A report by Nobel Peace Prize recipients and other organizations criticized mainstream media for grossly underreporting the death tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The U.S.-led “war on terror” which began Sept. 11, 2001, has left at least 1.3 million people dead – mostly civilians – in 12 years in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, a 101-page report revealed.
The report, called “Body Count,” written by 1985 Nobel Peace Prize winners Physicians for Social Responsibility and by Physicians for Global Survival and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, criticizes the mainstream media and the United States and its allies for grossly and intentionally underestimating death tolls in the three countries.
“There is probably no other war that has seen such a fierce and drawn-out controversy surrounding the number of its victims. One main reason for this is the lack of legitimacy for the U.S.-led attack on Iraq – even in the U.S. itself,” the report states. “The original pretexts for going to war quickly turned out to be spurious, and from then on only the ‘liberation of the country from a violent dictatorship’ and the ‘democratization’ and ‘stabilization’ of Iraq remained as justification for the war and occupation.”
The authors of the report accuse the mainstream media of manipulating information in order to “laboriously” paint a false image of a crisis in Iraq to justify a U.S.-led intervention in the country. They also say that the amount of people killed during the United States invasion is comparable to genocide.
“The numbers relayed by the media (previously 43,000 and now 110,000) should in themselves be terrifying enough, as they correspond to the annihilation of an entire city’s population. But apparently they are still perceived as tolerable and, moreover, even easy to explain given the picture of excessive religiously motivated violence. The figure of 655,000 deaths in the first three war years alone, however, clearly points to a crime against humanity approaching genocide,” the report states.
In Iraq alone, the U.S. intervention cost the lives of about 1 million people, while their war in Afghanistan left over 220,000 people dead and 80,000 in Pakistan, according to the report dated March 2015. The authors of the report commented that the death toll estimates are “conservative,” meaning the number of people killed could be greater. It investiagated the number of deaths in the three countries between 2001-2013.
“The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware,” the study’s authors wrote. They added that “this is only a conservative estimate,” saying the real death toll could be “in excess of 2 million.”
In the case of Iraq, the report added, the amount of people killed amounts to 5 percent of their population.
The Body Count report also highlights the criminal aspect of the U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, where most of the victims were civilians, including children.
The report suggests that U.S. citizens have been lied too, as they assume that approximately 9,900 Iraqis were killed during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It adds that U.S. public opinion could perhaps be far more outraged if they knew the actual number of people killed in Iraq due directly or indirectly to the U.S. intervention.
The Body Count report also highlights the criminal aspect of the U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, where most of the victims were civilians, including children. The report suggests that U.S. citizens have been lied too, as they assume that approximately 9,900 Iraqis were killed during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It adds that U.S. public opinion could perhaps be far more outraged if they knew the actual number of people killed in Iraq due directly or indirectly to the U.S. intervention.
(Featured Image: Reuters)
This content was originally published by teleSURtv.net
