{"id":16637,"date":"2016-01-18T12:28:08","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T17:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16637"},"modified":"2016-01-18T12:28:22","modified_gmt":"2016-01-18T17:28:22","slug":"playing-games-with-war-deaths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16637","title":{"rendered":"Playing Games with War Deaths"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Playing Games with War Deaths<\/a><\/h3>\n

There\u2019s a double standard in how the U.S. mainstream media reports civilian deaths depending if\u00a0the U.S. military is fighting the wars or not, accepting absurdly low numbers when the U.S. is at fault and hyping\u00a0death tolls when \u201cenemies\u201d are involved, a\u00a0manipulation of human tragedy, says Nicolas J S Davies.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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How many people have been killed in\u00a0the wars\u00a0in Afghanistan, Iraq,\u00a0Syria, Yemen\u00a0and Somalia?\u00a0On Nov. 18, a\u00a0UN press briefing<\/u><\/a>\u00a0on the war in Yemen declared authoritatively that it had so far killed 5,700 people, including 830 women and children.\u00a0But how precise are these figures, what are they based on, and what relation are they likely to bear to the true numbers of people killed?<\/p>\n

Throughout the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, the media has cited UN updates comparing numbers of Afghans killed by \u201ccoalition forces\u201d and the \u201cTaliban.\u201d\u00a0Following the U.S. escalation of the war in 2009 and 2010,\u00a0a report by\u00a0<\/u>McClatchy<\/u><\/em><\/a>\u00a0in March 2011 was headlined, \u201cUN: U.S.-led forces killed fewer Afghan civilians last year.\u201d\u00a0It reported a 26 percent drop in U.S.-led killing of Afghan civilians in 2010, offset by a 28 percent increase in civilians killed by the \u201cTaliban\u201d and \u201cother insurgents.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"U.S.<\/a><\/p>\n

U.S. Army troops on patrol in during Operation Southern Strike III in the Spin Boldak district of Afghanistan\u2019s Kandahar province on Sept. 2, 2012. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Katie Gray)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This was all illustrated in a\u00a0neat\u00a0pie-chart slicing up the extraordinarily low reported total of 2,777 Afghan civilians killed in 2010 at the peak of the U.S.-led escalation of the war.<\/p>\n

Neither the UN nor the media\u00a0made any effort to critically\u00a0examine this\u00a0reported decrease in civilians killed by U.S.-led forces, even as U.S. troop strength peaked at 100,000 in August 2010.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Playing Games with War Deaths There\u2019s a double standard in how the U.S. mainstream media reports civilian deaths depending if\u00a0the U.S. military is fighting the wars or not, accepting absurdly low numbers when the U.S. is at fault and hyping\u00a0death tolls when \u201cenemies\u201d are involved, a\u00a0manipulation of human tragedy, says Nicolas J S Davies. How […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[9495,6963,512,11789,822,826,827],"class_list":["post-16637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-civilian-deaths","tag-consortium-news","tag-media","tag-nicolas-j-s-davies","tag-un","tag-united-nations","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16637"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16639,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16637\/revisions\/16639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}