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THE most effective weapon terrorists have found to wield against us isn't the headline-grabbing suicide bomber or even the deadly roadside bomb, the IED. Such weapons can harm us, but they can't stop us. Terror's super-weapon is the lie. Lying about civilian casualties is the one sure way to impede or even halt US (or Israeli) operations, to force such tight restrictions on our troops that they can't win. The casualty con's so effective as both propaganda and tactic that terrorists everywhere have adopted the technique. It's been so successful that our enemies long ago transitioned to the next phase:...

HAMAS is like the Bill Clinton of terrorist groups. I am not suggesting that the terror group needs a lesson about what to do with Cuban cigars, it more a matter of twisting phrases and honesty. Or to put it a different way when it comes to Hamas Civilian casualty numbers, it depends what "IS" is. The casualty numbers reported by the press and Used by Hamas are compiled by Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR). The PCHR numbers are seriously flawed. One of the problems with their figures is that they classify as Civilians, casualties that most reasonable people...

A NATO official on Friday said it was investigating the claims of civilian casualties but insisted any blame would lie with "irresponsible" militants for launching attacks in the first place.

Though I find a sudden deep concern by some for the civilian population of Lebanon quite moving, I find the slaughtered Israeli civilian just as moving as well as the kidnapped Israeli soldiers being held hostage. A race and nation facing genocidal maniacs certainly has the right to defend itself and to try to crush those who seek its extermination. Israel has not specifically targeted civilians and in fact has done as much or more to try to spare the civilian population than we have in Iraq. Before their recent raids to destroy Hezbollah outposts and strongholds they foretold and...

Everyone has heard of the “killings at Haditha,” even though the military investigation of what happened there is still underway. Has anyone heard of the “killings at St. Lo” in July, 1944? A comparison of the New York Times coverage of those two events is instructive. A Google News search of Haditha + killings + New York Times yields 891 hits as of Sunday noon. The articles on this subject in the Times are driving the national and international news in all media on this subject. The Times and its reporters are cited in most of these articles. But what...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- A top U.S. Air Force general said Sunday that reports of civilian casualties in Iraq as a result of American military action were exaggerated. "I would tell you first off I don't believe most of it and I am very much aware that some of that has been staged," said Lt. Gen. Walter E. Buchanan III, Commander of the 9th U.S. Air Force and U.S. Central Command Air Forces. Buchanan, speaking to The Associated Press on the sidelines on the annual Dubai Air Show, said the U.S. Air Force was doing everything necessary to minimize...

LONDON, Jan 29 (Reuters) - The BBC apologised on Saturday for erroneously reporting that U.S.-led and Iraqi forces may be responsible for the deaths of 60 percent of Iraqi civilians killed in conflict over the last six months. The British broadcaster said on Friday in broadcasts and a news statement that its Panorama investigative show would air a report on Sunday citing "confidential" records from Iraq's health ministry to support the contention. Iraq's health minister said the BBC misinterpreted the statistics it had received and had ignored statements from the ministry clarifying the figures. "Today, the Iraqi Ministry of Health...

The Western media in pre-election Iraq, Peter Jennings for example, are doing all they can to aid and abet Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's call for the Iraqi people to stay away from the polls on Sunday. Fortunately for Iraq and the world, there's not much either of them can do. Jennings, after all, is hardly a household word in Baghdad, and Zarqawi's latest rhetorical rant has placed him in clear opposition not just to the American occupation of Iraq, but the Iraqi people as well. After all, the quickest and surest way to get the Americans out of the country is...

The UK Government will "examine with very great care" claims around 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the US-led invasion, Jack Straw has said. A study in the Lancet said the majority of the victims were women and children killed due to military activity. The UK foreign secretary told the BBC's Today programme that another independent estimate of civilian deaths was around 15,000. The study by US and Iraq researchers was led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, US.

A beloved if misguided cousin forwarded me this idiotic "Not One Damn Dime" e-mail touting a national anti-war protest on January 20, to wit: We support the troops but feel that the polititians need to know that they need to find a way to end this fast! Maybe this will help get them the message. Not One Damn Dime -- Spread the word! This might be the closest we could come to a general strike in this country and could be powerful symbolically if it were wide spread... Not One Damn Dime Day - Jan 20, 2005 Since our religious...

WASHINGTON (AP) - As a week of mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq drew to a close, the Bush administration pledged Friday to take the fight to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and other Iraqi resisters. "We're worried, but I am not panicked about it," said Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage of the upsurge in resistance to U.S. occupation. "They've chosen to fight," Armitage told the semiofficial Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. "We'll fight. And they will see that we understand strength as well." The cleric's militia has been in battle with U.S. and other coalition forces this week. Armitage dismissed the al-Sadr...

The revelation in the April 25, 2001 New York Times Magazine that former senator Bob Kerrey murdered innocent women and children in Vietnam has exposed a sharp division in American public opinion over questions of military ethics. Kerrey admitted to having participated, as a young Navy SEALs lieutenant, in a massacre of 13 unarmed Vietnamese women and children in the tiny village of Thanh Phong. Exactly how the incident, which occurred in February of 1969, took place still isn't clear. According to Kerrey, his SEAL commando squad mistakenly believed they were under fire; but one of the members of that...

After the bombs stopped falling, Faith Fippinger ventured out into Baghdad. At a hospital, she found a man weeping beside his dying wife. Their six children had been killed in the attack, too, Fippinger said. When the man asked Fippinger where she was from, she told him the truth — the United States, which was dropping the bombs pounding the city. Not denying her citizenship was something she had sworn to do during her time in Iraq, Fippinger said. She wanted the Iraqis to know there were Americans who did not approve of the war on Iraq. "I would say...

For the past three years, no matter how monstrous the Palestinian attack on Israeli civilians, the Minneapolis Star Tribune has consistently refused to apply the word 'terrorism.' One of the paper's editors explained their 'evenhanded' position in February, 2002: "In the case of the term 'terrorist,' other words -- 'gunman,' 'separatist' and 'rebel,' for example -- may be more precise and less likely to be viewed as judgmental. We also take extra care to avoid the term 'terrorist' in articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because of the emotional and heated nature of that dispute." Now, suddenly, the largest paper in...

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The Afghan president on Saturday said a U.S. air strike this month killed 10 civilians, including women and children, contradicting American military reports that claimed the casualties were Taliban militants. Meanwhile, the U.S. military said an arms dump blast that killed eight soldiers appeared to have been an accident. The bloody events highlighted the pitfalls of the U.S. mission to defeat an escalating insurgency by supporters of the former ruling Taliban and al-Qaida (website - news) that threatens summer elections. President Hamid Karzai said an Interior Ministry report had found that the Jan. 17 air strike...

Is President Bush guilty of crimes against humanity? Many on the left insist he is, primarily because his decision to forcibly remove Saddam Hussein has cost the lives of somewhere between eight and ten thousand Iraqi civilians----see Iraqbodycount.net. They argue that the apprehension of one man, no matter how despotic, is not worth the lives of so many innocents. But which policy proved deadlier to the Iraqi population, the United Nation’s long-term policy of “containing” Saddam Hussein or Bush’s regime change? Regardless of your position on the war, recent media coverage would probably lead you to conclude that Bush’s decision...

<p>THE WHITE HOUSE always said it would never count how many Iraqi parents we killed to liberate their children. We would never count how many toddlers we blew to pieces to free their elders. We would never count how many nuclear families we vaporized. We would never know if we razed a village to save a child.</p>

BAQUBAH, Iraq, 31 (AFP) - An Iraqi farmer was killed by US army fire in the town of Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad, Friday and his brother was detained for attempting to retrieve the body, witnesses told AFP. The farmer, Ziad Yass Abbas, was watering his crops when US troops, standing about 400 meters (yards) away, opened fire on him at around 6:00 am (0300 GMT), said his nephew, Yass Amer Abbas, who was with him at the time. His uncle was killed instantly, he said. "They opened fire on my uncle who was with me. I immediately ducked and hid...

ABU GHRAIB, Iraq - Amid burst of gunfire and prayer, Iraqi rioters waving portraits of Saddam Hussein battled U.S. troops and tanks on Friday, when a dispute over a marketplace outside Baghdad exploded into anti-American fury. Two Iraqis were killed, and 17 others and two U.S. soldiers were reported wounded. Farther west in Fallujah, a center of the anti-U.S. resistance, an explosion and fire struck the office of the mayor, who has cooperated with the U.S. occupation. In a melee that followed, one Iraqi was killed, and later Friday U.S. troops came under attack at the same spot. An Islamic...

Up to 15,000 Iraqis – around 4300 of them unarmed civilians – died during the first four weeks of the war, according to an independent US thinktank. A study by the Massachusetts-based Project on Defence Alternatives (PDA) says the available evidence shows approximately 11,000 to 15,000 Iraqis, combatants and non-combatants, were killed in the course of the US-led invasion.“Of the total number of Iraqi fatalities during the relevant period, approximately 30% (or between 3200 and 4300) were non-combatant civilians - that is, civilians who did not take up arms,” says the study released on Tuesday. PDA has not included Iraqis killed after...

The refusal by the US army to count the number of Iraqi civilians killed by US soldiers in Baghdad has been strongly condemned by Human Rights Watch.Joe Stork, the acting executive director of the group's Middle East and North Africa division, said: "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so many civilians in Baghdad. But it is really incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths."Human Rights Watch collected evidence of 94 civilians being killed by the US army in the capital and confirmed 20 cases between 1 May and 30 September. The report said...

On what was to be their wedding day, Chanan Sand, 19, placed a wedding ring in the grave of the woman he loved instead of on her finger. Sitting in a house packed with mourners on Thursday Sand said he couldn't let her go without giving her the ring, even though a suicide bomber forever destroyed their dream of a life together. The explosion at Caf Hillel in Jerusalem on Tuesday, the night before their wedding, killed seven, including Sand's beloved, Nava Applebaum, 20, and her father, Dr. David Applebaum. "She's my wife," he said simply. On the tables in...

The death of two innocent Iraqis was thought so unremarkable the US military did not even report it, but Peter Beaumont says it reflects an increasingly callous disregard of civilian lives in coalition operations Sunday September 7, 2003The ObserverFarah Fadhil was only 18 when she was killed. An American soldier threw a grenade through the window of her apartment. Her death, early last Monday, was slow and agonising. Her legs had been shredded, her hands burnt and punctured by splinters of metal, suggesting that the bright high-school student had covered her face to shield it from the explosion. She had...

Oruzgan Province: Operation FULL THROTTLE -- The Deh Rawod area of Afghanistan is considered the “home” of the Taliban and remains an area where the Taliban enjoy popular support. The extended families of both Mullah Mohammed Omar, the former “Supreme Leader” of the Taliban, and Mullah Berader, the former “Senior Military Commander” of the Taliban, reside in the area. Coalition aircraft have regularly been the target of hostile fire from the Deh Rawod area. While ineffective, the fire was clearly intentional and directed toward coalition forces. Two weeks prior to Operation FULL THROTTLE (OFT), covert reconnaissance of the area was...

Caption: A day after the incident, Hospitalman 3rd Class Joseph Reyes, 3rd Battalion 4th Marines (right), and Hospitalman 3rd Class Phillip Alexian, 3/4, give immediate care to an unidentified 5-year-old Iraqi child April 5 who apparently received a gunshot wound from crossfire according to the corpsmen. Photo by: Courtesy National Geographic Television and Film MARINE CORPS AIR GROUND COMBAT CENTER, Calif.(August 6, 2003) -- If located, one Iraqi child who was injured during Operation Iraqi Freedom may be given a second chance at life. On the night of April 4, heave-fire was exchanged outside Baghdad, Iraq. That same night some...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The night air hung like a hot wet blanket over the north Baghdad suburb of Slaykh. At 9 p.m., an electrical transformer blew up, plunging the neighborhood into darkness. American soldiers, apparently fearing a bomb attack, went on alert. Within 45 minutes, six Iraqis trying to get home before the 11 p.m. curfew were shot and killed by U.S. forces. Anwaar Kawaz, 36, lost her husband and three of four children. "We kept shouting, 'We're a family! Don't shoot!' But no one listened. They kept shooting," she told The Associated Press. She's expecting another child this month....

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Army Capt. Jeff Hall and his platoon rolled up near the Al-Sa’ah Restaurant in Humvees and were quickly mobbed by angry residents. Nearby, two bullet-riddled cars and a dead man with his head split open were all that remained from a U.S. operation that had gone badly. In the chaos, Hall tried to calm the crowd, but many of the people out in Baghdad’s upscale al-Mansour district were furious and giving his troops an earful. “They were blaming us,” he said. “They were shouting at us saying that we were the abusers.” It wasn’t the platoon’s fault....

The families of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed or injured by U.S. forces will not receive compensation unless they prove clear-cut negligence or wrongdoing by soldiers, military officials said Sunday. The policy rules out payments for tragic mistakes, such as the fatal shootings of civilians at military checkpoints, if soldiers believed it was reasonable to fire. And incidents after May 1, when President Bush declared the end of major fighting in Iraq, could still be regarded as combat-related and therefore ineligible for compensation, the officials said. However, cases involving soldiers who accidentally fire their weapons or traffic accidents involving supply...

A group of British and American researchers said yesterday that the number of killed because of the American- British war against Iraq reached more than 6,000 following statistics that covered the victims in remote areas in Iraq. Earlier statistics said that 5500 Iraqis were the victims of the war. The report of the researchers which was issued under the title "defining the number of Iraqi bodies" was based on reports of the mass media and 12 programs to define the number of killed Iraqis. Independent investigators from inside and outside Iraq took part in the investigation. The report estimated the...

Burned Iraqi Children Turned AwayBy DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer On a scorching afternoon, while on duty at an Army airfield, Sgt. David J. Borell was approached by an Iraqi who pleaded for help for his three children, burned when they set fire to a bag containing explosive powder left over from war in Iraq Borell immediately called for assistance. But the two Army doctors who arrived about an hour later refused to help the children because their injuries were not life-threatening and had not been inflicted by U.S. troops. Now the two girls and a boy are covered with...

Suffer the children 16jun03 http://heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,6600315%255E25717,00.html JOHN Pilger was far from the only journalist to believe -- incredibly -- it was our fault that Iraqi children were dying in their hundreds of thousands. Oh, no. Time magazine in 1998 even reported on the parade of children's corpses that Saddam Hussein staged through Baghdad's streets to persuade Western journalists of our guilt, and warned of the "anger and despair of Iraq's people". But I mention Pilger because you may have seen his documentary, Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq, which screened on SBS in 2000 and is perhaps the best...

Iraqi sues US for loss of sheepFrom correspondents in Ramadi, Iraq June 14, 2003 AN Iraqi shepherd is seeking $US200 million ($301.43 million) in damages from the US military for the deaths of 17 members of his family as well as 200 sheep in a missile strike, in the first such suit filed through the courts of the US-led occupation administration. The first hearing will take place on July 20 at the tribunal of Ramadi, 100km west of Baghdad. "The trial will be Iraq's first against US troops because we believe they used excessive force against the Iraqi people who...

<p>HENEVER REPORTERS asked about civilian deaths in the invasion of Iraq, US military officials reflexively plunged into a numbing prattle about the precision of our weaponry, precaution to avoid needless carnage, and promises to investigate possible mistakes.</p> <p>In late March, after an American missile hit a marketplace in Baghdad and killed plenty of people - Iraqi officials said 58 - Major General Victor Renuart of Central Command said: ''With every one of those circumstances, we ask the component ... who may have had forces involved, whether it's land, sea, or air, to do an investigation, and that takes a number of days to do that. The air component in this case is completing his review. We think that will be complete within the next day or so. And as soon as ... the review is completed, we'll make that available.</p>

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq (news - web sites) during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll — if it is ever tallied — is sure to be significantly higher. Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but the AP tally is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south. The AP count was based...

Marla Ruzicka, 26, from the San Francisco Bay Area, has been in Baghdad since the day Saddam's statue fell in the city center. She has been doing a headcount of the Iraqi injured and the dead. She's found more than she expected. She has formed her own nonprofit organization, called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or CIVIC. She has organized 150 surveyors to fan out across Iraq. So far, they say they have documented 620 civilian deaths in Baghdad, 256 in Najaf, 425 in Karbala and as many as 1,100 in Nasiriyah. It is only a preliminary count....

n the fifth floor of Najaf's Teaching Hospital lay two sisters injured by American forces during the liberation of the city. Esraa, a wide-eyed six-year-old, had just undergone surgery to amputate her leg below the knee; it had become infected after a shrapnel wound. In the bed beside her lay her 14-year-old sister, Nor. She had taken two shrapnel wounds to the leg, but was expected to make a complete recovery. Dr. Ali, who was accompanying me, said he knew the girls and that their house had been near some of the most severe fighting in Nanjaf. Both girls were...

<p>A garden where patients at the Central Teaching Hospital for Children could once stroll is now a cemetery. Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press.</p> <p>BAGHDAD, Iraq - The battle for Baghdad cost the lives of at least 1,101 Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, according to records at the city's 19 largest hospitals.</p>

More civilians are being injured or killed in northern Iraq now than during the war, largely due to the breakdown of law and order and the dangers of abandoned caches of Iraqi arms, a human rights group said Sunday. The New York-based group Human Rights Watch said it studied civilian injuries and deaths at five hospitals and morgues in the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. Health workers reported daily weapons-related injuries, both intentional and accidental, and many of the victims were children who played with unexploded ordnance, it said. "In some ways, the peace has proved more lethal than...

ZAAFARANIYA, Iraq - About 500 Iraqi men, chanting anti-American, pro-Islam slogans, drove in a convoy of trucks, buses and cars out of the Baghdad suburb hit by a huge arms dump blast on Saturday. Reuters correspondent Rosalind Russell saw a first truck carrying six coffins, apparently containing bodies, followed by the rest of the convoy as it passed a US military checkpoint set up after angry residents forced out American troops. “No Americans or Saddam; Yes, Yes to Islam!” the men chanted in Arabic, some of them flying green Islamic flags and banners. Among the slogans were two in English:...

The administration's policy of minimizing harm to civilians is an unwarranted confession of guilt about waging a war strictly to safeguard America. In war, a country convinced of the rightness of its course expects its forces to subordinate all considerations to the objective of military victory. Our government, however, has adopted the indecisive policy of "balancing" the goal of defeating the enemy in Iraq with the goal of avoiding harm to civilians. When General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declares that great care is being taken to prevent civilian casualties, he is not referring to the...

IN THE PERSIAN GULF A taxi driver from Samawa thought he had escaped his house full of Iraqi soldiers — only to see a bullet hit his son and a speeding car strike down his daughter. A mother from Zubair let her son outside one calm morning after days of intense fighting — only to find that he got caught in rekindled crossfire. A lawyer tried to reunite his extended family in Nasiriyah — but instead saw his brother die and his wife and sister each lose part of a leg when their bus was attacked on the way. Even...

Even if civilian casualties in Iraq (news - web sites) are light, expect a great deal of attention to the subject in the days ahead. In a number-obsessed society, focusing relentlessly on the deaths of innocents--and inflating the numbers, if necessary--is a conventional way of undermining support for war. This helps explain why dozens of civilian-casualty articles sprouted in the news media within hours of the first shots in Iraq, even before coalition ground forces swung into action. The news agencies of our chief non-allies--France, Russia, China, and Germany--were quick off the mark. Agence France Presse may have established the...

ATHENS, April 17 (AFP) - The European Commission said Thursday it had begun preparations to build an "air bridge" in collaboration with the Red Cross to fly wounded Iraqi children to hospitals in Europe as soon as possible. Commission president Romano Prodi said European Union member states had agreed proposals by the EU's executive arm for an air bridge for the most seriously wounded. "So with the Red Cross and other humanitarian organisations, we are preparing this air bridge so that we can act immediately and more intensively inside Iraq, and allow these seriously injured Iraqi children to be transported...

Iraq: U.S. Military Confirms Killing Iraqis In Mosul During Protest Saliyah, Qatar; 16 April 2003 (RFE/RL) -- A U.S. spokesman said today that U.S. soldiers killed as many as seven Iraqis while returning fire during a violent demonstration at a city government building in Mosul yesterday. Brigadier General Vincent Brooks said during a briefing at U.S. Central Command in Qatar that some of the demonstrators fired at U.S. soldiers, and the soldiers returned fire at some of the demonstrators. "Fire was directed at the [U.S.] Marines and Special Operations forces in this complex [in Mosul]. It was aimed fire, and...

French President Jacques Chirac said the European Union planned to organise an airlift to allow wounded Iraqis, especially children, to receive medical treatment in Europe. Mr Chirac said the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, would arrange the airlift "as quickly as possible" in cooperation with "the occupying powers" - the United States and Britain. Speaking after an EU summit in Athens, Mr Chirac said he had discussed the idea with British Prime Minister Tony Blair who was "in favour of this initiative". The airlift would cover Iraqis wounded in the US-British war, notably children, who "need treatment which can...

MOSUL, Iraq, April 15 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - At least 10 Iraqi people were shot dead and scores wounded Tuesday, April 15, in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, a hospital doctor said, with witnesses claiming U.S. troops opened fire after a crowd turned against an American-installed local governor. "There are perhaps 100 wounded and 10 to 12 dead" following the shooting near the local government offices in a central square, Dr. Ayad al-Ramadhani said at the emergency department of the city hospital, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP). Three witnesses questioned by AFP and casualties who spoke to hospital staff...

The Pentagon (CNSNews.com) - A group of international civil rights lawyers is calling for an investigation into the tactics used by coalition forces in the U.S.-led military campaign to disarm Iraq, which they said is resulting in an inordinately high number of Iraqi civilian casualties. British attorney Phil Shiner, a representative of Public Interest Lawyers based in Birmingham, U.K., joined forces with Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Roger Normand, executive director of the Center for Economic and Social Rights, to call for a war crimes investigation at the United Nations Monday. "What I've been outlining...

The price paid by children such as Ali is justified You want to pick him up and hug him, but the lightest touch would harm him further. Stumps are all he has for arms and there are deep burns to his abdomen, lower chest and possibly his back and legs. The face of 12-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas, bandaged and beseeching, will be one of the terrible, enduring images of this war. The natural human instinct is to flinch and turn away. But all of us who supported the war, and especially those, like me, who championed regime change to alleviate...

FOOTAGE filmed by France 3 television of a strike on a hotel which killed two journalists in Baghdad today shows a US tank targeting the journalists' hotel and waiting at least two minutes before firing. The journalist and film editor who filmed the attack, Herve de Ploeg, who filmed the attack, said: "I did not hear any shots in the direction of the tank, which was stationed at the west entrance of the Al-Jumhuriya (Republic) bridge, 600 metres north-west of the hotel. The tank's turret is seen moving toward the Palestine Hotel, where foreign reporters have set up shop, and...

They carried the bodies of the children out first. There was a girl of about 12, whom the Marines wrapped in her black abaya cloak.Next off the shattered minibus was her brother, a boy of about four, whom the Marines covered in a sports jacket. A sister, about six years old, had fallen between the seats. They placed her beside her siblings on a blanket.The children's mother and grandfather also died on the bus late Friday night when they failed to stop at a Marine roadblock while fleeing Baghdad. Four other Iraqis also died trying to speed past in other...