A Moment of Silence !

On Thursday, 12 October 2006, 11 executives, producers and staffers were gunned down of a new television station in Iraq including the station's chairman of the board. The station had not even gone fully on the air, broadcasting only test programs: patriotic songs calling for Iraqi unity. The attack was the single biggest attack on the media after the car bombing in 2004 on the Baghdad offices of Al Arabiya television, which left seven dead.


It was the deadliest attack against the media in Iraq since the conflict began in March 2003. During that time, 85 journalists have been killed - mostly Iraqis - along with 35 other employees of media companies have been killed, including drivers, interpreters and guards, all of them Iraqi except for one Lebanese.


Reporters Without Borders states 109 local and foreign journalists and media assistants have been killed in Iraq since the US invasion to topple Saddam Hussain in 2003.


A few days ago a study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland put the Iraqi death count since the March 2003 invasion at around 655,000. The President of USA, the Prime Ministers of UK and Australia have said there is not much truth in the figures and the number is not more than 50, 000 deaths. They called the methods used by the study unreliable.


The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is not another small time unrecognized medical school. It was founded in 1916 by William H. Welch and John D. Rockefeller. It is also claimed to be the largest school of public health in the world. The Medical School receives 25.2 percent of all U.S. federal research funds awarded to the 37 accredited U.S. schools of public health. Now for the U.S. government to refute one of its own esteemed medical school to which it gives a quarter of its federal research grants, is as good as spitting into the air. As the saying goes, "spit into the air and the spit falls back on your own face."


The UN's humanitarian chief refuted their statements by claiming the death toll was higher. In July the UN put the death total at 3,590 deaths and for August a figure of 3,009 deaths. The death rate was almost an unprecedented 116 deaths a day in July. Finding reliable data about deaths in Iraq is difficult. The United Nations obtains its figure from morgues and the Iraqi Health Ministry. If counting the dead is not reliable enough at morgues, what is? Imagine the number of uncounted deaths hidden in countless unmarked graves.


The U.S. military has said its own figure for the "murder rate" in Baghdad halved in August, but Washington has not explained how it arrived at the figure, which it says does not include deaths in bombings and mass attacks. Not counting deaths by bombs and mass attacks are enough reason to lower the official death counts cited by the allies. The attack on the tv station may not be counted as it could be termed as a mass attack.


The numbers do not matter anymore - human lives are being lost - when will it stop? A moment of silence for the innocents around the world who perish while men in power argue numbers.

How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder.... But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. It is just, necessary, commendable, and right. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take?

~Adin Ballou, Non-Resistantance, 1845