Iraq Body Count Issues Statement on Manning Trial

[Hissyspit]

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/bradley-manning-verdict

When victimless crimes matter and victims don't: the trial of Bradley Manning

by Josh Dougherty
2 August 2013

On October 22, 2010, the group WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs, a series of nearly 400,000 classified military records, also known as "SIGACTs". These documents have remained publicly available on the internet in various forms since the original release, and IBC has been working since then to carefully integrate them into our database. As of today, more than 4,000 civilian deaths have been added to the IBC database derived exclusively from these records, and roughly 10,000 more are likely to be added as the work continues.1

- snip -

On July 30, 2013, Manning was found guilty of 20 charges by a military court for his release of the documents, including those pertaining to the Iraq war. The court acquitted him of the most extreme allegation of "aiding the enemy", but he now faces a possible maximum sentence of 136 years, essentially a life behind bars for exposing important truths, including war crimes and human rights violations, to the public.

By contrast, former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who started a war of aggression against Iraq in 2003 that has led to the deaths of over 125,000 civilians, 4,486 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi and other fighters on all sides, face living the rest of their lives in freedom as multi-millionaires.

Likewise, all upper-level US government officials who presided over the bloodbath that was the US occupation of Iraq, including the years of 2004-2009 covered in the documents exposed by Manning, will face no punishment of any kind.

Some lower-level US troops have faced punishment for some specific actions, but this has been quite rare and the punishments have typically been relatively light even where they were sought.

For example, the US Marines involved in one of the most notorious massacres of civilians in Iraq by US forces, in Haditha in November 2005,3 faced virtually no legal consequences. One Marine was convicted of a minor offense for which he served no jail time, and the rest have all been acquitted or had all charges dropped and will live the rest of their lives in freedom.4

The helicopter pilots who gunned down at least ten civilians, including two Reuters journalists and a father of two children who stopped to try to help the wounded, as documented in the "Collateral Murder" video exposed by Bradley Manning, face no punishment of any kind.

- snip -

It would seem apparent that the US government has a rather lenient approach to prosecution of its own soldiers, who are rarely charged, even more rarely convicted and typically receive relatively light sentences for even very serious offenses. And lenient is too strong a word for the treatment of upper-level military or civilian government officials, who essentially enjoy total immunity from prosecution for anything related to the Iraq war.

Now contrast this to the prosecution faced by Bradley Manning. No soldier or official involved in the Iraq war has faced the level of vindictive punishment that US prosecutors have sought to impose on Bradley Manning. Indeed, it appears that, as far as the US government is concerned, torture, murder, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and war crimes are much lesser transgressions than is exposing them to the public without the government's permission.

- snip -

These and thousands of others like them are known to the world today only because Bradley Manning could no longer in good conscience collude with an official policy of the Bush and Obama administrations to abuse secrecy and "national security" to erase them from history. If Manning deserves any punishment at all for this, certainly his three years already served, and the disgraceful abuse he was made to suffer during it, is more than enough.

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[Autumn]

1. I keep coming back and reading this.

I can't come up with word to describe how wrong I find this situation.

[struggle4progress]

2. Iraq Body Count spent most of the war low-balling the casualty figures

An abridged history of Iraqi civilian casualty estimates
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2657591&mesg_id=2657591

[Hissyspit]

3. So?

Iraq Body Count does not include casualty estimates or projections in its database. It only includes individual or cumulative deaths as directly reported by the media or tallied by official bodies (for instance, by hospitals, morgues and, in a few cases so far, NGOs), and subsequently reported in the media. In other words, each entry in the Iraq Body Count data base represents deaths which have actually been recorded by appropriate witnesses - not "possible" or even "probable" deaths.

1 Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey Roberts et al., The Lancet, Nov 2004.
2 Lancet 2004 co-author Richard Garfield, cited in Halloween Tidings from the 'War on Terror' Jim Lobe, IPS News, 29 Oct 2004.
3 Iraq ministry says coalition kills more civilians than insurgents do Nancy A. Youssef, Knight-Ridder/McClatchy Newspapers via Seattle Times, 6 Oct 2004.
The Lancet study's headline figure of "100,000" excess deaths is a probabilistic projection from a small number of reported deaths - most of them from aerial weaponry - in a sample of 988 households to the entire Iraqi population. Only those actual, war-related deaths could be included in our count. Because the researchers did not ask relatives whether the male deaths were military or civilian the civilian proportion in the sample is unknown (despite the Lancet website's front-page headline "100,000 excess civilian deaths after Iraq invasion," the authors clearly state that "many" of the dead in their sample may have been combatants [P.7]). Iraq Body Count only includes reports where there are feasible methods of distinguishing military from civilian deaths (most of the uncertainty that remains in our own count - the difference between our reported Minimum and Maximum - arises from this issue). Our count is purely a civilian count.

One frequently cited misapprehension is that IBC "only can count deaths where journalists are present."2 This is incorrect, and appears to arise from unfamiliarity with the variety of sources which the media may report and IBC has used. These sources include hospital and morgue officials giving totals for specific incidents or time periods, totals which in turn have sometimes been integrated into overall tolls of deaths and injuries for entire regions of Iraq as collated by central agencies such as the Iraqi Health Ministry (see KRT 25th September 2004 3); these are all carefully separated from more "direct" as well as duplicate media reporting before being added to IBC's database. The Lancet's survey data was itself gathered without journalists being present, and yet is widely reported in the press. Were the Lancet study a count and not a projection, it too could after appropriate analysis become part of the IBC database. Little-known but impeccably reported death tolls in fact constitute the larger part of IBC's numbers (as can be seen by sorting IBC's database by size of entry). We believe that such counts - when freely conducted and without official interference - have the potential to far exceed the accuracy and comprehensiveness even of local press reporting. It is after all the job of morgues and hospitals to maintain such records, and not the media's, who simply report their findings.

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. It is no part of our practice, at least as far as our published totals are concerned, to make any prediction or projection about what the "unseen" number of deaths might have been. This total can only be established to our satisfaction by a comprehensive count carried out by the Iraqi government, or other organisation with national or transnational authority.

[struggle4progress]

4. Objectively speaking, IBC was an integral part of the propaganda surrounding the war:

corporate media almost always cited IBC figures to contradict careful estimates provided by other projects

[Hissyspit]

5. Good grief.

Their numbers were horrifying, too.

And what does that have to do with the statement?

[whatchamacallit]

7. Great, then the real, higher, numbers

serve to further illustrate the travesty of Manning's crucifixion.

[malaise]

6. K & R

This is important

[G_j]

8. K&R