Cover-up of a slaughter

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2 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL1991 & April 9 att.

Dear editor, Please do a story on the actual number of Iraqi dead and why the D.O.D. still has this information classified. Is it too embarrassing? Does it make us look like high-tech cowards? Is that what the yellow ribbons really mean?

David McLaughlin San Francisco, Calif.

How many of the people of Iraq were killed in the 100-day bombing campaign by U.S.-led forces? "A very, very large number," Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf crowed soon after the ceasefire. He was referring to Iraqi troops, of course, and ignoring civilian deaths. But how many? No comment, said the general.

The U.S. government's campaign to destroy the Iraqi army and regime has been portrayed as a "clean" war. And yet the evidence is rather messy. The warplanes incinerated thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children. They were "just sitting ducks," one U.S. air squadron commander said of the Iraqi troops who were slaughtered on the highway while trying to withdraw from Kuwait.

And so it was understandable that Gen. Schwarzkopf would remain tight-lipped. But other officials tried to give reasons for their silence. "No one had any time to stop and count [the Iraqi dead]," one Bush administration official explained.

And now that the war was over,. the officials shrugged, let the Iraqis count the bodies. When reporters pointed out that the Geneva Convention's statutes require the victor in a battle to catalogue the enemy dead, they were told that the Saudi Arabian military had been assigned to the job—so stop asking.

Politicians won't "squeal"

Our "public servants" have been even more arrogant in denying our right to know the truth. Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.), speaking on the Phil Donahue television show in mid-March, admitted that the Pentagon had given him a count of Iraqi deaths. But he refused to say another word, because the matter was "classified."

Instead of open inquiry into how many Iraqis died, most of the news media were satisfied to give us conjectures from a handful of "experts" with computer models. Early accounts gauged that about 25,000 to 35,000 Iraqi soldiers had died. Civilian deaths were not even guessed at.

But other reports crept through. One "senior military official" told the Los Angeles Times on Feb. 28 that close to 10,000 men from one Republican Guard division alone were probably "destroyed" in the final days of the war. No prisoners were taken, he said, and no one was known to have escaped.

Finally, on March 23, another "senior military official" came through with a much higher Red Crescent say that between 100,000 and 200,000 Iraqi troops and civilians were killed. And the Iragi-American Association estimates 400,000 casualties (dead and wounded).

The dying is still not over. Many of the wounded are expected to die; medicine and antiseptics are in severe shortage due to U.S.imposed sanctions. According to a United Nations health team, disease epidemics "could cause more deaths and casualties than the fighting and bombing."

A new type of coverup The U.S. government's coverup, of course, began at the very start of the war, when Baghdad and other cities were attacked from the air. The United States claimed that "surgical strikes" were being conducted against "military targets" only. The bombs were landing, they told the American people, with an accuracy rate of 80 percent.

Now the line has changed. The U.S. Air Force admits that most of its bombing runs were wildly inaccurate. In fact, only 30 percent of the bombs hit their target! The U.S. government has also been forced to acknowledge that many civilian buildings were destroyed (9000 Iraqi homes were demolished, according to the United Nations).

A new type of coverup has been set in motion, however. Now we are told that civilians weren't killed on purpose but because the United States did not have enough highprecision "smart" bombs, which could have avoided civilian targets. "Give us more money for weaponry," says the Pentagon, "and we promise to be more accurate in the next war!"

Unfortunately, the government is still withholding the truth. Fragmentation bombs were dropped on

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CTION end women's rights

By Michael Schreiber