no fewer than 30,644 Iraqi civilians," and that, "children are less likely to survive their suicide bomb injuries than adults."[17]
Criticisms and counter-criticisms[edit]
The IBC has been the most often cited source on civilian deaths in Iraq,[18] but it has also received criticism from many sides. Some critics have focused on potential bias of sources. Others have raised concerns about the difficulty of distinguishing civilians from combatants. Others have criticized it for over or undercounting.
Some critics, often on the political right, claimed that the IBC numbers were an overcount, and that the numbers were suspect due to the antiwar bias of the IBC members. For example; the 26 July 2005 National Review article, "Bad Counts. An unquestioning media."[19]
Others, often on the political left, criticized media and government willingness to quote IBC figures more approvingly than the much higher estimate coming from the Lancet study[20] that came out in October 2004.
Journalists included Lila Guterman,[21][22] Andrew Cockburn,[23] John Pilger, and George Monbiot[24]
In a 27 January 2005 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education Lila Guterman wrote:
"The Lancet released the paper on October 29, the Friday before the election, when many reporters were busy with political coverage. That day, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune each dedicated only about 400 words to the study and placed the articles inside their front sections, on Pages A4 and A11, respectively. (The news media in Europe gave the study much more play; many newspapers put articles about it on their front pages.) In a short article about the study on Page A8, The New York Times noted that the Iraq Body Count, a project to tally civilian deaths reported in the news media, had put the maximum death toll at around 17,000. The new study, the article said, 'is certain to generate intense controversy.' But the Times has not published any further news articles about the paper."
In late 2005 and early 2006 some on the left began criticizing IBC itself. This criticism of IBC came mainly from the British website Media Lens which published four pieces[18][25][26][27] on what they saw as the "massive bias and gaps" reflected in the IBC database and their totals. David Edwards of Media Lens also wrote for other websites.[28]
This view of IBC was based on the belief that IBC figures are extremely low due to pro-US media bias and inadequate reporting due to its heavy (though not exclusive) reliance on Western media sources, which has led some of these critics to claim IBC should be called the "Iraq Western Media Body Count". These biases and inadequacies, they claim, mean IBC's count is low by up to a factor of 10, and that it specifically minimizes the proportion of deaths caused by US forces.
Media Lens, 26 January 2006[25] states: "First, the dramatic absence of examples of mass killing by US-UK forces suggests that the low IBC toll of civilian deaths in comparison with other studies is partly explained by the fact that examples of US-UK killing are simply not being reported by the media or recorded by IBC. Visitors to the site - directed there by countless references in the same media that have acted as sources - are being given a very one-sided picture of who is doing the killing."
Stephen Soldz wrote a 5 February 2006 article titled "When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths".[29] It stated: "Of course, in conditions of active rebellion, the safer areas accessible to Western reporters are likely to be those under US/Coalition control, where deaths are, in turn, likely to be due to insurgent attacks. Areas of insurgent control, which are likely to be subject to US and Iraqi government attack, for example most of Anbar province, are simply off-limits to these reporters. Thus, the realities of reporting imply that reporters will be witness to a larger fraction of deaths due to insurgents and a lesser proportion of deaths due to US and Iraqi government forces."
A further claim has been that IBC does little or nothing to correct misuse of their figures by public officials or media organizations. It is claimed that the media often misuse IBC's estimate of the total number dead. It is also claimed that the media use the IBC's estimate in order to ignore or downplay the October 2004 excess mortality study published in the Lancet Medical Journal, which estimated a far higher figure. Critics of IBC argue that the Lancet study is the most accurate estimate so far and is more reliable than IBC's estimate.
The 26 January 2006 Media Lens article[25] stated: "We accept that the IBC editors are sincere and well-intentioned. We accept, also, that they have often made clear that their figures are likely to be an underestimate. But we believe they could have done much more to challenge the cynical exploitation of their figures by journalists and politicians. And they could have done much more to warn visitors to their site of the number and type of gaps in their database."
Other criticism of various kinds came from journalists Stephen Soldz,[29] Dahr Jamail,[30] and Jeff Pflueger[30]
In April 2006 IBC published a lengthy response to their critics entitled "Speculation is no substitute: a defence of Iraq Body Count".[31] In their reply, IBC argues that their critics have several key facts wrong. IBC argues that while their estimate is likely to be below the full toll, their critics' errors have led the critics to exaggerate the likely extent of such an undercount. Finally, IBC argues, the available evidence does not support their critics' claims of a pro-US bias infecting the IBC database.
English-language versus Arabic-language media sources[edit]
The IBC report for March 2003 to March 2005[10] states: "We have not made use of Arabic or other non English language sources, except where these have been published in English. The reasons are pragmatic. We consider fluency in the language of the published report to be a key requirement for accurate analysis, and English is the only language in which all team members are fluent. It is possible that our count has excluded some victims as a result."
Independent journalist Dahr Jamail spent over eight months reporting from occupied Iraq. In a 15 January 2006 email quoted in a 26 January 2006 Media Lens article[25] he wrote: "Due to their [IBC] sources and lack of adequate Arab media in them (who do a much better job of reporting Iraqi civilian casualty counts), it is heavily biased towards western outlets which have from the beginning done a dismal (at best) job of reporting on the air war and consequent civ. casualties."
Stephen Soldz, who runs the website "Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report", writes in a 5 February 2006 ZNet article[29] (in reference to the 2003-2005 IBC report[10]): "Given, as indicated in that report, that ten media outlets provided over half the IBC reports and three agencies [Associated Press, Agence France Presse, and Reuters] provided over a third of the reports, there is simply no reason to believe that even a large fraction of Iraqi civilian combat-related deaths are ever reported in the Western media, much less, have the two independent reports necessary to be recorded in the IBC database. Do these few agencies really have enough Iraqi reporters on retainer to cover the country? Are these reporters really able comprehensively to cover deaths in insurgent-held parts of Iraq? How likely is it that two reporters from distinct media outlets are going to be present at a given site where deaths occur? How many of the thousands of US bombings have been investigated by any reporter, Western or Iraqi? Simply to state these questions is to emphasize the fragmentary nature of the reporting that occurs and thus the limitations of the IBC database."
In an 28 April 2006 BBC Newsnight interview[32] the IBC project's co-founder John Sloboda, in response to these and similar arguments, has said: "we have never had over the entire three years, anyone show us an Arabic source that reports deaths that we haven't already got. In three years. In thousands of incidents. There are organisations that translate Arabic reports into English, and we see their data."
IBC monitors many Arabic sources that either publish in English as well as Arabic, or are translated by other sources. Some of these include:
Al Arabiya TV, Al-Furat, Al-Ittihad, Al Jazeera (Web), Al Jazeera TV, Al Sharqiyah TV, Al-Taakhi, Al-Bawaba, Arab News, Arabic News, Asharq Al Awsat, As-Sabah, Arab Times, Bahrain News Agency, Bahrain Times.[33]
Undercounting[edit]
The IBC acknowledges on its website that its count is bound to be low due to limitations in reporting stating; "many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war." IBC's critics claim, though, that the IBC does not do enough to indicate what they believe is the full extent of the undercounting.[18][25][26][27][29][30] IBC has directly disputed these claims in a lengthy document on its website, in particular concentrating on what they see as a campaign against them from Media Lens among others.[31]
One criticism of IBC's method, from MIT's John Tirman, a Principal Research Scientist, is that the "surveillance instrument" - the news media - is changing all the time: media organizations add or (more likely) subtract reporters from the field, which was happening in Iraq; reporters were largely confined to Baghdad during the worst violence; and reporters tended to write about spectacular events, like car bombs, when much of the violence was in the form revenge killings throughout Iraq. "As a result, this technique of totaling up the dead is incapable of accounting for the deaths that were not being recorded, whether by the English-language news media or the chaotic health care system." IBC itself radically changed its method in the middle of the war, switching from two references to one reference in the news media.[34]
The October 2006 Lancet study states: "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods."[35][36]
In an April 2006 article the IBC had described an example comparing itself to the 2004 United Nations Development Programme Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS).[37][38] The Lancet report uses the population estimates drawn from the ILCS study, while not mentioning its estimate of war-related deaths. IBC contends that ILCS is a more reliable indicator of violent deaths than the Lancet study, and suggests a much lower number than the Lancet study.
However, a supplement to the Lancet study published separately by its authors, as well as subsequent interviews with one of Lancet's authors have disputed the methodology and results of the ILCS study. On the other hand Jon Pedersen, author of the ILCS study, has disputed the methodology and results of the Lancet study. For more info on this controversy see the sections titled "Criticisms" and "UNDP ILCS study compared to Lancet study" in Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties.
The 2006 Lancet study[35] also states: "In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates. Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5% in years of highest violence."
The Lancet reference used is to Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer and their 1999 book, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection.[39] From the introduction: "The CIIDH database consists of cases culled from direct testimonies and documentary and press sources."
Chapter 10[40] elaborates, saying that "In the CIIDH project, participating popular organizations collected many of the testimonies long after the time of the killings, when people were less clear about details, especially the identities of all the victims." And says, "Typically, during the collection of testimonies, a surviving witness might provide the names of one or two victims, perhaps close relatives, while estimating the number of other neighbors in the community without giving their names."
They report in chapter 7:[41]
"Figure 7.1 shows that in the CIIDH database, most of the information for human rights violations prior to 1977 comes from press sources. ... Approximately 10,890 cases were coded from the newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the press cases were taken from Prensa Libre, 10 percent from El Gráfico, 8 percent from La Hora and El Impacto respectively, and 6 percent from El Imparcial. The remaining 5 percent is made up by eight other newspapers."
But also in chapter 7 they reported that in later, more violent years:
"When the level of violence increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numbers of reported violations in the press stayed very low. In 1981, one of the worst years of state violence, the numbers fall towards zero. The press reported almost none of the rural violence."
There is a list[42] of figures, tables, and charts in the book that can be used to calculate what percentage of their cases of killings by state forces were reported by 13 Guatemalan newspapers for each year when compared to the testimonies of witnesses (as previously described from chapter 10[40]).
In a 7 November 2004 press release[43] concerning the October 2004 Lancet study[20] the IBC states: "We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording".
One of the sources used by the media are morgues. Only the central Baghdad area morgue has released figures consistently. While that is the largest morgue in Iraq and in what is often claimed to be the most consistently violent area, the absence of comprehensive morgue figures elsewhere leads to undercounting. IBC makes it clear that, due to these issues, its count will almost certainly be below the full toll in its 'Quick FAQ' on its homepage.
Quote from an IBC note:[44] "The Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate for x350, like that for x334, was made possible by examination of the detailed data supplied to the Associated Press (AP) by the morgues surveyed in AP's 23 May 2004 survey of Iraqi morgues."
That 23 May 2004 Associated Press article[45] points out the lack of morgue data from many areas of Iraq. Also, it states: "The [Baghdad] figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families. Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues."

Respecting Military service does not mean eulogizing extra constitutional killings ....

For your kind information.

The extra constitutional killings are prohibited and condemned in all militaries in civilized nations ....only caveat here is it talks about Civilized nations ...not Savage countries that we see bullying other countries around !!!




Apache Helicoper attack video is not the only instance ...there are several reports of extra constitutional killings by US soldiers ...

Apache helicopter one is one of the few that were leaked by Wikileaks ....



Iraq Body Count project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Iraq Body Count project (IBC) is a web-based effort to record civilian deaths resulting from the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Included are deaths attributable to coalition and insurgent military action, sectarian violence and criminal violence, which refers to excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion. As of December 2012, the IBC has recorded 110,937-121,227 civilian deaths. The IBC has a media-centered approach to counting and documenting the deaths. Other sources have provided differing estimates of deaths, some much higher. See Casualties of the Iraq War.
The project uses reports from English-language news media (including Arabic media translated into English), NGO-based reports, and official records that have been released into the public sphere to compile a running total.[2] On its database page the IBC states: "Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence."[3] The group is staffed by volunteers consisting mainly of academics and activists based in the UK and the US. The project was founded by John Sloboda and Hamit Dardagan.
According to Jonathan Steele, writing in The Guardian, IBC "is widely considered as the most reliable database of Iraqi civilian deaths".[4] But some researchers regard it at best as a floor, or baseline for mortality, and that it underestimates actual mortality by potentially several factors.[5]
Contents
[hide]
Project statement[edit]
The IBC overview page states:
"This is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies. The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion."[1]
The project quotes the top US general in Iraq, Tommy Franks, as saying "We don't do body counts [3]". The quotation was from a discussion of the Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan and was referring to counts of enemy soldiers killed, in the context of using enemy body counts as a measure of military success. The website, which omits the context of the quote, could be said to conflate the meaning of "enemy body count" with "civilian deaths caused" and to imply that the US is not interested in the number of civilian deaths its military operations cause.
Biographical information of group members is shown on the group's website.[4]
Method[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Deaths in the database are derived from a comprehensive survey of commercial media and NGO-based reports, along with official records that have been released into the public sphere. Reports range from specific, incident based accounts to figures from hospitals, morgues, and other documentary data-gathering agencies."[6]
Project volunteers sample news stories to extract minimum and maximum numbers of civilian casualties. Each incident reported at least by two independent news sources is included in the Iraq Body Count database. In December 2007, IBC announced that they would begin to include deaths reported by one source, and that they number of deaths provided by such reports would be openly tracked on its database page.[7] Between 3.3 and 3.5 percent of deaths recorded by IBC are currently listed on the database page as derived from a single source.
IBC is purely a civilian count. IBC defines civilian to exclude Iraqi soldiers, insurgents, suicide bombers or any others directly engaged in war-related violence. A "min" and "max" figure are used where reports differ on the numbers killed, or where the civilian status of the dead is uncertain.
IBC is not an "estimate" of total civilian deaths based on projections or other forms of extrapolation. It is a compilation of documented deaths, as reported by English-language media worldwide. See the sources section farther down for more info on the media and their sources.
Some[who?] have suggested bias of sources could affect the count. If a number is quoted from a pro-Iraqi source, and the Allies fail to give a sufficiently specific alternate number, the pro-Iraqi figure is entered into IBC's database as both a maximum and a minimum. The same works vice versa. The project argues that these potential over- and undercounts by different media sources would tend to balance out.[citation needed]
IBC's online database shows the newspaper, magazine or website where each number is reported, and the date on which it was reported. However, this has been criticized as insufficient because it typically does not list the original sources for the information: that is, the NGO, journalist or government responsible for the number presented. Hence, any inherent bias due to the lack of reliable reports from independent or Allied sources is not readily available to the reader.
Sources[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Our sources include public domain newsgathering agencies with web access. A list of some core sources is given below. ... For a source to be considered acceptable to this project it must comply with the following standards: (1) site updated at least daily; (2) all stories separately archived on the site, with a unique url (see Note 1 below); (3) source widely cited or referenced by other sources; (4) English Language site; (5) fully public (preferably free) web-access. ... Note 1. Some sites remove items after a given time period, change their urls, or place them in archives with inadequate search engines. For this reason it is project policy that urls of sources are NOT published on the iraqbodycount site."[1]
Primary sources used by the media are listed in the 2003 to 2005 IBC report. The sources are followed by the number of deaths reported from that source.
  • Mortuaries. 8,913
  • Medics. 4,846
  • Iraqi officials. 4,376
  • Eyewitnesses. 3,794
  • Police. 3,588
  • Relatives. 2,780
  • US-Coalition. 2,423
  • Journalists. 1,976
  • NGOs. 732
  • Friends/Associates. 596
  • Other. 196
Web counters[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Results and totals are continually updated and made immediately available here and on various IBC web counters which may be freely displayed on any website or homepage, where they are automatically updated without further intervention."[1]
Body count[edit]
Deaths in the Iraq war:
DateMinMax
9 April 20039961,174
10 August 20036,0877,798
25 April 20048,91810,769
12 September 200411,79713,806
12 March 200516,23118,510
6 December 200527,35430,863
28 June 200638,72543,140
2 October 200643,54648,343
1 March 200757,48263,421
5 August 200768,34774,753
2 May 200883,33690,897
24 October 201098,585107,594
12 January 2012104,594114,260
The figures above are those that appeared in real time on the IBC counters on or around those dates. However, those in the first line were increased radically in the following days and weeks. IBC's current Max figure for the entire invasion phase, up to 30 April 2003, now stands at 7,299. Because IBC performs analyses (e.g., accounts for multiple reports, eliminates overlaps, etc.), there is always a delay between the date on which incidents occur and the addition of their numbers to the IBC database. Another factor is that some reports emerge weeks or even months later - for instance the emergence of Baghdad city morgue reports for 2005 in early 2006. The 6 December line above was taken from the IBC total as it stood on 6 December 2005, but the emergence of the morgue figures later increased IBC's figures for that period to 31,818 - 35,747.
2006[edit]
The Iraq Body Count project states for the week ending 31 December 2006:[8][9] "It was a truly violent year, as around 24,000 civilians lost their lives in Iraq. This was a massive rise in violence: 14,000 had been killed in 2005, 10,500 in 2004 and just under 12,000 in 2003 (7,000 of them killed during the actual war, while only 5,000 killed during the ‘peace’ that followed in May 2003). In December 2006 alone around 2,800 civilians were reported killed. This week there were over 560 civilian deaths reported."
From the above quote here are IBC yearly death totals (not counting the initial 7000 invasion deaths):
  • 2003: 5,000
  • 2004: 10,500
  • 2005: 14,000
  • 2006: 24,000
March 2003 to March 2005 report[edit]
The IBC released a report detailing the civilian deaths it had recorded between 20 March 2003 and 19 March 2005.[10] From page 26: "The analyses in this dossier cover the first two years of the military intervention in Iraq from 20 March 2003 to 19 March 2005, and are based on data which was available by 14 June 2005."
The report says the US and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attributed to anti-occupation forces (9%), crime (36%), and unknown agents (11%).
Who did the killing?
  • 37%. US-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.
  • 9%. Anti-occupation forces/insurgents killed 9% of civilian victims.
  • 36%. Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.
  • 11%. Unknown agents (11%).
Killings by anti-occupation forces, crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period.
Who was killed?
  • 24,865 civilians were reported killed in the first two years.
  • Men accounted for over 80% of all civilian deaths.
  • Baghdad alone recorded almost half of all deaths.
When did they die?
  • 30% of civilian deaths occurred during the invasion phase before 1 May 2003.
  • Post-invasion, the number of civilians killed was almost twice as high in year two (11,351) as in year one (6,215).
What was the most lethal weaponry?
  • Over half (53%) of all civilian deaths involved explosive devices.
  • Air strikes caused most (64%) of the explosives deaths.
  • Children were disproportionately affected by all explosive devices but most severely by air strikes and unexploded ordnance (including cluster bomblets).
How many were injured?
  • At least 42,500 civilians were reported wounded.
  • The invasion phase caused 41% of all reported injuries.
  • Explosive weaponry caused a higher ratio of injuries to deaths than small arms.
  • The highest wounded-to-death ratio incidents occurred during the invasion phase.
Iraq War Logs[edit]
In October 2010, the group WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs, a set of nearly 400,000 classified US military documents on the Iraq war. IBC was among several media organizations and NGO's given pre-release access to the documents, and IBC co-founder John Sloboda delivered a speech at the press conference for the release by WikiLeaks.[11]
IBC published three pieces on their website detailing their analysis of the war logs.[12][13][14] Among the main findings were that the war logs, "contain an estimated 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths," and that addition of the new material would suggest that, "over 150,000 violent deaths have been recorded since March 2003, with more than 122,000 (80%) of them civilian."
Academic publications[edit]
Between 2009 and 2011, IBC published three papers in peer reviewed academic journals, co-authored with researchers from King’s College London and Royal Holloway, University of London. Each paper uses IBC data to evaluate different aspects of civilian casualties during the war.
The first paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, 2009, analyses civilian deaths between 2003 and 2008 according to weapon types used. Among the findings were that, "execution after abduction or capture was the single most common form of death overall," and that, "events involving air attacks and mortar fire were the most dangerous" to Iraqi females and children.[15]
The second paper, published in PLoS Medicine in February, 2011, analyses civilian deaths between 2003 and 2008 according to perpetrator, weapon, time, and location. The paper found that most deaths during the period were, "inflicted by unknown perpetrators, primarily through extrajudicial executions." The paper also utilized what the authors refer to as the "Dirty War Index" which evaluates the behavior of different perpetrators or weapon types in terms of the proportion of women and children killed, with higher DWI ratios suggesting tactics or weapons that are more indiscriminate toward civilians. The study found that unknown perpetrators firing mortars had the highest DWI ratio, followed by Coalition Forces air attacks, leading the authors to advise that such weapons should not be used in populated areas.[16]
The third paper, published in September, 2011, in a special edition of The Lancet for the 10 year anniversary of the September 11 attacks of 2001, focused on casualties of both civilians and Coalition soldiers specifically by suicide bomb attacks in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. This paper found that there had been at least 12,284 Iraqi civilians and 200 Coalition soldiers killed in at least 1,003 suicide bombings during the period. The study also found that these bombings had "injured no fewer than 30,644 Iraqi civilians," and that, "children are less likely to survive their suicide bomb injuries than adults."[17]
Criticisms and counter-criticisms[edit]
The IBC has been the most often cited source on civilian deaths in Iraq,[18] but it has also received criticism from many sides. Some critics have focused on potential bias of sources. Others have raised concerns about the difficulty of distinguishing civilians from combatants. Others have criticized it for over or undercounting.
Some critics, often on the political right, claimed that the IBC numbers were an overcount, and that the numbers were suspect due to the antiwar bias of the IBC members. For example; the 26 July 2005 National Review article, "Bad Counts. An unquestioning media."[19]
Others, often on the political left, criticized media and government willingness to quote IBC figures more approvingly than the much higher estimate coming from the Lancet study[20] that came out in October 2004.
Journalists included Lila Guterman,[21][22] Andrew Cockburn,[23] John Pilger, and George Monbiot[24]
In a 27 January 2005 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education Lila Guterman wrote:
"The Lancet released the paper on October 29, the Friday before the election, when many reporters were busy with political coverage. That day, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune each dedicated only about 400 words to the study and placed the articles inside their front sections, on Pages A4 and A11, respectively. (The news media in Europe gave the study much more play; many newspapers put articles about it on their front pages.) In a short article about the study on Page A8, The New York Times noted that the Iraq Body Count, a project to tally civilian deaths reported in the news media, had put the maximum death toll at around 17,000. The new study, the article said, 'is certain to generate intense controversy.' But the Times has not published any further news articles about the paper."
In late 2005 and early 2006 some on the left began criticizing IBC itself. This criticism of IBC came mainly from the British website Media Lens which published four pieces[18][25][26][27] on what they saw as the "massive bias and gaps" reflected in the IBC database and their totals. David Edwards of Media Lens also wrote for other websites.[28]
This view of IBC was based on the belief that IBC figures are extremely low due to pro-US media bias and inadequate reporting due to its heavy (though not exclusive) reliance on Western media sources, which has led some of these critics to claim IBC should be called the "Iraq Western Media Body Count". These biases and inadequacies, they claim, mean IBC's count is low by up to a factor of 10, and that it specifically minimizes the proportion of deaths caused by US forces.
Media Lens, 26 January 2006[25] states: "First, the dramatic absence of examples of mass killing by US-UK forces suggests that the low IBC toll of civilian deaths in comparison with other studies is partly explained by the fact that examples of US-UK killing are simply not being reported by the media or recorded by IBC. Visitors to the site - directed there by countless references in the same media that have acted as sources - are being given a very one-sided picture of who is doing the killing."
Stephen Soldz wrote a 5 February 2006 article titled "When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths".[29] It stated: "Of course, in conditions of active rebellion, the safer areas accessible to Western reporters are likely to be those under US/Coalition control, where deaths are, in turn, likely to be due to insurgent attacks. Areas of insurgent control, which are likely to be subject to US and Iraqi government attack, for example most of Anbar province, are simply off-limits to these reporters. Thus, the realities of reporting imply that reporters will be witness to a larger fraction of deaths due to insurgents and a lesser proportion of deaths due to US and Iraqi government forces."
A further claim has been that IBC does little or nothing to correct misuse of their figures by public officials or media organizations. It is claimed that the media often misuse IBC's estimate of the total number dead. It is also claimed that the media use the IBC's estimate in order to ignore or downplay the October 2004 excess mortality study published in the Lancet Medical Journal, which estimated a far higher figure. Critics of IBC argue that the Lancet study is the most accurate estimate so far and is more reliable than IBC's estimate.
The 26 January 2006 Media Lens article[25] stated: "We accept that the IBC editors are sincere and well-intentioned. We accept, also, that they have often made clear that their figures are likely to be an underestimate. But we believe they could have done much more to challenge the cynical exploitation of their figures by journalists and politicians. And they could have done much more to warn visitors to their site of the number and type of gaps in their database."
Other criticism of various kinds came from journalists Stephen Soldz,[29] Dahr Jamail,[30] and Jeff Pflueger[30]
In April 2006 IBC published a lengthy response to their critics entitled "Speculation is no substitute: a defence of Iraq Body Count".[31] In their reply, IBC argues that their critics have several key facts wrong. IBC argues that while their estimate is likely to be below the full toll, their critics' errors have led the critics to exaggerate the likely extent of such an undercount. Finally, IBC argues, the available evidence does not support their critics' claims of a pro-US bias infecting the IBC database.
English-language versus Arabic-language media sources[edit]
The IBC report for March 2003 to March 2005[10] states: "We have not made use of Arabic or other non English language sources, except where these have been published in English. The reasons are pragmatic. We consider fluency in the language of the published report to be a key requirement for accurate analysis, and English is the only language in which all team members are fluent. It is possible that our count has excluded some victims as a result."
Independent journalist Dahr Jamail spent over eight months reporting from occupied Iraq. In a 15 January 2006 email quoted in a 26 January 2006 Media Lens article[25] he wrote: "Due to their [IBC] sources and lack of adequate Arab media in them (who do a much better job of reporting Iraqi civilian casualty counts), it is heavily biased towards western outlets which have from the beginning done a dismal (at best) job of reporting on the air war and consequent civ. casualties."
Stephen Soldz, who runs the website "Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report", writes in a 5 February 2006 ZNet article[29] (in reference to the 2003-2005 IBC report[10]): "Given, as indicated in that report, that ten media outlets provided over half the IBC reports and three agencies [Associated Press, Agence France Presse, and Reuters] provided over a third of the reports, there is simply no reason to believe that even a large fraction of Iraqi civilian combat-related deaths are ever reported in the Western media, much less, have the two independent reports necessary to be recorded in the IBC database. Do these few agencies really have enough Iraqi reporters on retainer to cover the country? Are these reporters really able comprehensively to cover deaths in insurgent-held parts of Iraq? How likely is it that two reporters from distinct media outlets are going to be present at a given site where deaths occur? How many of the thousands of US bombings have been investigated by any reporter, Western or Iraqi? Simply to state these questions is to emphasize the fragmentary nature of the reporting that occurs and thus the limitations of the IBC database."
In an 28 April 2006 BBC Newsnight interview[32] the IBC project's co-founder John Sloboda, in response to these and similar arguments, has said: "we have never had over the entire three years, anyone show us an Arabic source that reports deaths that we haven't already got. In three years. In thousands of incidents. There are organisations that translate Arabic reports into English, and we see their data."
IBC monitors many Arabic sources that either publish in English as well as Arabic, or are translated by other sources. Some of these include:
Al Arabiya TV, Al-Furat, Al-Ittihad, Al Jazeera (Web), Al Jazeera TV, Al Sharqiyah TV, Al-Taakhi, Al-Bawaba, Arab News, Arabic News, Asharq Al Awsat, As-Sabah, Arab Times, Bahrain News Agency, Bahrain Times.[33]
Undercounting[edit]
The IBC acknowledges on its website that its count is bound to be low due to limitations in reporting stating; "many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war." IBC's critics claim, though, that the IBC does not do enough to indicate what they believe is the full extent of the undercounting.[18][25][26][27][29][30] IBC has directly disputed these claims in a lengthy document on its website, in particular concentrating on what they see as a campaign against them from Media Lens among others.[31]
One criticism of IBC's method, from MIT's John Tirman, a Principal Research Scientist, is that the "surveillance instrument" - the news media - is changing all the time: media organizations add or (more likely) subtract reporters from the field, which was happening in Iraq; reporters were largely confined to Baghdad during the worst violence; and reporters tended to write about spectacular events, like car bombs, when much of the violence was in the form revenge killings throughout Iraq. "As a result, this technique of totaling up the dead is incapable of accounting for the deaths that were not being recorded, whether by the English-language news media or the chaotic health care system." IBC itself radically changed its method in the middle of the war, switching from two references to one reference in the news media.[34]
The October 2006 Lancet study states: "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods."[35][36]
In an April 2006 article the IBC had described an example comparing itself to the 2004 United Nations Development Programme Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS).[37][38] The Lancet report uses the population estimates drawn from the ILCS study, while not mentioning its estimate of war-related deaths. IBC contends that ILCS is a more reliable indicator of violent deaths than the Lancet study, and suggests a much lower number than the Lancet study.
However, a supplement to the Lancet study published separately by its authors, as well as subsequent interviews with one of Lancet's authors have disputed the methodology and results of the ILCS study. On the other hand Jon Pedersen, author of the ILCS study, has disputed the methodology and results of the Lancet study. For more info on this controversy see the sections titled "Criticisms" and "UNDP ILCS study compared to Lancet study" in Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties.
The 2006 Lancet study[35] also states: "In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates. Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5% in years of highest violence."
The Lancet reference used is to Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer and their 1999 book, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection.[39] From the introduction: "The CIIDH database consists of cases culled from direct testimonies and documentary and press sources."
Chapter 10[40] elaborates, saying that "In the CIIDH project, participating popular organizations collected many of the testimonies long after the time of the killings, when people were less clear about details, especially the identities of all the victims." And says, "Typically, during the collection of testimonies, a surviving witness might provide the names of one or two victims, perhaps close relatives, while estimating the number of other neighbors in the community without giving their names."
They report in chapter 7:[41]
"Figure 7.1 shows that in the CIIDH database, most of the information for human rights violations prior to 1977 comes from press sources. ... Approximately 10,890 cases were coded from the newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the press cases were taken from Prensa Libre, 10 percent from El Gráfico, 8 percent from La Hora and El Impacto respectively, and 6 percent from El Imparcial. The remaining 5 percent is made up by eight other newspapers."
But also in chapter 7 they reported that in later, more violent years:
"When the level of violence increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numbers of reported violations in the press stayed very low. In 1981, one of the worst years of state violence, the numbers fall towards zero. The press reported almost none of the rural violence."
There is a list[42] of figures, tables, and charts in the book that can be used to calculate what percentage of their cases of killings by state forces were reported by 13 Guatemalan newspapers for each year when compared to the testimonies of witnesses (as previously described from chapter 10[40]).
In a 7 November 2004 press release[43] concerning the October 2004 Lancet study[20] the IBC states: "We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording".
One of the sources used by the media are morgues. Only the central Baghdad area morgue has released figures consistently. While that is the largest morgue in Iraq and in what is often claimed to be the most consistently violent area, the absence of comprehensive morgue figures elsewhere leads to undercounting. IBC makes it clear that, due to these issues, its count will almost certainly be below the full toll in its 'Quick FAQ' on its homepage.
Quote from an IBC note:[44] "The Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate for x350, like that for x334, was made possible by examination of the detailed data supplied to the Associated Press (AP) by the morgues surveyed in AP's 23 May 2004 survey of Iraqi morgues."
That 23 May 2004 Associated Press article[45] points out the lack of morgue data from many areas of Iraq. Also, it states: "The [Baghdad] figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families. Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues."

Respecting Military service does not mean eulogizing extra constitutional killings ....

For your kind information.

The extra constitutional killings are prohibited and condemned in all militaries in civilized nations ....only caveat here is it talks about Civilized nations ...not Savage countries that we see bullying other countries around !!!




Apache Helicoper attack video is not the only instance ...there are several reports of extra constitutional killings by US soldiers ...

Apache helicopter one is one of the few that were leaked by Wikileaks ....



Iraq Body Count project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Iraq Body Count project (IBC) is a web-based effort to record civilian deaths resulting from the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Included are deaths attributable to coalition and insurgent military action, sectarian violence and criminal violence, which refers to excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion. As of December 2012, the IBC has recorded 110,937-121,227 civilian deaths. The IBC has a media-centered approach to counting and documenting the deaths. Other sources have provided differing estimates of deaths, some much higher. See Casualties of the Iraq War.
The project uses reports from English-language news media (including Arabic media translated into English), NGO-based reports, and official records that have been released into the public sphere to compile a running total.[2] On its database page the IBC states: "Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence."[3] The group is staffed by volunteers consisting mainly of academics and activists based in the UK and the US. The project was founded by John Sloboda and Hamit Dardagan.
According to Jonathan Steele, writing in The Guardian, IBC "is widely considered as the most reliable database of Iraqi civilian deaths".[4] But some researchers regard it at best as a floor, or baseline for mortality, and that it underestimates actual mortality by potentially several factors.[5]
Contents
[hide]
Project statement[edit]
The IBC overview page states:
"This is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies. The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion."[1]
The project quotes the top US general in Iraq, Tommy Franks, as saying "We don't do body counts [3]". The quotation was from a discussion of the Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan and was referring to counts of enemy soldiers killed, in the context of using enemy body counts as a measure of military success. The website, which omits the context of the quote, could be said to conflate the meaning of "enemy body count" with "civilian deaths caused" and to imply that the US is not interested in the number of civilian deaths its military operations cause.
Biographical information of group members is shown on the group's website.[4]
Method[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Deaths in the database are derived from a comprehensive survey of commercial media and NGO-based reports, along with official records that have been released into the public sphere. Reports range from specific, incident based accounts to figures from hospitals, morgues, and other documentary data-gathering agencies."[6]
Project volunteers sample news stories to extract minimum and maximum numbers of civilian casualties. Each incident reported at least by two independent news sources is included in the Iraq Body Count database. In December 2007, IBC announced that they would begin to include deaths reported by one source, and that they number of deaths provided by such reports would be openly tracked on its database page.[7] Between 3.3 and 3.5 percent of deaths recorded by IBC are currently listed on the database page as derived from a single source.
IBC is purely a civilian count. IBC defines civilian to exclude Iraqi soldiers, insurgents, suicide bombers or any others directly engaged in war-related violence. A "min" and "max" figure are used where reports differ on the numbers killed, or where the civilian status of the dead is uncertain.
IBC is not an "estimate" of total civilian deaths based on projections or other forms of extrapolation. It is a compilation of documented deaths, as reported by English-language media worldwide. See the sources section farther down for more info on the media and their sources.
Some[who?] have suggested bias of sources could affect the count. If a number is quoted from a pro-Iraqi source, and the Allies fail to give a sufficiently specific alternate number, the pro-Iraqi figure is entered into IBC's database as both a maximum and a minimum. The same works vice versa. The project argues that these potential over- and undercounts by different media sources would tend to balance out.[citation needed]
IBC's online database shows the newspaper, magazine or website where each number is reported, and the date on which it was reported. However, this has been criticized as insufficient because it typically does not list the original sources for the information: that is, the NGO, journalist or government responsible for the number presented. Hence, any inherent bias due to the lack of reliable reports from independent or Allied sources is not readily available to the reader.
Sources[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Our sources include public domain newsgathering agencies with web access. A list of some core sources is given below. ... For a source to be considered acceptable to this project it must comply with the following standards: (1) site updated at least daily; (2) all stories separately archived on the site, with a unique url (see Note 1 below); (3) source widely cited or referenced by other sources; (4) English Language site; (5) fully public (preferably free) web-access. ... Note 1. Some sites remove items after a given time period, change their urls, or place them in archives with inadequate search engines. For this reason it is project policy that urls of sources are NOT published on the iraqbodycount site."[1]
Primary sources used by the media are listed in the 2003 to 2005 IBC report. The sources are followed by the number of deaths reported from that source.
  • Mortuaries. 8,913
  • Medics. 4,846
  • Iraqi officials. 4,376
  • Eyewitnesses. 3,794
  • Police. 3,588
  • Relatives. 2,780
  • US-Coalition. 2,423
  • Journalists. 1,976
  • NGOs. 732
  • Friends/Associates. 596
  • Other. 196
Web counters[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Results and totals are continually updated and made immediately available here and on various IBC web counters which may be freely displayed on any website or homepage, where they are automatically updated without further intervention."[1]
Body count[edit]
Deaths in the Iraq war:
DateMinMax
9 April 20039961,174
10 August 20036,0877,798
25 April 20048,91810,769
12 September 200411,79713,806
12 March 200516,23118,510
6 December 200527,35430,863
28 June 200638,72543,140
2 October 200643,54648,343
1 March 200757,48263,421
5 August 200768,34774,753
2 May 200883,33690,897
24 October 201098,585107,594
12 January 2012104,594114,260
The figures above are those that appeared in real time on the IBC counters on or around those dates. However, those in the first line were increased radically in the following days and weeks. IBC's current Max figure for the entire invasion phase, up to 30 April 2003, now stands at 7,299. Because IBC performs analyses (e.g., accounts for multiple reports, eliminates overlaps, etc.), there is always a delay between the date on which incidents occur and the addition of their numbers to the IBC database. Another factor is that some reports emerge weeks or even months later - for instance the emergence of Baghdad city morgue reports for 2005 in early 2006. The 6 December line above was taken from the IBC total as it stood on 6 December 2005, but the emergence of the morgue figures later increased IBC's figures for that period to 31,818 - 35,747.
2006[edit]
The Iraq Body Count project states for the week ending 31 December 2006:[8][9] "It was a truly violent year, as around 24,000 civilians lost their lives in Iraq. This was a massive rise in violence: 14,000 had been killed in 2005, 10,500 in 2004 and just under 12,000 in 2003 (7,000 of them killed during the actual war, while only 5,000 killed during the ‘peace’ that followed in May 2003). In December 2006 alone around 2,800 civilians were reported killed. This week there were over 560 civilian deaths reported."
From the above quote here are IBC yearly death totals (not counting the initial 7000 invasion deaths):
  • 2003: 5,000
  • 2004: 10,500
  • 2005: 14,000
  • 2006: 24,000
March 2003 to March 2005 report[edit]
The IBC released a report detailing the civilian deaths it had recorded between 20 March 2003 and 19 March 2005.[10] From page 26: "The analyses in this dossier cover the first two years of the military intervention in Iraq from 20 March 2003 to 19 March 2005, and are based on data which was available by 14 June 2005."
The report says the US and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attributed to anti-occupation forces (9%), crime (36%), and unknown agents (11%).
Who did the killing?
  • 37%. US-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.
  • 9%. Anti-occupation forces/insurgents killed 9% of civilian victims.
  • 36%. Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.
  • 11%. Unknown agents (11%).
Killings by anti-occupation forces, crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period.
Who was killed?
  • 24,865 civilians were reported killed in the first two years.
  • Men accounted for over 80% of all civilian deaths.
  • Baghdad alone recorded almost half of all deaths.
When did they die?
  • 30% of civilian deaths occurred during the invasion phase before 1 May 2003.
  • Post-invasion, the number of civilians killed was almost twice as high in year two (11,351) as in year one (6,215).
What was the most lethal weaponry?
  • Over half (53%) of all civilian deaths involved explosive devices.
  • Air strikes caused most (64%) of the explosives deaths.
  • Children were disproportionately affected by all explosive devices but most severely by air strikes and unexploded ordnance (including cluster bomblets).
How many were injured?
  • At least 42,500 civilians were reported wounded.
  • The invasion phase caused 41% of all reported injuries.
  • Explosive weaponry caused a higher ratio of injuries to deaths than small arms.
  • The highest wounded-to-death ratio incidents occurred during the invasion phase.
Iraq War Logs[edit]
In October 2010, the group WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs, a set of nearly 400,000 classified US military documents on the Iraq war. IBC was among several media organizations and NGO's given pre-release access to the documents, and IBC co-founder John Sloboda delivered a speech at the press conference for the release by WikiLeaks.[11]
IBC published three pieces on their website detailing their analysis of the war logs.[12][13][14] Among the main findings were that the war logs, "contain an estimated 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths," and that addition of the new material would suggest that, "over 150,000 violent deaths have been recorded since March 2003, with more than 122,000 (80%) of them civilian."
Academic publications[edit]
Between 2009 and 2011, IBC published three papers in peer reviewed academic journals, co-authored with researchers from King’s College London and Royal Holloway, University of London. Each paper uses IBC data to evaluate different aspects of civilian casualties during the war.
The first paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, 2009, analyses civilian deaths between 2003 and 2008 according to weapon types used. Among the findings were that, "execution after abduction or capture was the single most common form of death overall," and that, "events involving air attacks and mortar fire were the most dangerous" to Iraqi females and children.[15]
The second paper, published in PLoS Medicine in February, 2011, analyses civilian deaths between 2003 and 2008 according to perpetrator, weapon, time, and location. The paper found that most deaths during the period were, "inflicted by unknown perpetrators, primarily through extrajudicial executions." The paper also utilized what the authors refer to as the "Dirty War Index" which evaluates the behavior of different perpetrators or weapon types in terms of the proportion of women and children killed, with higher DWI ratios suggesting tactics or weapons that are more indiscriminate toward civilians. The study found that unknown perpetrators firing mortars had the highest DWI ratio, followed by Coalition Forces air attacks, leading the authors to advise that such weapons should not be used in populated areas.[16]
The third paper, published in September, 2011, in a special edition of The Lancet for the 10 year anniversary of the September 11 attacks of 2001, focused on casualties of both civilians and Coalition soldiers specifically by suicide bomb attacks in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. This paper found that there had been at least 12,284 Iraqi civilians and 200 Coalition soldiers killed in at least 1,003 suicide bombings during the period. The study also found that these bombings had "injured no fewer than 30,644 Iraqi civilians," and that, "children are less likely to survive their suicide bomb injuries than adults."[17]
Criticisms and counter-criticisms[edit]
The IBC has been the most often cited source on civilian deaths in Iraq,[18] but it has also received criticism from many sides. Some critics have focused on potential bias of sources. Others have raised concerns about the difficulty of distinguishing civilians from combatants. Others have criticized it for over or undercounting.
Some critics, often on the political right, claimed that the IBC numbers were an overcount, and that the numbers were suspect due to the antiwar bias of the IBC members. For example; the 26 July 2005 National Review article, "Bad Counts. An unquestioning media."[19]
Others, often on the political left, criticized media and government willingness to quote IBC figures more approvingly than the much higher estimate coming from the Lancet study[20] that came out in October 2004.
Journalists included Lila Guterman,[21][22] Andrew Cockburn,[23] John Pilger, and George Monbiot[24]
In a 27 January 2005 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education Lila Guterman wrote:
"The Lancet released the paper on October 29, the Friday before the election, when many reporters were busy with political coverage. That day, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune each dedicated only about 400 words to the study and placed the articles inside their front sections, on Pages A4 and A11, respectively. (The news media in Europe gave the study much more play; many newspapers put articles about it on their front pages.) In a short article about the study on Page A8, The New York Times noted that the Iraq Body Count, a project to tally civilian deaths reported in the news media, had put the maximum death toll at around 17,000. The new study, the article said, 'is certain to generate intense controversy.' But the Times has not published any further news articles about the paper."
In late 2005 and early 2006 some on the left began criticizing IBC itself. This criticism of IBC came mainly from the British website Media Lens which published four pieces[18][25][26][27] on what they saw as the "massive bias and gaps" reflected in the IBC database and their totals. David Edwards of Media Lens also wrote for other websites.[28]
This view of IBC was based on the belief that IBC figures are extremely low due to pro-US media bias and inadequate reporting due to its heavy (though not exclusive) reliance on Western media sources, which has led some of these critics to claim IBC should be called the "Iraq Western Media Body Count". These biases and inadequacies, they claim, mean IBC's count is low by up to a factor of 10, and that it specifically minimizes the proportion of deaths caused by US forces.
Media Lens, 26 January 2006[25] states: "First, the dramatic absence of examples of mass killing by US-UK forces suggests that the low IBC toll of civilian deaths in comparison with other studies is partly explained by the fact that examples of US-UK killing are simply not being reported by the media or recorded by IBC. Visitors to the site - directed there by countless references in the same media that have acted as sources - are being given a very one-sided picture of who is doing the killing."
Stephen Soldz wrote a 5 February 2006 article titled "When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths".[29] It stated: "Of course, in conditions of active rebellion, the safer areas accessible to Western reporters are likely to be those under US/Coalition control, where deaths are, in turn, likely to be due to insurgent attacks. Areas of insurgent control, which are likely to be subject to US and Iraqi government attack, for example most of Anbar province, are simply off-limits to these reporters. Thus, the realities of reporting imply that reporters will be witness to a larger fraction of deaths due to insurgents and a lesser proportion of deaths due to US and Iraqi government forces."
A further claim has been that IBC does little or nothing to correct misuse of their figures by public officials or media organizations. It is claimed that the media often misuse IBC's estimate of the total number dead. It is also claimed that the media use the IBC's estimate in order to ignore or downplay the October 2004 excess mortality study published in the Lancet Medical Journal, which estimated a far higher figure. Critics of IBC argue that the Lancet study is the most accurate estimate so far and is more reliable than IBC's estimate.
The 26 January 2006 Media Lens article[25] stated: "We accept that the IBC editors are sincere and well-intentioned. We accept, also, that they have often made clear that their figures are likely to be an underestimate. But we believe they could have done much more to challenge the cynical exploitation of their figures by journalists and politicians. And they could have done much more to warn visitors to their site of the number and type of gaps in their database."
Other criticism of various kinds came from journalists Stephen Soldz,[29] Dahr Jamail,[30] and Jeff Pflueger[30]
In April 2006 IBC published a lengthy response to their critics entitled "Speculation is no substitute: a defence of Iraq Body Count".[31] In their reply, IBC argues that their critics have several key facts wrong. IBC argues that while their estimate is likely to be below the full toll, their critics' errors have led the critics to exaggerate the likely extent of such an undercount. Finally, IBC argues, the available evidence does not support their critics' claims of a pro-US bias infecting the IBC database.
English-language versus Arabic-language media sources[edit]
The IBC report for March 2003 to March 2005[10] states: "We have not made use of Arabic or other non English language sources, except where these have been published in English. The reasons are pragmatic. We consider fluency in the language of the published report to be a key requirement for accurate analysis, and English is the only language in which all team members are fluent. It is possible that our count has excluded some victims as a result."
Independent journalist Dahr Jamail spent over eight months reporting from occupied Iraq. In a 15 January 2006 email quoted in a 26 January 2006 Media Lens article[25] he wrote: "Due to their [IBC] sources and lack of adequate Arab media in them (who do a much better job of reporting Iraqi civilian casualty counts), it is heavily biased towards western outlets which have from the beginning done a dismal (at best) job of reporting on the air war and consequent civ. casualties."
Stephen Soldz, who runs the website "Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report", writes in a 5 February 2006 ZNet article[29] (in reference to the 2003-2005 IBC report[10]): "Given, as indicated in that report, that ten media outlets provided over half the IBC reports and three agencies [Associated Press, Agence France Presse, and Reuters] provided over a third of the reports, there is simply no reason to believe that even a large fraction of Iraqi civilian combat-related deaths are ever reported in the Western media, much less, have the two independent reports necessary to be recorded in the IBC database. Do these few agencies really have enough Iraqi reporters on retainer to cover the country? Are these reporters really able comprehensively to cover deaths in insurgent-held parts of Iraq? How likely is it that two reporters from distinct media outlets are going to be present at a given site where deaths occur? How many of the thousands of US bombings have been investigated by any reporter, Western or Iraqi? Simply to state these questions is to emphasize the fragmentary nature of the reporting that occurs and thus the limitations of the IBC database."
In an 28 April 2006 BBC Newsnight interview[32] the IBC project's co-founder John Sloboda, in response to these and similar arguments, has said: "we have never had over the entire three years, anyone show us an Arabic source that reports deaths that we haven't already got. In three years. In thousands of incidents. There are organisations that translate Arabic reports into English, and we see their data."
IBC monitors many Arabic sources that either publish in English as well as Arabic, or are translated by other sources. Some of these include:
Al Arabiya TV, Al-Furat, Al-Ittihad, Al Jazeera (Web), Al Jazeera TV, Al Sharqiyah TV, Al-Taakhi, Al-Bawaba, Arab News, Arabic News, Asharq Al Awsat, As-Sabah, Arab Times, Bahrain News Agency, Bahrain Times.[33]
Undercounting[edit]
The IBC acknowledges on its website that its count is bound to be low due to limitations in reporting stating; "many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war." IBC's critics claim, though, that the IBC does not do enough to indicate what they believe is the full extent of the undercounting.[18][25][26][27][29][30] IBC has directly disputed these claims in a lengthy document on its website, in particular concentrating on what they see as a campaign against them from Media Lens among others.[31]
One criticism of IBC's method, from MIT's John Tirman, a Principal Research Scientist, is that the "surveillance instrument" - the news media - is changing all the time: media organizations add or (more likely) subtract reporters from the field, which was happening in Iraq; reporters were largely confined to Baghdad during the worst violence; and reporters tended to write about spectacular events, like car bombs, when much of the violence was in the form revenge killings throughout Iraq. "As a result, this technique of totaling up the dead is incapable of accounting for the deaths that were not being recorded, whether by the English-language news media or the chaotic health care system." IBC itself radically changed its method in the middle of the war, switching from two references to one reference in the news media.[34]
The October 2006 Lancet study states: "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods."[35][36]
In an April 2006 article the IBC had described an example comparing itself to the 2004 United Nations Development Programme Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS).[37][38] The Lancet report uses the population estimates drawn from the ILCS study, while not mentioning its estimate of war-related deaths. IBC contends that ILCS is a more reliable indicator of violent deaths than the Lancet study, and suggests a much lower number than the Lancet study.
However, a supplement to the Lancet study published separately by its authors, as well as subsequent interviews with one of Lancet's authors have disputed the methodology and results of the ILCS study. On the other hand Jon Pedersen, author of the ILCS study, has disputed the methodology and results of the Lancet study. For more info on this controversy see the sections titled "Criticisms" and "UNDP ILCS study compared to Lancet study" in Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties.
The 2006 Lancet study[35] also states: "In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates. Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5% in years of highest violence."
The Lancet reference used is to Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer and their 1999 book, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection.[39] From the introduction: "The CIIDH database consists of cases culled from direct testimonies and documentary and press sources."
Chapter 10[40] elaborates, saying that "In the CIIDH project, participating popular organizations collected many of the testimonies long after the time of the killings, when people were less clear about details, especially the identities of all the victims." And says, "Typically, during the collection of testimonies, a surviving witness might provide the names of one or two victims, perhaps close relatives, while estimating the number of other neighbors in the community without giving their names."
They report in chapter 7:[41]
"Figure 7.1 shows that in the CIIDH database, most of the information for human rights violations prior to 1977 comes from press sources. ... Approximately 10,890 cases were coded from the newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the press cases were taken from Prensa Libre, 10 percent from El Gráfico, 8 percent from La Hora and El Impacto respectively, and 6 percent from El Imparcial. The remaining 5 percent is made up by eight other newspapers."
But also in chapter 7 they reported that in later, more violent years:
"When the level of violence increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numbers of reported violations in the press stayed very low. In 1981, one of the worst years of state violence, the numbers fall towards zero. The press reported almost none of the rural violence."
There is a list[42] of figures, tables, and charts in the book that can be used to calculate what percentage of their cases of killings by state forces were reported by 13 Guatemalan newspapers for each year when compared to the testimonies of witnesses (as previously described from chapter 10[40]).
In a 7 November 2004 press release[43] concerning the October 2004 Lancet study[20] the IBC states: "We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording".
One of the sources used by the media are morgues. Only the central Baghdad area morgue has released figures consistently. While that is the largest morgue in Iraq and in what is often claimed to be the most consistently violent area, the absence of comprehensive morgue figures elsewhere leads to undercounting. IBC makes it clear that, due to these issues, its count will almost certainly be below the full toll in its 'Quick FAQ' on its homepage.
Quote from an IBC note:[44] "The Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate for x350, like that for x334, was made possible by examination of the detailed data supplied to the Associated Press (AP) by the morgues surveyed in AP's 23 May 2004 survey of Iraqi morgues."
That 23 May 2004 Associated Press article[45] points out the lack of morgue data from many areas of Iraq. Also, it states: "The [Baghdad] figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families. Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues."
 
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Obama's drone wars and the normalisation of extrajudicial murder | Michael Boyle | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Obama's drone wars and the normalisation of extrajudicial murder | Michael Boyle | Comment is free | theguardian.com


Obama's drone wars and the normalisation of extrajudicial murder
Executive privilege has seduced the president into a reckless 'kill first, ask questions later' policy that explodes the US constitution
A-Pakistani-protest-again-008.jpg

A Pakistani protest in June 2012, after two recent US drone strikes killed 12 people. Photograph: SS Mirza/AFP/Getty
In his first campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush administration's approach to terrorism – such as the use of torture, the rendition of terrorist suspects to CIA-run black sites around the globe, and the denial of basic legal rights to prisoners in Guantánamo – and to develop a counterterrorism policy that was consistent with the legal and moral tradition of the United States. In an address at the Woodrow Wilson Center in August 2007, Obama criticized the Bush administration for putting forward a "false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand", and swore to provide "our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our constitution and our freedom".
As a candidate, Obama also promised to restore proper legislative and judicial oversight to counterterrorism operations. Rather than treat counterterrorism policy as an area of exception, operating without the normal safeguards that protect the rights of the accused, Obama promised that his approach "will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary."
Four years later, it is clear that President Obama has delivered a very different counterterrorism policy from that which he promised on the campaign trail. (Full disclosure: I was an adviser on the Obama campaign's counterterrorism expert group from July 2007-November 2008.) In fairness, he has delivered on a few of his promises, including closing the CIA-run "black site" prisons abroad and ordering that interrogations of all suspects be conducted according to the US army field manual, which proscribes many of the tactics widely considered torture. And some failures were not wholly his own: Obama's inability to close Guantánamo Bay was due more to congressional opposition and to an array of legal obstacles than to his own lack of initiative.
Yet, contrary to his campaign promises, Obama has left most of the foundations of Bush's counterterrorism approach intact, including its presumption of executive privilege, its tolerance of indefinite detention in Guantánamo and elsewhere and its refusal to grant prisoners in America's jails abroad habeas corpus rights. While the language of the "war on terror" has been dropped, the mindset of the Bush approach – that America is forever at war, constantly on the offensive to kill "bad guys" before they get to the United States – has crept into this administration and been translated into policy in new and dangerous ways.
This fact is clearly demonstrated in a recent New York Times article, which details how President Obama has become personally involved in an elaborate internal process by which his administration decides who will be the next victim of America's drone strikes. The article itself – clearly written with the cooperation of the administration, as the writers had unprecedented access to three dozen counterterrorism advisers – was designed to showcase Obama as a warrior president, thoughtfully wrestling with the moral issues involved in drone strikes, but forceful enough to pull the trigger when needed.
What it instead revealed was that the president has routinized and normalized extrajudicial killing from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America's temporary advantage in drone technology to wage a series of shadow wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Without the scrutiny of the legislature and the courts, and outside the public eye, Obama is authorizing murder on a weekly basis, with a discussion of the guilt or innocence of candidates for the "kill list" being resolved in secret on "Terror Tuesday" teleconferences with administration officials and intelligence officials.
The creation of this "kill list" – as well as the dramatic escalation in drone strikes, which have now killed at least 2,400 people in Pakistan alone, since 2004 – represents a betrayal of President Obama's promise to make counterterrorism policies consistent with the US constitution. As Charles Pierce has noted, there is nothing in the constitution that allows the president to wage a private war on individuals outside the authorization of Congress.
The spirit of the constitution was quite the opposite: all of the founders were concerned, in varying degrees, with the risk of allowing the president to exercise too much discretion when declaring war or using force abroad. For this reason, the constitution explicitly grants the right to declare war to the Congress in order to restrain the president from chasing enemies around the world based solely on his authority as commander-in-chief. The founders would be horrified, not comforted, to know that the president has implicated himself in the killing of foreign nationals in states against which the Congress has not passed a declaration of war.
Beyond bypassing the constitution and the War Powers Act, the Obama administration has also adopted a dangerously broad interpretation of the legal right to use drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad. According to his counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, the legal authority for the drone strikes derives from the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by the Congress in September 2001 to authorize the attack on Afghanistan. He notes that there is "nothing in the AUMF that restricts the use of military force against al-Qa'ida to Afghanistan".
This interpretation treats the AUMF as a warrant to allow the president to use force against anyone at any time in a war without a defined endpoint.
Together with the bland assertion that the US has the right to self-defense against al-Qaida under international law, these legal arguments have enabled the president to expand drone operations against terrorist organizations to Yemen and Somalia, as well as to escalate the campaign against militant networks in Pakistan. To date, Obama has launched 278 drone strikes against targets in Pakistan. The use of drone strikes is now so commonplace that some critics have begun to wonder if the administration has adopted a "kill, not capture" policy, forsaking the intelligence gains of capturing suspects for an approach that leaves no one alive to pose a threat.
This vast, expansive interpretation of executive power to enable drone wars conducted in secret around the globe has also set dangerous precedent, which the administration has not realized or acknowledged. Once Obama leaves office, there is nothing stopping the next president from launching his own drone strikes, perhaps against a different and more controversial array of targets. The infrastructure and processes of vetting the "kill list" will remain in place for the next president, who may be less mindful of moral and legal implications of this action than Obama supposedly is.
For those Democrats who are comforted by the fact that Obama has the final say in authorizing drone strikes and so refuse to criticize the administration, ask yourself: would you be as comfortable if the next decision on who is killed by a drone was left to President Romney, or President Palin?
Also in contravention of his campaign promises, the Obama administration has worked to expand its power of the executive and to resist oversight from the other branches of government. While candidate Obama insisted that even terrorist suspects deserved their due process rights and a chance to defend themselves in some kind of a court, his administration has now concluded that a review of the evidence by the executive branch itself – even merely a hasty discussion during one of the "Terror Tuesdays" – is equivalent to granting a terrorist suspect due process rights. With little fanfare, it has also concluded that American citizens may now be killed abroad without access to a "judicial process".
As the complexity and consequences of the drone strikes have grown, the administration has insisted that it alone should be trusted with the decision about when drone strikes are permitted, and consequently provides only the bare minimum of information to congressional oversight committees about drone activities.
What is also striking about Obama's embrace of drones and targeted killings is that he – who, during his 2008 campaign, displayed awareness that America's reckless actions abroad were damaging to its long-term interests – has become so indifferent to civilian casualties. According to statistics compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, at least 551 civilians have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, though the figure could be much higher. Yet, the Obama administration has consistently argued that almost no civilians are killed in these strikes, despite independent assessments that put the number of civilians killed as much higher.
This claim is only possible because the administration has engaged in an Orwellian contortion of language, which assumes that anyone in the area of a drone strike must be "up to no good" and therefore a militant. This assumption of guilt by association, and the grotesque misuse of definitions to cover up the deaths of innocents, including children, has allowed the administration to inflate the number of successful "hits" it has, while playing down the number of civilian casualties.
Now emboldened by this apparent success and the lack of an outcry over deaths caused by drone strikes, the administration is proposing to loosen the standards for targeting in Yemen even further by approving so-called "signature strikes", in which attacks are launched on patterns of behavior rather than the known presence of a terrorist operative. These signature strikes are almost guaranteed to increase the number of civilian casualties, as they are far more likely to catch innocent people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The drone strikes are portrayed by the administration as successful because they are able to take out high-ranking terrorist operatives, such as Abu Yahya al-Libi . But such a portrayal conflates a tactical victory (killing one al-Qaida commander) with a strategic success (that is, dampening the growth of extremist movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan). It also rarely looks at the other side of the ledger and asks whether the drone strikes have jeopardized the stability of the governments of Pakistan and Yemen, possibly risking more chaos if they are overthrown.
During his first presidential campaign, Obama promised to control counterterrorism operations and to put them in their proper place as one piece of a wider set of relationships with other governments. But he has done the opposite, allowing short-term tactical victories against terrorist networks to overwhelm America's wider strategic priorities and leave its relations with key governments in a parlous state. His embrace of drones and his willingness to shoot first may also be policies that the US comes to regret when its rivals, such as China begin to develop and use their own drones.
Beyond simply failing to live up to campaign promises, the real tragedy of Obama's counterterrorism policy is that he has squandered an unprecedented opportunity to redefine the struggle against al-Qaida in a way that moves decisively beyond the Bush administration's mindset. Instead, he has provided another iteration of that approach, with a level of cold-blooded ruthlessness and a contempt for the constitutional limits imposed on executive power that rivals his predecessor.
Instead of restoring counterterrorism to its proper place among America's other foreign policy priorities, President Obama has been seduced by political expediency and the lure of new technology into adopting a policy that kills first and asks questions later. He may succeed in crippling al-Qaida and preventing some attacks today, but it is now harder than ever to believe that a young child in Pakistan hearing the whirring noises of drones above them will look up and see Obama's America as "the relentless opponent of terror and tyranny, and the light of hope to the world".



If Apache helicopter killing was legitimate then why US government try to suppress vedio ???





First of all, if US was determined to hide the video, THERE WOULD NOT HAVE A VIDEO, the ops is legit and the people were clear, what the video is going to do with the legit it's?

Secondly the video is a redit video, a lot of segment were missing, it only show the moment those people we're kill

I can cut any legit war footage into spinning a story, I can edit a video of Pakistani soldier killing Indian and make it look like an Indian war crime

Have you ever think why the whole video had not shown? Or you are too dumb to think?

And you still hasn't answer me this

One IAF officer rape young girl, then I can say all Indian soldier are scat rapist right?
 
.
Respecting Military service does not mean eulogizing extra constitutional killings ....

For your kind information.

The extra constitutional killings are prohibited and condemned in all militaries in civilized nations ....only caveat here is it talks about Civilized nations ...not Savage countries that we see bullying other countries around !!!




Apache Helicoper attack video is not the only instance ...there are several reports of extra constitutional killings by US soldiers ...

Apache helicopter one is one of the few that were leaked by Wikileaks ....



Iraq Body Count project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Iraq Body Count project (IBC) is a web-based effort to record civilian deaths resulting from the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Included are deaths attributable to coalition and insurgent military action, sectarian violence and criminal violence, which refers to excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion. As of December 2012, the IBC has recorded 110,937-121,227 civilian deaths. The IBC has a media-centered approach to counting and documenting the deaths. Other sources have provided differing estimates of deaths, some much higher. See Casualties of the Iraq War.
The project uses reports from English-language news media (including Arabic media translated into English), NGO-based reports, and official records that have been released into the public sphere to compile a running total.[2] On its database page the IBC states: "Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence."[3] The group is staffed by volunteers consisting mainly of academics and activists based in the UK and the US. The project was founded by John Sloboda and Hamit Dardagan.
According to Jonathan Steele, writing in The Guardian, IBC "is widely considered as the most reliable database of Iraqi civilian deaths".[4] But some researchers regard it at best as a floor, or baseline for mortality, and that it underestimates actual mortality by potentially several factors.[5]
Contents
[hide]
Project statement[edit]
The IBC overview page states:
"This is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies. The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion."[1]
The project quotes the top US general in Iraq, Tommy Franks, as saying "We don't do body counts [3]". The quotation was from a discussion of the Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan and was referring to counts of enemy soldiers killed, in the context of using enemy body counts as a measure of military success. The website, which omits the context of the quote, could be said to conflate the meaning of "enemy body count" with "civilian deaths caused" and to imply that the US is not interested in the number of civilian deaths its military operations cause.
Biographical information of group members is shown on the group's website.[4]
Method[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Deaths in the database are derived from a comprehensive survey of commercial media and NGO-based reports, along with official records that have been released into the public sphere. Reports range from specific, incident based accounts to figures from hospitals, morgues, and other documentary data-gathering agencies."[6]
Project volunteers sample news stories to extract minimum and maximum numbers of civilian casualties. Each incident reported at least by two independent news sources is included in the Iraq Body Count database. In December 2007, IBC announced that they would begin to include deaths reported by one source, and that they number of deaths provided by such reports would be openly tracked on its database page.[7] Between 3.3 and 3.5 percent of deaths recorded by IBC are currently listed on the database page as derived from a single source.
IBC is purely a civilian count. IBC defines civilian to exclude Iraqi soldiers, insurgents, suicide bombers or any others directly engaged in war-related violence. A "min" and "max" figure are used where reports differ on the numbers killed, or where the civilian status of the dead is uncertain.
IBC is not an "estimate" of total civilian deaths based on projections or other forms of extrapolation. It is a compilation of documented deaths, as reported by English-language media worldwide. See the sources section farther down for more info on the media and their sources.
Some[who?] have suggested bias of sources could affect the count. If a number is quoted from a pro-Iraqi source, and the Allies fail to give a sufficiently specific alternate number, the pro-Iraqi figure is entered into IBC's database as both a maximum and a minimum. The same works vice versa. The project argues that these potential over- and undercounts by different media sources would tend to balance out.[citation needed]
IBC's online database shows the newspaper, magazine or website where each number is reported, and the date on which it was reported. However, this has been criticized as insufficient because it typically does not list the original sources for the information: that is, the NGO, journalist or government responsible for the number presented. Hence, any inherent bias due to the lack of reliable reports from independent or Allied sources is not readily available to the reader.
Sources[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Our sources include public domain newsgathering agencies with web access. A list of some core sources is given below. ... For a source to be considered acceptable to this project it must comply with the following standards: (1) site updated at least daily; (2) all stories separately archived on the site, with a unique url (see Note 1 below); (3) source widely cited or referenced by other sources; (4) English Language site; (5) fully public (preferably free) web-access. ... Note 1. Some sites remove items after a given time period, change their urls, or place them in archives with inadequate search engines. For this reason it is project policy that urls of sources are NOT published on the iraqbodycount site."[1]
Primary sources used by the media are listed in the 2003 to 2005 IBC report. The sources are followed by the number of deaths reported from that source.
  • Mortuaries. 8,913
  • Medics. 4,846
  • Iraqi officials. 4,376
  • Eyewitnesses. 3,794
  • Police. 3,588
  • Relatives. 2,780
  • US-Coalition. 2,423
  • Journalists. 1,976
  • NGOs. 732
  • Friends/Associates. 596
  • Other. 196
Web counters[edit]
The IBC overview page states: "Results and totals are continually updated and made immediately available here and on various IBC web counters which may be freely displayed on any website or homepage, where they are automatically updated without further intervention."[1]
Body count[edit]
Deaths in the Iraq war:
DateMinMax
9 April 20039961,174
10 August 20036,0877,798
25 April 20048,91810,769
12 September 200411,79713,806
12 March 200516,23118,510
6 December 200527,35430,863
28 June 200638,72543,140
2 October 200643,54648,343
1 March 200757,48263,421
5 August 200768,34774,753
2 May 200883,33690,897
24 October 201098,585107,594
12 January 2012104,594114,260
The figures above are those that appeared in real time on the IBC counters on or around those dates. However, those in the first line were increased radically in the following days and weeks. IBC's current Max figure for the entire invasion phase, up to 30 April 2003, now stands at 7,299. Because IBC performs analyses (e.g., accounts for multiple reports, eliminates overlaps, etc.), there is always a delay between the date on which incidents occur and the addition of their numbers to the IBC database. Another factor is that some reports emerge weeks or even months later - for instance the emergence of Baghdad city morgue reports for 2005 in early 2006. The 6 December line above was taken from the IBC total as it stood on 6 December 2005, but the emergence of the morgue figures later increased IBC's figures for that period to 31,818 - 35,747.
2006[edit]
The Iraq Body Count project states for the week ending 31 December 2006:[8][9] "It was a truly violent year, as around 24,000 civilians lost their lives in Iraq. This was a massive rise in violence: 14,000 had been killed in 2005, 10,500 in 2004 and just under 12,000 in 2003 (7,000 of them killed during the actual war, while only 5,000 killed during the ‘peace’ that followed in May 2003). In December 2006 alone around 2,800 civilians were reported killed. This week there were over 560 civilian deaths reported."
From the above quote here are IBC yearly death totals (not counting the initial 7000 invasion deaths):
  • 2003: 5,000
  • 2004: 10,500
  • 2005: 14,000
  • 2006: 24,000
March 2003 to March 2005 report[edit]
The IBC released a report detailing the civilian deaths it had recorded between 20 March 2003 and 19 March 2005.[10] From page 26: "The analyses in this dossier cover the first two years of the military intervention in Iraq from 20 March 2003 to 19 March 2005, and are based on data which was available by 14 June 2005."
The report says the US and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attributed to anti-occupation forces (9%), crime (36%), and unknown agents (11%).
Who did the killing?
  • 37%. US-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.
  • 9%. Anti-occupation forces/insurgents killed 9% of civilian victims.
  • 36%. Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.
  • 11%. Unknown agents (11%).
Killings by anti-occupation forces, crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period.
Who was killed?
  • 24,865 civilians were reported killed in the first two years.
  • Men accounted for over 80% of all civilian deaths.
  • Baghdad alone recorded almost half of all deaths.
When did they die?
  • 30% of civilian deaths occurred during the invasion phase before 1 May 2003.
  • Post-invasion, the number of civilians killed was almost twice as high in year two (11,351) as in year one (6,215).
What was the most lethal weaponry?
  • Over half (53%) of all civilian deaths involved explosive devices.
  • Air strikes caused most (64%) of the explosives deaths.
  • Children were disproportionately affected by all explosive devices but most severely by air strikes and unexploded ordnance (including cluster bomblets).
How many were injured?
  • At least 42,500 civilians were reported wounded.
  • The invasion phase caused 41% of all reported injuries.
  • Explosive weaponry caused a higher ratio of injuries to deaths than small arms.
  • The highest wounded-to-death ratio incidents occurred during the invasion phase.
Iraq War Logs[edit]
In October 2010, the group WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs, a set of nearly 400,000 classified US military documents on the Iraq war. IBC was among several media organizations and NGO's given pre-release access to the documents, and IBC co-founder John Sloboda delivered a speech at the press conference for the release by WikiLeaks.[11]
IBC published three pieces on their website detailing their analysis of the war logs.[12][13][14] Among the main findings were that the war logs, "contain an estimated 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths," and that addition of the new material would suggest that, "over 150,000 violent deaths have been recorded since March 2003, with more than 122,000 (80%) of them civilian."
Academic publications[edit]
Between 2009 and 2011, IBC published three papers in peer reviewed academic journals, co-authored with researchers from King’s College London and Royal Holloway, University of London. Each paper uses IBC data to evaluate different aspects of civilian casualties during the war.
The first paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, 2009, analyses civilian deaths between 2003 and 2008 according to weapon types used. Among the findings were that, "execution after abduction or capture was the single most common form of death overall," and that, "events involving air attacks and mortar fire were the most dangerous" to Iraqi females and children.[15]
The second paper, published in PLoS Medicine in February, 2011, analyses civilian deaths between 2003 and 2008 according to perpetrator, weapon, time, and location. The paper found that most deaths during the period were, "inflicted by unknown perpetrators, primarily through extrajudicial executions." The paper also utilized what the authors refer to as the "Dirty War Index" which evaluates the behavior of different perpetrators or weapon types in terms of the proportion of women and children killed, with higher DWI ratios suggesting tactics or weapons that are more indiscriminate toward civilians. The study found that unknown perpetrators firing mortars had the highest DWI ratio, followed by Coalition Forces air attacks, leading the authors to advise that such weapons should not be used in populated areas.[16]
The third paper, published in September, 2011, in a special edition of The Lancet for the 10 year anniversary of the September 11 attacks of 2001, focused on casualties of both civilians and Coalition soldiers specifically by suicide bomb attacks in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. This paper found that there had been at least 12,284 Iraqi civilians and 200 Coalition soldiers killed in at least 1,003 suicide bombings during the period. The study also found that these bombings had "injured no fewer than 30,644 Iraqi civilians," and that, "children are less likely to survive their suicide bomb injuries than adults."[17]
Criticisms and counter-criticisms[edit]
The IBC has been the most often cited source on civilian deaths in Iraq,[18] but it has also received criticism from many sides. Some critics have focused on potential bias of sources. Others have raised concerns about the difficulty of distinguishing civilians from combatants. Others have criticized it for over or undercounting.
Some critics, often on the political right, claimed that the IBC numbers were an overcount, and that the numbers were suspect due to the antiwar bias of the IBC members. For example; the 26 July 2005 National Review article, "Bad Counts. An unquestioning media."[19]
Others, often on the political left, criticized media and government willingness to quote IBC figures more approvingly than the much higher estimate coming from the Lancet study[20] that came out in October 2004.
Journalists included Lila Guterman,[21][22] Andrew Cockburn,[23] John Pilger, and George Monbiot[24]
In a 27 January 2005 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education Lila Guterman wrote:
"The Lancet released the paper on October 29, the Friday before the election, when many reporters were busy with political coverage. That day, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune each dedicated only about 400 words to the study and placed the articles inside their front sections, on Pages A4 and A11, respectively. (The news media in Europe gave the study much more play; many newspapers put articles about it on their front pages.) In a short article about the study on Page A8, The New York Times noted that the Iraq Body Count, a project to tally civilian deaths reported in the news media, had put the maximum death toll at around 17,000. The new study, the article said, 'is certain to generate intense controversy.' But the Times has not published any further news articles about the paper."
In late 2005 and early 2006 some on the left began criticizing IBC itself. This criticism of IBC came mainly from the British website Media Lens which published four pieces[18][25][26][27] on what they saw as the "massive bias and gaps" reflected in the IBC database and their totals. David Edwards of Media Lens also wrote for other websites.[28]
This view of IBC was based on the belief that IBC figures are extremely low due to pro-US media bias and inadequate reporting due to its heavy (though not exclusive) reliance on Western media sources, which has led some of these critics to claim IBC should be called the "Iraq Western Media Body Count". These biases and inadequacies, they claim, mean IBC's count is low by up to a factor of 10, and that it specifically minimizes the proportion of deaths caused by US forces.
Media Lens, 26 January 2006[25] states: "First, the dramatic absence of examples of mass killing by US-UK forces suggests that the low IBC toll of civilian deaths in comparison with other studies is partly explained by the fact that examples of US-UK killing are simply not being reported by the media or recorded by IBC. Visitors to the site - directed there by countless references in the same media that have acted as sources - are being given a very one-sided picture of who is doing the killing."
Stephen Soldz wrote a 5 February 2006 article titled "When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths".[29] It stated: "Of course, in conditions of active rebellion, the safer areas accessible to Western reporters are likely to be those under US/Coalition control, where deaths are, in turn, likely to be due to insurgent attacks. Areas of insurgent control, which are likely to be subject to US and Iraqi government attack, for example most of Anbar province, are simply off-limits to these reporters. Thus, the realities of reporting imply that reporters will be witness to a larger fraction of deaths due to insurgents and a lesser proportion of deaths due to US and Iraqi government forces."
A further claim has been that IBC does little or nothing to correct misuse of their figures by public officials or media organizations. It is claimed that the media often misuse IBC's estimate of the total number dead. It is also claimed that the media use the IBC's estimate in order to ignore or downplay the October 2004 excess mortality study published in the Lancet Medical Journal, which estimated a far higher figure. Critics of IBC argue that the Lancet study is the most accurate estimate so far and is more reliable than IBC's estimate.
The 26 January 2006 Media Lens article[25] stated: "We accept that the IBC editors are sincere and well-intentioned. We accept, also, that they have often made clear that their figures are likely to be an underestimate. But we believe they could have done much more to challenge the cynical exploitation of their figures by journalists and politicians. And they could have done much more to warn visitors to their site of the number and type of gaps in their database."
Other criticism of various kinds came from journalists Stephen Soldz,[29] Dahr Jamail,[30] and Jeff Pflueger[30]
In April 2006 IBC published a lengthy response to their critics entitled "Speculation is no substitute: a defence of Iraq Body Count".[31] In their reply, IBC argues that their critics have several key facts wrong. IBC argues that while their estimate is likely to be below the full toll, their critics' errors have led the critics to exaggerate the likely extent of such an undercount. Finally, IBC argues, the available evidence does not support their critics' claims of a pro-US bias infecting the IBC database.
English-language versus Arabic-language media sources[edit]
The IBC report for March 2003 to March 2005[10] states: "We have not made use of Arabic or other non English language sources, except where these have been published in English. The reasons are pragmatic. We consider fluency in the language of the published report to be a key requirement for accurate analysis, and English is the only language in which all team members are fluent. It is possible that our count has excluded some victims as a result."
Independent journalist Dahr Jamail spent over eight months reporting from occupied Iraq. In a 15 January 2006 email quoted in a 26 January 2006 Media Lens article[25] he wrote: "Due to their [IBC] sources and lack of adequate Arab media in them (who do a much better job of reporting Iraqi civilian casualty counts), it is heavily biased towards western outlets which have from the beginning done a dismal (at best) job of reporting on the air war and consequent civ. casualties."
Stephen Soldz, who runs the website "Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report", writes in a 5 February 2006 ZNet article[29] (in reference to the 2003-2005 IBC report[10]): "Given, as indicated in that report, that ten media outlets provided over half the IBC reports and three agencies [Associated Press, Agence France Presse, and Reuters] provided over a third of the reports, there is simply no reason to believe that even a large fraction of Iraqi civilian combat-related deaths are ever reported in the Western media, much less, have the two independent reports necessary to be recorded in the IBC database. Do these few agencies really have enough Iraqi reporters on retainer to cover the country? Are these reporters really able comprehensively to cover deaths in insurgent-held parts of Iraq? How likely is it that two reporters from distinct media outlets are going to be present at a given site where deaths occur? How many of the thousands of US bombings have been investigated by any reporter, Western or Iraqi? Simply to state these questions is to emphasize the fragmentary nature of the reporting that occurs and thus the limitations of the IBC database."
In an 28 April 2006 BBC Newsnight interview[32] the IBC project's co-founder John Sloboda, in response to these and similar arguments, has said: "we have never had over the entire three years, anyone show us an Arabic source that reports deaths that we haven't already got. In three years. In thousands of incidents. There are organisations that translate Arabic reports into English, and we see their data."
IBC monitors many Arabic sources that either publish in English as well as Arabic, or are translated by other sources. Some of these include:
Al Arabiya TV, Al-Furat, Al-Ittihad, Al Jazeera (Web), Al Jazeera TV, Al Sharqiyah TV, Al-Taakhi, Al-Bawaba, Arab News, Arabic News, Asharq Al Awsat, As-Sabah, Arab Times, Bahrain News Agency, Bahrain Times.[33]
Undercounting[edit]
The IBC acknowledges on its website that its count is bound to be low due to limitations in reporting stating; "many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war." IBC's critics claim, though, that the IBC does not do enough to indicate what they believe is the full extent of the undercounting.[18][25][26][27][29][30] IBC has directly disputed these claims in a lengthy document on its website, in particular concentrating on what they see as a campaign against them from Media Lens among others.[31]
One criticism of IBC's method, from MIT's John Tirman, a Principal Research Scientist, is that the "surveillance instrument" - the news media - is changing all the time: media organizations add or (more likely) subtract reporters from the field, which was happening in Iraq; reporters were largely confined to Baghdad during the worst violence; and reporters tended to write about spectacular events, like car bombs, when much of the violence was in the form revenge killings throughout Iraq. "As a result, this technique of totaling up the dead is incapable of accounting for the deaths that were not being recorded, whether by the English-language news media or the chaotic health care system." IBC itself radically changed its method in the middle of the war, switching from two references to one reference in the news media.[34]
The October 2006 Lancet study states: "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods."[35][36]
In an April 2006 article the IBC had described an example comparing itself to the 2004 United Nations Development Programme Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS).[37][38] The Lancet report uses the population estimates drawn from the ILCS study, while not mentioning its estimate of war-related deaths. IBC contends that ILCS is a more reliable indicator of violent deaths than the Lancet study, and suggests a much lower number than the Lancet study.
However, a supplement to the Lancet study published separately by its authors, as well as subsequent interviews with one of Lancet's authors have disputed the methodology and results of the ILCS study. On the other hand Jon Pedersen, author of the ILCS study, has disputed the methodology and results of the Lancet study. For more info on this controversy see the sections titled "Criticisms" and "UNDP ILCS study compared to Lancet study" in Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties.
The 2006 Lancet study[35] also states: "In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates. Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5% in years of highest violence."
The Lancet reference used is to Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer and their 1999 book, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection.[39] From the introduction: "The CIIDH database consists of cases culled from direct testimonies and documentary and press sources."
Chapter 10[40] elaborates, saying that "In the CIIDH project, participating popular organizations collected many of the testimonies long after the time of the killings, when people were less clear about details, especially the identities of all the victims." And says, "Typically, during the collection of testimonies, a surviving witness might provide the names of one or two victims, perhaps close relatives, while estimating the number of other neighbors in the community without giving their names."
They report in chapter 7:[41]
"Figure 7.1 shows that in the CIIDH database, most of the information for human rights violations prior to 1977 comes from press sources. ... Approximately 10,890 cases were coded from the newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the press cases were taken from Prensa Libre, 10 percent from El Gráfico, 8 percent from La Hora and El Impacto respectively, and 6 percent from El Imparcial. The remaining 5 percent is made up by eight other newspapers."
But also in chapter 7 they reported that in later, more violent years:
"When the level of violence increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numbers of reported violations in the press stayed very low. In 1981, one of the worst years of state violence, the numbers fall towards zero. The press reported almost none of the rural violence."
There is a list[42] of figures, tables, and charts in the book that can be used to calculate what percentage of their cases of killings by state forces were reported by 13 Guatemalan newspapers for each year when compared to the testimonies of witnesses (as previously described from chapter 10[40]).
In a 7 November 2004 press release[43] concerning the October 2004 Lancet study[20] the IBC states: "We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording".
One of the sources used by the media are morgues. Only the central Baghdad area morgue has released figures consistently. While that is the largest morgue in Iraq and in what is often claimed to be the most consistently violent area, the absence of comprehensive morgue figures elsewhere leads to undercounting. IBC makes it clear that, due to these issues, its count will almost certainly be below the full toll in its 'Quick FAQ' on its homepage.
Quote from an IBC note:[44] "The Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate for x350, like that for x334, was made possible by examination of the detailed data supplied to the Associated Press (AP) by the morgues surveyed in AP's 23 May 2004 survey of Iraqi morgues."
That 23 May 2004 Associated Press article[45] points out the lack of morgue data from many areas of Iraq. Also, it states: "The [Baghdad] figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families. Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues."
 
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How about

Other soldiers kill for their country...American soldiers kill for their fun ....
And Unless you can explain how that work, I stand by my comment

And I am not even talk about operational detail to people who never served



Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse
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Lynndie England holding a leash attached to a prisoner, known to the guards as "Gus", who is lying on the floor

This image of a prisoner being tortured has become internationally famous, eventually making it onto the cover of The Economist (see "Media" below)
From late 2003 to early 2004, during the Iraq War, military police personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency[1] committed human rights violations against prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison. They physically and sexually abused, tortured,[2][3][4] raped,[2][3] sodomized,[4] and killed[5] prisoners.
It came to public attention in early 2004, beginning with United States Department of Defense announcements. As revealed in the Taguba Report (2004), an initial criminal investigation by the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command had already been underway, in which soldiers of the 320th Military Police Battalion had been charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice with prisoner abuse. In April 2004, articles describing the abuse, including pictures showing military personnel appearing to abuse prisoners, came to wide public attention when a 60 Minutes II news report (April 28) and an article by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker magazine (posted online on April 30 and published days later in the May 10 issue) reported the story.[6]
The United States Department of Defense removed seventeen soldiers and officers from duty, and eleven soldiers were charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery. Between May 2004 and March 2006, eleven soldiers were convicted in courts-martial, sentenced to military prison, and dishonorably discharged from service. Two soldiers, Specialist Charles Graner, and his former fiancée, Specialist Lynndie England, were sentenced to ten years and three years in prison, respectively, in trials ending on January 14, 2005 and September 26, 2005. The commanding officer of all Iraq detention facilities, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was reprimanded for dereliction of duty and demoted to the rank of Colonel on May 5, 2005. Col. Karpinski has denied knowledge of the abuses, claiming that the interrogations were authorized by her superiors and performed by subcontractors, and that she was not allowed entry into the interrogation rooms.
The public later learned of what have been called the Torture Memos, prepared in August 2002 and March 14, 2003 (shortly before the Iraq invasion) by the Office of Legal Counsel, United States Department of Justice, which authorized certain enhanced interrogation techniques (generally held to be torture) of foreign detainees who were enemy combatants. The March 2003 memo, written by John Yoo, the deputy in the OLC, said that federal laws on use of torture did not apply to American interrogators overseas. Several United States Supreme Court decisions, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), have overturned Bush administration policy related to treatment of detainees and ruled that Geneva Conventions apply. In addition, these opinions were superseded by replacement opinions in 2009 by the Obama administration.
The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib was in part the reason that on April 12, 2006, the United States Army activated the 201st Military Intelligence Battalion, the first of four joint interrogation battalions.[7]
Treatment of prisoners[edit]
Death of Manadel al-Jamadi[edit]
Main article: Manadel al-Jamadi
The prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi died in Abu Ghraib prison after being interrogated and tortured by a CIA officer and a private contractor. The torture included physical violence and strappado hanging, whereby the victim is hung from the wrists with the hands tied behind the back. His death has been labeled a homicide by the US military,[8] but neither of the two men who caused his death have been charged. The private contractor was granted qualified immunity.[9]
Reports of prisoner rape[edit]
Major General Antonio Taguba has stated that there is photographic evidence of rape being carried out at Abu Ghraib.[10] An Abu Ghraib detainee told investigators he heard an Iraqi teenage boy screaming and saw an Army translator having sex with him while a female soldier took pictures.[11] The alleged rapist was identified by a witness as an American-Egyptian who worked as a translator. He is now the subject of a civil court case in the US.[10] Another photo shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner.[10] Other photos show interrogators sexually assaulting prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube, and a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.[10] Taguba has supported President Obama's decision not to release the photos, stating, "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."[10]
In other alleged cases, female inmates were said to be raped by soldiers.[12] In one reported case, senior US officials admitted rape had taken place at Abu Ghraib.[13]
Media coverage[edit]
AP's early report[edit]
On November 1, 2003, The Associated Press published a lengthy report [14] on inhumane treatment, beatings and deaths at Abu Ghraib and other American prisons in Iraq, based on interviews with released detainees, who told journalist Charles J. Hanley of inmates attacked by dogs, made to wear hoods and humiliated in other ways.[15] The article gained little notice.[16]”I wish somebody could go and take a picture” of what was happening, one freed man said.[15]
When the U.S. military first reported abuse in early 2004, much of the U.S. media again showed little initial interest. On January 16, 2004, United States Central Command informed the media that an official investigation had begun involving abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by a group of US soldiers. On February 24, it was reported that 17 soldiers had been suspended. The military announced on March 21, 2004, that the first charges had been filed against six soldiers.[17][18]
60 Minutes II broadcast and aftermath[edit]


Lynndie England pointing to a naked prisoner being forced to masturbate in front of his captors[19]


Sgt. Ivan Frederick sitting on an Iraqi detainee between two stretchers
It was not until late April 2004 that U.S. television news-magazine 60 Minutes II broadcast a story on the abuse. The story included photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners.[20]
The news segment had been delayed by two weeks at the request of the Department of Defense and Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After learning that The New Yorker magazine planned to publish an article and photographs on the topic in its next issue, CBS proceeded to broadcast its report on April 28.[21]
In the CBS report, Dan Rather interviewed then-deputy director of Coalition operations in Iraq, Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt, who said:
The first thing I’d say is we’re appalled as well. These are our fellow soldiers. These are the people we work with every day, and they represent us. They wear the same uniform as us, and they let their fellow soldiers down [...] Our soldiers could be taken prisoner as well. And we expect our soldiers to be treated well by the adversary, by the enemy. And if we can't hold ourselves up as an example of how to treat people with dignity and respect [...] We can't ask that other nations do that to our soldiers as well. [...] So what would I tell the people of Iraq? This is wrong. This is reprehensible. But this is not representative of the 150,000 soldiers that are over here [...] I'd say the same thing to the American people ... Don't judge your army based on the actions of a few.[20]
Kimmitt also said: "I'd like to sit here and say that these are the only prisoner abuse cases that we're aware of, but we know that there have been some other ones since we've been here in Iraq."[20]
Former Marine Lt. Col. Bill Cowan was also interviewed, stating: "We went into Iraq to stop things like this from happening, and indeed, here they are happening under our tutelage."[20]
Rather interviewed Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick, a participant in the abuse, whose civilian job was as a corrections officer at a Virginia prison. Frederick stated, "We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things ... like rules and regulations", says Frederick. "And it just wasn't happening."[20] Frederick's video diary, sent home from Iraq, provided some of the images used in the story. In it he listed detailed, dated entries that chronicle abuse of OGA prisoners ("OGA" is code for "CIA") and their names. One example:
The next day the medics came in and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake I.V. [intravenous drip] in his arm and took him away. This OGA [prisoner] was never processed and therefore never had a number.[22]
Frederick implicated the Military Intelligence Corps as well, "MI has been present and witnessed such activity. MI has encouraged and told us great job [and] that they were now getting positive results and information."[22]
Hersh, New Yorker article[edit]
A May 2004 article by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker magazine discussed the abuses in detail, and used as its source a copy of the Taguba report.
The New Yorker, under the direction of editor David Remnick, posted a report on its website by Hersh, along with a number of images of the torture taken by U.S. military prison guards with digital cameras. The article, entitled "Torture at Abu Ghraib", was followed in the next two weeks by two more articles on the same subject, "Chain of Command" and "The Gray Zone", also by Hersh.[21]
Seymour Hersh's undercover sources claimed that an interrogation program called "Copper Green" was an official and systemic misuse of coercive methods of torture. They said it was deemed "successful" during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. It was strongly criticized in intelligence circles as an improper application to the context of fighting citizen-"insurgents" in Iraq. This theory, and the existence of "Copper Green", has been denied by The Pentagon.
More evidence of torture[edit]

United States soldier Spc. Graner punching, or pretending to punch, handcuffed Iraqi prisoners
According to Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, many more pictures and videotapes of the abuse at Abu Ghraib exist. Photos and videos were revealed by the Pentagon to lawmakers in a private viewing on May 12, 2004. Lawmakers disagreed over whether the additional photos were worse than those already released. Senator Ron Wyden said the new photos were "significantly worse than anything that I had anticipated [...] Take the worst case and multiply it several times over." Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher said the pictures were "not dramatically different".[23] A Department of Defense official said that most of the additional photos were pornography involving only US soldiers, and that most did not show abuse of prisoners.[24]
Evidence given by Ameen Saeed Al-Sheik, detainee No. 151362, was reported by the Washington Post in May 2004:
They said we will make you wish to die and it will not happen [...] They stripped me naked. One of them told me he would rape me. He drew a picture of a woman to my back and made me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks.[25]
'Do you pray to Allah?' one asked. I said yes. They said, '[Expletive] you. And [expletive] him.' One of them said, 'You are not getting out of here health[y], you are getting out of here handicapped. And he said to me, 'Are you married?' I said, 'Yes.' They said, 'If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.' One of them said, 'But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her.' " [...] "They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive." [...] "I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I believe in torture and I will torture you.'[25]
The New York Times, on January 12, 2005, reported testimony suggesting that the following actions had taken place at Abu Ghraib:
  • Urinating on detainees
  • Jumping on detainee's leg (a limb already wounded by gunfire) with such force that it could not heal properly afterward
  • Continuing by pounding detainee's wounded leg with collapsible metal baton
  • Pouring phosphoric acid on detainees
  • Sodomization of detainees with a baton
  • Tying ropes to the detainees' legs or penises and dragging them across the floor.[26]


SPC England and SPC Graner posing behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners, giving the "thumbs up" sign
In her video diary, a prison guard said that prisoners were shot for minor misbehavior, and claimed to have had venomous snakes used to bite prisoners, sometimes resulting in their deaths. The guard said that she was "in trouble" for having thrown rocks at the detainees.[27]
Hashem Muhsen, one of the naked prisoners in the human pyramid photo, later said the men were also forced to crawl around the floor naked and that U.S. soldiers rode them like donkeys. After being released in January 2004, Muhsen became an Iraqi police officer.[28]
DOD discovered that one prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, died as a result of torture. The death was ruled a homicide by the military.[29] One detainee claimed he was sodomized. The Taguba Report found the claim ("Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick") to be credible.[30]
 
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Reactions[edit]
Iraqi response[edit]
AsiaNews.it cited Yahia Said, an Iraqi fellow at the London School of Economics:
The reception [of abuse news from Abu Ghraib] was surprisingly low-key in Iraq. Part of the reason was that rumours and tall stories, as well as true stories, about abuse, mass rape, and torture in the jails and in coalition custody have been going round for a long time. So compared to what people have been talking about here the pictures are quite benign. There’s nothing unexpected. In fact what most people are asking is: why did they come up now? People in Iraq are always suspecting that there’s some scheming going on, some agenda in releasing the pictures at this particular point.[31]
CNN reporter Ben Wedeman reported that Iraqi reaction to President Bush's apology for the Abu Ghraib abuses was "mixed":
Some people react[ed] positively, saying that he's come out, he's dealing frankly and openly with the problem and that he has said that those involved in the abuse will be punished. On the other hand, there are many others who says it simply isn't enough, that they – many people noted that there was not a frank apology from the president for this incident. And, in fact, I have a Baghdad newspaper with me right now from – it's called 'Dar-es-Salaam.' That's from the Islam Iraqi Islamic Party. It says that an apology is not enough for the torture of – yes, the torture of Iraqi prisoners.[32]
Response of US government officials[edit]
US President George W. Bush claimed the acts were in no way indicative of normal or acceptable practices in the United States Army. Vice-president Dick Cheney's office had played a central role in eliminating limits on coercion in US custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration later portrayed as the initiatives of lower-ranking officials.[33]
On May 7, 2004, United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated in a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee:
These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility. It is my obligation to evaluate what happened, to make sure those who have committed wrongdoing are brought to justice, and to make changes as needed to see that it doesn't happen again. I feel terrible about what happened to these Iraqi detainees. They are human beings. They were in U.S. custody. Our country had an obligation to treat them right. We didn't do that. That was wrong. To those Iraqis who were mistreated by members of U.S. armed forces, I offer my deepest apology. It was un-American. And it was inconsistent with the values of our nation.[34]
He also commented on the very existence of the evidence of abuse:
We're functioning in a – with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.[35]
Following Rumsfeld's testimony, several Senators commented:
Senator James Inhofe, a Republican member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, felt that the events did not deserve moral outrage: "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment [...] [They] are not there for traffic violations. [...] If they're in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners – they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. [...] Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."[39]
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was careful to draw a distinction between abuse and torture: "What has been charged so far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture. I'm not going to address the ‘torture’ word."[40]
On May 26, 2004, Al Gore gave a sharply critical speech on the Iraq crisis and the George W. Bush administration. He called for the resignations of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Director of Central Intelligence Agency George Tenet, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, for encouraging policies that led to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and fanned hatred of Americans abroad. Gore also called the Bush administration's Iraq war plan "incompetent" and described Bush as the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon. Gore commented; "In Iraq, what happened at that prison, it is now clear, is not the result of random acts of a few bad apples. It was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy."[41]
Criticism of Rumsfeld grew during the ensuing scandal. Democratic senators John Kerry, Joe Biden and Jon Corzine called for Rumsfeld to resign. They were joined by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, George Miller, Tom Harkin, and the Congressional Black Caucus.[citation needed] John McCain said that he had "no confidence" in the Secretary of Defense, and his fellow Republican senator Trent Lott said that he was "not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld."[42]
Media[edit]

The Economist calls for Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation
Several periodicals, including The New York Times and The Boston Globe, also called for Rumsfeld's resignation.[43][44] The cover of The Economist, which had backed President Bush in the 2000 election, carried a photo of the abuse with the words "Resign, Rumsfeld." An editorial in The Army Times, claiming that Rumsfeld's role in the scandal "amount(ed) to professional negligence", wrote "shame... on the chairman (of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and secretary (of defense)."[45]


This photograph released in 2006 shows several naked Iraqis in hoods, of whom one has the words "I'm a rapeist" (sic) written on his hip.
Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, contended that "this is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of emotional release?"[46][47][48] Conservative talk show host, Michael Savage said, "Instead of putting joysticks, I would have liked to have seen dynamite put in their orifices", and that "we need more of the humiliation tactics, not less." He repeatedly referred to Abu Ghraib prison as "Grab-an-Arab" prison.[49]
Political commentator Christopher Hitchens, an Iraq War supporter, opined,
"Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad....Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day."[50]
World[edit]
The torture? A more serious blow to the United States than September 11, 2001 attacks. Except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves.Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, foreign minister of the Vatican.[51]
From a legal declaration by Ronald Schlicher of the US State Department: "The Bahraini English-language Daily Tribune wrote on May 5, 2004, 'The blood-boiling pictures will make more people inside and outside Iraq determined to carry out attacks against the Americans and British.' The Qatari Arabic-language Al-Watan predicted on May 3, 2004 that because of the images, 'The Iraqis now feel very angry and that will cause revenge to restore the humiliated dignity.'"[52]
On May 10, 2004, swastika-covered posters of Abu Ghraib abuse photographs were attached to British and Indian graves at the Commonwealth military cemetery in Gaza City. Thirty-two graves of soldiers killed in World War I were desecrated or destroyed.[53]
In November 2008 Lord Bingham, the former UK Law Lord, describing the treatment of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib, said: "Particularly disturbing to proponents of the rule of law is the cynical lack of concern for international legality among some top officials in the Bush administration."[54]
Courts martial, non-judicial punishment, and administrative reprimands[edit]

Naval Consolidated Brig, Miramar, where England and Harman served their sentences
Eleven soldiers have been convicted of various charges relating to the incidents, all including dereliction of duty—most receiving relatively minor sentences. Three other soldiers have either been cleared of charges or were not charged. No one has been convicted for murders of detainees.
  • Colonel Thomas Pappas was relieved of his command on May 13, 2005, after receiving non-judicial punishment on May 9, 2005, for two instances of dereliction, including that of allowing dogs to be present during interrogations. He was fined $8000 under the provisions of Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (non-judicial punishment). He also received a General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand (GOMOR) which effectively ended his military career.
  • Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan became the highest ranking officer to have charges brought against him in connection with the Abu Ghraib abuse on April 29, 2006.[55] Prior to his trial, eight of twelve charges against him were dismissed, two of the most serious after Major General George Fay admitted that he did not read Jordan his rights before interviewing him in reference to the abuses that had taken place. On August 28, 2007, Jordan was acquitted of all charges related to prisoner mistreatment and received a reprimand for disobeying an order not to discuss a 2004 investigation into the allegations.[56]
  • Specialist Charles Graner was found guilty on January 14, 2005 of conspiracy to maltreat detainees, failing to protect detainees from abuse, cruelty, and maltreatment, as well as charges of assault, indecency, adultery, and obstruction of justice. On January 15, 2005, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, dishonorable discharge and reduction in rank to private.[57][58] Graner was paroled from the US military's Fort Leavenworth prison on August 6, 2011 after serving six-and-a-half years.[59]
  • Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick pled guilty on October 20, 2004 to conspiracy, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of detainees, assault and committing an indecent act in exchange for other charges being dropped. His abuses included forcing three prisoners to masturbate. He also punched one prisoner so hard in the chest that he needed resuscitation. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, forfeiture of pay, a dishonorable discharge and a reduction in rank to private.[60]
  • Sergeant Javal Davis pled guilty February 4, 2005 to dereliction of duty, making false official statements and battery. He was sentenced to six months in prison, a reduction in rank to private, and a bad conduct discharge.
  • Specialist Jeremy Sivits was sentenced on May 19, 2004 by a special court-martial to the maximum one-year sentence, in addition to a bad conduct discharge and a reduction of rank to private, upon his guilty plea.[61]
  • Specialist Armin Cruz was sentenced on September 11, 2004, to eight months confinement, reduction in rank to private and a bad conduct discharge in exchange for his testimony against other soldiers.[62]
  • Specialist Sabrina Harman was sentenced on May 17, 2005, to six months in prison and a bad conduct discharge after being convicted on six of the seven counts. She had faced a maximum sentence of five years.[63] Harman served her sentence at Naval Consolidated Brig, Miramar.[64]
  • Specialist Megan Ambuhl was convicted on October 30, 2004, of dereliction of duty and sentenced to reduction in rank to private and loss of a half-month’s pay.[65]
  • Private First Class Lynndie England was convicted on September 26, 2005, of one count of conspiracy, four counts of maltreating detainees and one count of committing an indecent act. She was acquitted on a second conspiracy count. England had faced a maximum sentence of ten years. She was sentenced on September 27, 2005, to three years confinement, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, reduction to Private (E-1) and received a dishonorable discharge.[60] England had served her sentence at Naval Consolidated Brig, Miramar.[66]
  • Sergeant Santos Cardona was convicted of dereliction of duty and aggravated assault, the equivalent of a felony in the US civilian justice system. He served 90 days of hard labor at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was then transferred to a new unit where he trained Iraqi police.[67] Cardona was unable to re-enlist due to the conviction, and left the army in 2007. In 2009, he was killed in action while working as a government contractor in Afghanistan.
  • Specialist Roman Krol pled guilty on February 1, 2005 to conspiracy and maltreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib. He was sentenced to ten months confinement, reduction in rank to private, and a bad conduct discharge.[68]
  • Specialist Israel Rivera, who was present during abuse on October 25, was under investigation but was never charged and testified against other soldiers.
  • Sergeant Michael Smith was found guilty on March 21, 2006 of two counts of prisoner maltreatment, one count of simple assault, one count of conspiracy to maltreat, one count of dereliction of duty and a final charge of an indecent act, and sentenced to 179 days in prison, a fine of $2,250, a demotion to private, and a bad conduct discharge.
Related personnel[edit]
Brig. General Janis Karpinski, commanding officer at the prison, was demoted to colonel on May 5, 2005. In a BBC interview, Janis Karpinski said she is being made a scapegoat, and that the top U.S. commander for Iraq, Gen Ricardo Sanchez, should be asked what he knew about the abuse, as according to her, he said that prisoners are "like dogs".[69] However, a spokesman for Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the Guantanamo prison and later commanded all detention operations, including Abu Ghraib, called Karpinski's allegations "categorically false", and said no directive to treat detainees "like dogs" was made at either Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.[70]
MP (stands for "Military Police") Captain Christopher Beiring "led a reservist military police company that was guarding the American detention center in Afghanistan when the two men were killed in December 2002".[71] The prisoners died (one of them was Dilawar) "after guards kneed them repeatedly in the legs while each was shackled to the ceiling of his cell". Beiring was the only officer to be prosecuted in the case.[72]
Donald Rumsfeld stated in February 2005 that he had, as a result of the Abu Ghraib scandal, twice made an offer to President George W. Bush to resign the office of Secretary of Defense, and that both offers were declined.[73]
Jay Bybee, the author of the Justice Department memo defining torture as activity producing pain equivalent to the pain experienced during death and organ failure,[74] was nominated by President Bush to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he began service in 2003.
Michael Chertoff, who as head of the Justice Department's criminal division advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the outer limits of legality in coercive interrogation sessions, was selected by President Bush to fill the cabinet-level vacancy at Secretary of Homeland Security created by the departure of Tom Ridge.
Captain Carolyn Wood was head of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion from Fort Bragg. In August 2002, nine interrogation techniques not approved by military doctrine or included in Army field manuals were added after Chris Mackey and his team turned over the detention unit in Bagram to the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion. Chris Mackey had trained with Wood before she got her command at Bagram. He says that while he was "gravely disappointed" when he found out about her changes to the interrogation rules, he understands what might have been going on. "After she took over, the stakes got very high," he says.
"We went from losing three or four soldiers a month to scores of them. She must have been under a tremendous amount of pressure.""But there was horrible incompetence at the leadership and oversight level. People were aware of what we were doing because we were open. [The prison] was practically a Disney ride, with lots of higher-ups and officials coming through. But the common response we got was, Aren’t you kind of babying them?"[75]
(Note: This change likely followed the legal opinions issued in what were later termed the Torture Memos, written in early August 2002 by the Office of Legal Counsel, US Department of Justice.)
Two inmates in December 2002 were tortured and beaten to death in cells down the hall from Wood's office. "Hung by their arms from the ceiling and beaten so severely that," according to a report by Army investigators later leaked to the Baltimore Sun, "their legs would have needed to be amputated had they lived." The Army’s Criminal Investigation command launched an inquiry, but few people outside Afghanistan took notice."[75]
"In August, a former Bagram interrogator told a Knight Ridder journalist that at the time of the two deaths screams and moans could easily be heard from interrogation rooms at Bagram, and that Wood must have been aware of the abuse, as the interrogation rooms were near her office. In any case, by virtue of her position, CPT. Wood should have been aware that abuse was taking place. We are concerned that, as at Abu Ghraib, the U.S. government appears more interested in blaming abuses on low-level personnel than in investigating the role of commanding officers and civilian officials."[76]
When she transferred to Abu Ghraib in August 2003, Wood is reported to have "posted her own list of 'interrogation rules of engagement,'[77] which were inconsistent with those later issued for Iraq by the top American commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, according to Congressional officials. The Geneva Convention didn't apply to Woods' methods of interrogation. The Fay-Jones report states,
"The JIDC October 2003 SOP (Standard operational procedure), likewise created by CPT. Wood, was remarkably similar to the Bagram (Afghanistan) Collection Point SOP. Prior to deployment to Iraq, CPT. Wood's unit (A/519 MI BN) allegedly conducted the abusive interrogation practices in Bagram resulting in a Criminal Investigation Command (CID) homicide investigation ... from December 2002, interrogators in Afghanistan were removing clothing, isolating people for long periods of time, using stress positions, exploiting fear of dogs and implementing sleep and light deprivation. Interrogators in Iraq, already familiar with the practice of some of these new ideas, implemented them even prior to any policy guidance from CJTF-7. (Combined Joint Task Force Seven headed by LTG Ricardo S. Sanchez) These practices were accepted as SOP by newly arrived interrogators. Some of the CJTF-7 ICRPs neither effectively addressed these practices, nor curtailed their use."[78]
"At Abu Ghraib, interrogation operations were also plagued by a lack of an organizational chain of command presence and by a lack of proper actions to establish standards and training by the senior leaders present." In both prison facilities, the officers who carried out the abuses were under the command of CPT. Woods and she has never been held accountable.[79]
The Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations specifically absolved senior U.S. military and political leadership from direct culpability: "The Panel finds no evidence that organizations above the 800th MP brigade or the 205th MI Brigade-level were directly involved in the incidents at Abu Ghraib."[80] BG Karpinski's immediate operational supervisor and LTG Sanchez' deputy, Major General Walter Wojdakowski, was subsequently appointed as Chief of the US Army Infantry School at Fort Benning. COL Pappas's boss, MG Barbara Fast, was subsequently appointed as Chief of the US Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca. Pappas and Karpinski were relieved of command but Wojdakowski and Fast became the Chiefs of their respective branches. The senior lawyer for LTG Sanchez and his legal representative on the Detainee Release Boards along with BN Karpinski and MG Fast, COL Marc Warren, has since been selected for promotion to Brigadier General.[citation needed]
US government policy on interrogations and torture[edit]

Specialist Charles Graner poses over Manadel al-Jamadi's corpse.
Reaction from the Bush administration characterized the Abu Ghraib torture scandal as an isolated incident uncharacteristic of US actions in Iraq. This view is widely disputed, notably in Arab countries. In addition, the International Red Cross had been making representations about abuse of prisoners for more than a year before the scandal broke.[81]
International law[edit]
The United States has ratified the UN's Convention Against Torture and the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions. The Bush Administration took the position that, in the words of Alberto R. Gonzales, White House Counsel to the President: "Both the United States and Iraq are parties to the Geneva Conventions. The United States recognizes that these treaties are binding in the war for the 'liberation of Iraq'".[82]
According to Human Rights Watch:
Al-Qaeda detainees would likely not be accorded POW status, but the Conventions still provide explicit protections to all persons held in an international armed conflict, even if they are not entitled to POW status. Such protections include the right to be free from coercive interrogation, to receive a fair trial if charged with a criminal offense, and, in the case of detained civilians, to be able to appeal periodically the security rationale for continued detention.[83]
The Convention Against Torture defines torture in the following terms:
Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him ... information or a confession, punishing him for an act he ... has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him.
United Nations Convention Against Torture, (Article 1)
The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in its confidential February 2004 report to the Coalition Forces that it had documented
"serious violations of International Humanitarian Law relating to the conditions of treatment of the persons deprived of their liberty held by the CF in Iraq. In particular, it establishes that persons deprived of their liberty face the risk of being subjected to a process of physical and psychological coercion, in some cases tantamount to torture, in the early stages of the internment process."[84]
The main violations described in the ICRC report included:
  • Brutality against protected persons upon capture and initial custody, sometimes causing death or serious injury.
  • Absence of notification of arrest of persons deprived of their liberty to their families causing distress among persons deprived of their liberty and their families.
  • Physical or psychological coercion during interrogation to secure information.
  • Prolonged solitary confinement in cells devoid of daylight.
  • Excessive and disproportionate use of force against persons deprived of their liberty resulting in death or injury during their period of internment.[84]


A man is intimidated, or threatened, by at least two dogs.
Some legal experts have said that the United States could be obligated to try some of its soldiers for war crimes.[citation needed] Under the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, prisoners of war and civilians detained in a war may not be treated in a degrading manner, and violation of that section is a "grave breach". In a November 5, 2003 report on prisons in Iraq, the Army's provost marshal, Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, stated that the conditions under which prisoners were held sometimes violated the Geneva Conventions.[citation needed]
Also, legal analysts later noted that Alberto Gonzales and other top administration attorneys had argued that detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and other locations should be considered "unlawful combatants" and as such not protected by the Geneva Conventions. These legal opinions were issued in multiple memoranda, known today as the "Torture Memos," in August 2002, by the Office of Legal Counsel, United States Department of Justice, regarding these perceived legal gray areas and issued to the CIA and DOD general counsels.[85] They were written by John Yoo, deputy Assistant Attorney General in OLC, and two of three were signed by his boss Jay S. Bybee. (The latter was appointed as a federal judge in 2003, starting March 21, 2003.)
In addition, on March 14, 2003, after the resignation of Bybee, Yoo issued a related legal opinion memo, at the request of William J. Haynes, General Counsel of DOD. It was shortly before the invasion of Iraq beginning March 19, 2003. Yoo concluded that federal laws prohibiting the use of torture for prisoners and suspects did not apply American practices overseas.[86]
Gonzales observed during administration discussions of detainee treatment that denying coverage under the Geneva Conventions, "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act."[87] Congressman Elizabeth Holtzman wrote that his statement suggested those who crafted policies in this area were concerned that US officials were involved in acts that could be seen to be war crimes.[87][88][89][90]
In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), the US Supreme Court ruled that Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions applies to all detainees in the War on Terror. It said that the Military Tribunals used to try these suspects were in violation of US and international law because of their processes. It said that the president could not unilaterally establish such tribunals, and Congress needed to authorize a means by which detainees could confront their accusers and challenge their detention.[91]
Critics consider the Military Commissions Act of 2006 as an amnesty law for crimes committed in the War on Terror by retroactively rewriting the War Crimes Act.[92] It abolished habeas corpus for foreign detainees, effectively making it impossible for detainees to challenge crimes committed against them.[93][94][95][96]
On November 14, 2006, legal proceedings invoking universal jurisdiction were started in Germany against Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, George Tenet and others for their alleged involvement in prisoner abuse under the command responsibility.[97][98] But, on April 27, 2007, the German federal prosecutor announced the government would not pursue charges against Rumsfeld and the 11 other U.S. officials, stating the accusations did not apply to German law, in part because there was insufficient evidence that the alleged acts occurred on German soil, nor did the accused live in Germany.[99]
Given the evidence of senior Bush administration policy makers authorizing torture, The Nation wrote in 2005 that, under the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, this "defense of superior orders" is not a defense for war crimes, although it might influence a sentencing authority to lessen the penalty. Under U.S. law, the War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a federal crime to violate certain provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The Act punishes any American, military or civilian, who commits a "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions. A grave breach, as defined by the Geneva Conventions, includes the deliberate "killing, torture or inhuman treatment" of detainees. Violations of the War Crimes Act that result in death carry the death penalty.[100][better source needed]
Executive Order[edit]
On December 21, 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union released copies of FBI internal memos they had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act concerning alleged torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. One memo dated May 22, 2004 was from someone whose name was blanked out but was described in the memo as "On Scene Commander – Baghdad".[101] He referred explicitly to an Executive Order that sanctioned the use of extraordinary interrogation tactics by U.S. military personnel. The methods explicitly mentioned as being sanctioned are sleep deprivation, hooding prisoners, playing loud music, removing all detainees' clothing, forcing them to stand in so-called "stress positions", and the use of dogs. The author also claimed that the Pentagon had limited use of the techniques by requiring specific authorization from the chain of command. The author identifies "physical beatings, sexual humiliation or touching" as being outside the Executive Order. This was the first internal evidence since the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse affair became public in April 2004 that forms of coercion of captives had been mandated by the President of the United States.[102]
Details[edit]

A detainee handcuffed in the nude to a bed with a pair of underpants covering his face.
On May 7, 2004, International Committee of the Red Cross Operations Director Pierre Krähenbühl stated that the ICRC's inspection visits to Coalition detention centers in Iraq did "not allow us to conclude that what we were dealing with ... were isolated acts of individual members of coalition forces. What we have described is a pattern and a broad system." He went on to say that some of the incidents they had observed were "tantamount to torture".[103]
U.S. and UK armed forces are jointly trained in so-called resistance to interrogation (R2I) techniques. These R2I techniques are taught ostensibly to help soldiers cope with or resist torture by the enemy. On May 8, 2004, The Guardian reported that, according to a former British special forces officer, the acts committed by the Abu Ghraib Prison military personnel resemble the techniques used in R2I training.[104] Also related are pride-and-ego down techniques to make captives more willing to cooperate.[105]
The same report states that:
The U.S. commander in charge of military jails in Iraq, Major General Geoffrey Miller, has confirmed that a battery of 50-odd special "coercive techniques" can be used against enemy detainees. The general, who previously ran the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, said his main role was to extract as much intelligence as possible.
The Guardian
Most accept the particular acts committed at the prison leading to the initial broadcast report were unauthorized, but as has been shown, they were not isolated incidents. These or similar incidents of torture and humiliation were routine, systemic and widespread, had been occurring for over a year, and some of them were official policy.
Alfred W. McCoy history professor and author of a book on torture in the Philippine armed forces, has noted similarities in the abusive treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the techniques described in the CIA's 1963 "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual and asserts that what he calls "the CIA's no-touch torture methods" have been in continuous use by the CIA and U.S. military intelligence since that time.
A May 25, 2004 article by Hersh in The New Yorker suggests a connection between the Abu Ghraib incidents and a chain of decisions and events set into play by high administration officials following the 9/11 attacks, specifically to a "special access" or "black ops" program known as Copper Green. According to Hersh, officials concerned with extracting intelligence information from terrorists stretched the bounds of interrogation to or beyond the extreme legal limits. Subsequently, methods which were originally intended to be used only on high value Taliban and Al-Qaeda "enemy combatants" came to be improperly used on Iraqi prisoners. The Department of Defense immediately characterized Hersh's report as "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture".
Ricardo Sanchez[edit]
Documents obtained by The Washington Post and the ACLU show that the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorized the use of military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns and sensory deprivation as interrogation methods in Abu Ghraib.[106] Also a November 2004 report by Brig Gen Richard Formica found that many troops at the Abu Ghraib prison were only following orders based on a memo from Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and that "[she] didn't find cruel and malicious criminals that are out there looking for detainees to abuse."[107] "Gen Sanchez authorised interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards", ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said in the union's statement.[108] In an interview for her hometown newspaper The Signal, Gen. Karpinski claimed to have seen unreleased documents from Rumsfeld that authorized these tactics for Iraqi prisoners.[109] Both Sanchez and Rumsfeld have denied authorization.
Ongoing news[edit]
In September 2005, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordered the release of new Abu Ghraib torture photos.[110]
In December 2005, John Pace, human rights chief for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), criticized the US military's practice of holding prisoners in Iraq in its own facilities such as Abu Ghraib prison. In an interview with Reuters,[111] Pace claimed that Abu Ghraib was not mandated by UN Resolution 1546, according to which the US government has claimed a legal mandate permitting its ongoing occupation of Iraq, including holding prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Pace said,
All except those held by the Ministry of Justice are, technically speaking, held against the law because the Ministry of Justice is the only authority that is empowered by law to detain, to hold anybody in prison. Essentially none of these people have any real recourse to protection and therefore we speak ... of a total breakdown in the protection of the individual in this country.
—John Pace
On March 29, 2006, the government agreed to drop all appeals and release the new set of photographs.[112]
Allegedly Rumsfeld-approved abuses[edit]
In November 2006, the former US Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, in charge of Abu Ghraib prison until early 2004, told Spain's El País newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Donald Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation. "The methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation ... playing music at full volume, having to sit in uncomfortably ... Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques." He said that this was contrary to the Geneva Convention and quoted the same "Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind". According to Karpinski, the handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: "Make sure this is accomplished". There have been no comments from either the Pentagon or US Army spokespeople in Iraq on Karpinski's accusations.[113][114][115]
Previously unreleased photographs[edit]
In February 2006, previously unreleased photos and videos were broadcast by SBS, an Australian television network, on its Dateline programme. According to initial reports, the Bush administration is attempting to prevent release of the images in the US, arguing that their publication could provoke antagonism towards them. According to BBC World News, the photographs were probably taken around the same time as the previously released photographs, and include some of the same prisoners and convicted soldiers from the earlier images. These newly released photographs depict prisoners crawling on the floor naked, being forced to perform sexual acts, and being covered in feces. Some images also show homicide and corpses, some shot in the head and some with slit throats. BBC World News stated that one of the prisoners, who was reportedly mentally unstable, was considered by prison guards as a "pet" for torture.[116]
The UN expressed hope that the pictures would be investigated immediately but the Pentagon stated that the images "have been previously investigated as part of the Abu Ghraib investigation."[117]
Five of the newly released pictures can be seen on the ElMundo webpage.[118] SBS claims not to have published the most shocking pictures due to the degree of their depravity, an example being the sodomy photo.
On March 15, 2006, Salon.com published the most extensive documentation of the abuse.[119] The source who gave the CID material to Salon magazine is familiar with the CID investigation.
The DVD containing the material includes a June 6, 2004, CID investigation report written by Special Agent Seigmund. That report includes the following summary of the material: "A review of all the computer media submitted to this office revealed a total of 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse, 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse, 660 images of adult pornography, 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts, 20 images of a soldier with a Swastika drawn between his eyes, 37 images of Military Working dogs being used in abuse of detainees and 125 images of questionable acts."
On May 28, 2009, more alleged pictures were made available to the public.[120] Some pictures have surfaced by Australian SBS TV.[121]
2011 grand jury investigation[edit]
In June 2011, the Justice Department announced it was opening a grand jury investigation into CIA torture which killed a prisoner.[122][123]
Torture Central: E-mails from Abu Ghraib[edit]
On October 29, 2007, the memoir of a soldier stationed in Abu Ghraib, Iraq during 2005-2006 was published. Torture Central chronicled many events previously unreported in the news media, including torture that continued at Abu Ghraib over a year after the abuse photos were published.[124]
Later developments[edit]
In 2009, an additional 21 color photographs surfaced, showing prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq being abused by their U.S. captors. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said, "[T]he government had long argued that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was isolated and was an aberration. The new photos would show that the abuse was more widespread." President Barack Obama initially indicated he would not fight the release of the photographs, but "reversed course in May and authorized an appeal to the high court." "The Obama administration believe[d] giving the imminent grant of authority over the release of such pictures to the defense secretary would short-circuit a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act." On Oct 10, 2009 the US "Congress [was] set to allow the Pentagon to keep new pictures ... from the public"[125]
In 2010, the last of the prisons were turned over to the Iraqi government to run. An Associated Press article said
Despite Abu Ghraib- or perhaps because of reforms in its wake- prisoners have more recently said they receive far better treatment in American custody than in Iraqi jails.[126]
In September 2010, Amnesty International warned in a report titled New Order, Same Abuses; Unlawful Detentions and Torture in Iraq that up to 30,000 prisoners, including many veterans of the US detention system, remain detained without rights in Iraq and are frequently tortured or abused. Furthermore, it describes a detention system that has not evolved since Saddam Hussein's regime, in which human rights abuses were endemic with arbitrary arrests and secret detention common and a lack of accountability throughout the security forces. Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa director, Malcolm Smart went on to say: "Iraq's security forces have been responsible for systematically violating detainees' rights and they have been permitted. US authorities, whose own record on detainees' rights has been so poor, have now handed over thousands of people detained by US forces to face this catalogue of illegality, violence and abuse, abdicating any responsibility for their human rights."[127]
On October 22, 2010, nearly 400,000 secret United States army field reports and war logs, detailing torture, summary executions and war crimes, were passed on to the British paper, The Guardian, and several other international media organisations through the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Among others, the logs detail how US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape, and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished, and that US troops abused prisoners for years even after the Abu Ghraib scandal.[128][129]
On June 27, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeals of lawsuits from a group of 250 Iraqis who wanted to sue the two contractors CACI International Inc. and Titan Corp. (now a subsidiary of L-3 Communications) over claims of abuse by interrogators and translators at the prison. The suits had been dismissed by the lower courts on the grounds that the companies held a derivative sovereign immunity from suits based on their status as government contractors pursuant to a battle-field preemption doctrine.[130][131]
Engility Holdings, Inc. of Chantilly, Virginia, paid $5.28 million dollars to 71 former inmates held there and at other U.S.-run detention sites between 2003 and 2007.[132]



 
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How about

Other soldiers kill for their country...American soldiers kill for their fun ....
And

Thanks to the Apache helicopter video leaked by Julian Assange ....we know how inhuman trigger happy US soldiers are .

they kill for mere fun ....they discern no difference between killing animals and killing innocent men , women and kids ...


So one video, and all American soldier are trigger happy?

Unless you can explain how that work, I stand by my comment

And I am not even talk about operational detail to people who never served



 
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Lol, you insult the whole service above and beyond the action created by some one

I saw news that some Indian soldier raped some one (I think it's an Air Force colonel) then can I say whole Indian Military is scat rapist?

Dude, that's call generalisation and by the way, the dude the apache crew killed were legit, AF control team found RPG7 and AK near the gun site.

Guess wiki leak forgot to tell you that?






 
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Lol, you insult the whole service above and beyond the action created by some one

I saw news that some Indian soldier raped some one (I think it's an Air Force colonel) then can I say whole Indian Military is scat rapist?

Dude, that's call generalisation and by the way, the dude the apache crew killed were legit, AF control team found RPG7 and AK near the gun site.

Guess wiki leak forgot to tell you that?








Inside Abu Ghraib Pt.4 (Iraq prison camp, CBC) - YouTube
 
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Only stupid like you will resort to these
kind of comparisons ...

I think that above statement against @jhungary in which he was called stupid/retarded or whatever falls under the category of personal attack.
Members are requested for not to do personal attack on one another.All nations fight for their countries,no one loves to go outside and kill for fun,such events take place when your armed forces experience frustration or desperation.To some extent policy makers of any regime of nation are to be blamed,not armed sectors who are following orders.Please respect each other and enjoy your stay.
-Regards
 
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@Indo-guy may i remind you this threat is discussing should member here respect military service, not to debate your version of American Evil Empire.

Cut the crap, if you want to open a thread about American Evil Empire, free to open a new thread about it

Only stupid like you will resort to these
kind of comparisons ...


I think that calling someone stupid/retarded or whatever falls under the category of personal attack.
Members are requested for not to do personal attack on one another.All nations fight for their countries,no one loves to go outside and kill for fun,such events take place when your armed forces experience frustration or desperation.To some extent policy makers of any regime of nation are to be blamed,not armed sectors who are following orders.Please respect each other and enjoy your stay.
-Regards

I cannot stop anyone from being an A-hole, i can take that he insult me or resort to personal attack method. That's his perjorative. Who am i to stop him dfrom discracing his family, his tradition lol??

But then respecting military services is a main point. In the military, we have a saying that "always respect your friend, but respect your enemy more" A person who stand up to his/her believe and willing to fight for and die for that should be respected.

I respected Taliban and Iraqi Insurgent, when they have the conviction to stand up to us and die for their clause. I will not pee on the body of Taliban and i will not desercrate the corps of any enemy and i hope for a proper burial

My father respected the VC and NVA, he won't go stick a surgical knife on them when they brought in VC/NVA POW to his hospital

My grandfather respect the German Infantry. Even when he shot down 3 times and got hunted down by german.

People who don't respect their enemy would usually be the first one to die and this indo-guy saying like American join any war for fun, that killing is fun, war is like a video game or that US Soldier is subhuman simply becasue he hates america.

I would have understand if he had served, but judging from what he said, i am not sure if he is even out of potty train phase.

It's ok to hate America, it's ok to hate any country, but disrespecting any Military Service in a defence forum is like shouting hate word and pee on any VFW parade. I get it if this is a political forum, but a military forum no less?

If you disrespect any military service, you have no place in here. This is what i believe.
 
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