Another Example of The New York Times' Service to Imperial Power

[donsu]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=9429


Here's a little new wrinkle in the story of the corporate-liberal New York Times' servility to imperial power. Last Monday's Time's contained an outwardly progressive item: a two-page photo essay on civilian casualties (what the paper calls "The Face of Sacrifice") in Iraq ("The Face and Voice of Civilian Sacrifice in Iraq: Photographs by Adam Nadel," NYT, 26 December 2005, pp. A16-A17).

"In Iraq," the Times says, "nobody knows, and few in authority seemed concerned to count, just how many civilians have been killed and injured. Soon it will be three years since the American-led invasion. The estimates of those killed run into the tens of thousands, the numbers wounded two or three times the number who lost their lives.
Even President Bush, estimating recently that 30,000 civilians may have been killed, acknowledged that was no more than an abstraction from unofficial calculation, not a Pentagon count."

-snip-

It relates seven incidents in which Iraqis have been violently killed or injured since March 19, 2003 (day 1 of "Operation Iraqi Freedom").

And who did the killing in the small number of such incidents it chose to report? In 3 of the 7, the killers are technically unindentified.
Regarding these 3 cases, readers learn only that the damage was done by "a bomb" that somehow exploded, though the suggestion is strong that anti-occupation forces ("terrorists") were the agents.

-snip-

There's certainly more people in Iraqi authority than in American authority that are "concerned to count just how many many civilians have been killed and injured." And it was General Tommy Franks of US Central Command who said the following when asked how many Iraqis had died in the initial phases of the U.S. invasion: "We Don't Do Body Counts."

How odd and revealing for the Times to say that "even Bush" can give only an abstract estimate of Iraq's casualty number and "not a Pentagon count."
-snip-
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this article is better read whole as it doesn't flow broken up into snipped parts

at any rate the NYT is rotten meat