Senator Andrew Bartlett
Sunday, February 20, 2005
 
Don't tell me, I don't want to know

There was a very telling piece by Alan Ramsey in the Sydney Morning Herald this weekend which is well worth a read. Ramsey is a very long serving, idiosyncratic member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. He can be quite cantankerous and single minded, but he is also one of the few that sometimes goes into the substance of what happens in the Parliament, as opposed to the wafer thin depth that tends to characterise most coverage. His knowledge of Parliamentary history (as opposed to artificially manufactured folklore) also means he is often worth reading, despite his foibles.

His column recounts the transcript from a Senate Committee hearing last week which basically showed the federal Government has no interest at all in what the civilian casualties might be from the invasion of Iraq. Among other things, the Government Minister and officials suggested there is no real way of reliably knowing what the figure might be, and use this as an excuse to avoid the topic altogether.

This made me think it was worth highlighting the Iraq Body Count website. I’ve had this linked on my main website for a while, but it’s worth giving it a special mention here. This is a project that has attempted to record every confirmed civilian casualty – possibly the first time in history this has been done in such a methodical and independently reviewable way. Because it only calculates from verifiable reports, it is undoubtedly an underestimate, but it is still a very important body of information. The count (so far) is between 16 036 and 18 305 civilian deaths.

Regardless of whether you supported the invasion of Iraq or not, I think we have a responsibility to inform ourselves of the human cost. It is unacceptable that our Government does not consider this information to be of any importance and absurd for them to suggest that there is no way to make any sort of reasonable estimate of the death toll.

So for the benefit of Minister Robert Hill and the Office of National Assessments, I hereby inform them of the following URL: http://www.iraqbodycount.net. Maybe at the next Committee hearings, they will be able to give some answers.

PS While I’m at it, another site worth looking at that gives daily updates of the human cost is Today in Iraq. And in the interests of balance, Chrenkoff has been regularly posting compilations of "good news from Iraq". Whilst I couldn’t disagree more with his enthusiastic embrace of George Bush and his cartoon like demonisation of the United Nations and other usual targets of unthinking right-wingers, he does compile a lot of material that doesn’t get much coverage in the mainstream media which is worth being informed of.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Sunday, February 20, 2005 Permalink
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