It is very important that we critically analyse all the data related to the suffering of the Iraqi people in order to properly remember the victims of this war, attempt to hold the perpetrators to account, make restitution where possible and prevent future wars. John Sloboda and the other volunteers at Iraq Body Count have been doing this with dedication for five years. You are perfectly welcome to question their methodology and suggest improvements – I know they welcome constructive feedback – but the personal vilification in this “satirical” article is undignified and unhelpful.

I am personally committed to peace and justice for Iraqis. I have campaigned against sanctions and war on Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness since 1998 and volunteered in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams in 2005, supporting Iraqis who were non-violently challenging the occupation and working for the rights of war victims and detainees. I have seen too many close friends, Iraqis and internationals, killed in Bush and Blair’s pointless war. I mention this to provide you with a context for my assessment.

I know John and the IBC team well. They are good people and firm opponents of the war who care deeply about its victims – this is why they have given over thousands of hours of their time to the traumatic task of gathering every media article related to casualties, along with data from morgues and other sources, and compiling a database with detailed and verifiable data about the victims. As a result IBC has played an important role in highlighting the horrific outcomes of this war. Their data is far from complete because many deaths go unrecorded, as IBC recognises. They don’t present their casualty data as the totality, but just as the verifiable component. Statistical surveys can also reveal another piece of the picture, although they can also have limitations and errors.

The IBC team’s long term goal goes beyond their media analysis or the statistical surveys. They want every victim of this war (and other wars) to be recorded and remembered as named person, not just a statistic, as every US or British soldier already is. This is a goal we could all campaign for, isn’t it? I hope you will retract this article and use your writing skills to document the brutality of the war, instead of slandering people who are speaking up for Iraqi victims.

In peace,

Justin

If you want to read Sloboda’s views on the Iraq war and the war criminals responsible for it, try here: http://tinyurl.com/289es4

If you want to see how Medialens get their facts wrong, see here: http://www.mediahell.org/community/07100901.htm

I used to like Dissident Voice before I read the above. But this is pretty dismal.

I would think that any anti-war protest has the “solid” support of at least 25% of the population. But, only .0000001 percent of people actually find the time to particpate because it is a “scheduled” event. But, exchanging U.S. dollars for some other type of currency could be done by a short walk to your local bank and at the time of your choosing.

My real question is … would it work?

It would certainly have a larger impact then a one-day event of 10 thousand protester picket signs. I would think that the U.S. government would need to respond and not simply sluff-it-off like they do with any street protest.

I’m not tryin’ to be an idiot. I seriously think that it would bring this war to an end within 60 or 90 days.

Calm

Nobody would lose any money because the more people who demanded Canadian dollars, the higher the value of the Canadian dollar would become.

It sure beats depending on street protests and having to schedule time to attend protests.

By exchanging funds at the bank, you could do it on your own time and quietly without much scheduling problems.

Calm

Three months later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had ‘Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’: he had ‘also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000’. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as ‘nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day’. In three months, Kristof’s estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later, on 27 November, Kristof warned that ‘if aid groups pull out . . . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.’ Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to climb to ‘nearly 400,000’ (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006). Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood internationally?