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<h1 class="title">The War on Terror is genocide</h1>
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<p>Wednesday 06 May 2015<br>
<b>Written By:</b> <a
href="http://cageuk.org/author/Karen%20Jayes">Karen Jayes</a><br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://cageuk.org/article/war-terror-genocide">http://cageuk.org/article/war-terror-genocide</a></small></small></b><br>
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<div><strong>A recent <a
href="http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf">report </a>by
the Physicians for Social Responsibility puts the number of
civilians killed in the War on Terror between 2006 and 2013 at
1.2 million, or at least as much as 2 million. The UN declared
the massacre of 200,000 civilians in Sudan ‘genocide’, Karen
Jayes of CAGE Africa explores the truth of such figures and
questions why the UN won’t recognise the West’s ‘war’ in the
Middle East as precisely the same thing? Reiterating CAGE's
stance, calling for full accountability for all perpetrators and
for full disclosure of the true toll of the War on Terror on
humanity.</strong></div>
<div> </div>
<div>CAGE would like to call attention to the first active attempt
to count the number of civilian casualties from US-led
counter-terrorism interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan:
a 97-page <a href="http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf">report
</a>released by the Nobel Prize-winning group Physicians for
Social Responsibility (PSR). </div>
<div> </div>
<div>The PSR report calculates that the ‘War on Terror’ has
‘directly or indirectly, killed 1 million people in Iraq (5% of
the population), 220 000 in Afghanistan, and 80 000 in Pakistan’.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>CAGE has repeatedly called for, and continues to call for, full
accountability for the perpetrators of such violence, despite
attempts by the media and other interest groups to shroud the full
weight of numbers killed as part of the War on Terror. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>‘The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of
which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and
propagated by the media and major NGOs,’ states the report. ‘And
this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths
in the three countries could be in excess of 2 million, while a
figure less than 1 million is extremely unlikely.’</div>
<div> </div>
<div>More recent war zones such as Yemen and Somalia have not been
included. Nor have the years of economic war on Iraq, when the UN
sanctions regime killed 1.7 million Iraqis.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>This means that the number of civilians killed as a result of
US-led action in the Middle East is much higher, and could in fact
be as high as 4 million people according to a report by <a
href="http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/unworthy-victims-western-wars-have-killed-four-million-muslims-1990-39149394">Nafeez
Ahmed</a>. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Most striking about these figures are their magnitude, and in
the face of their sheer human catastrophe, the West’s continued
procrastination in bringing perpetrators to justice. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Much of the PSR report closely examines various death count
reports. Broadly, it lends support to the 2006 Lancet study, while
calling into question the Iraq Body Count (IBC) study, most cited
by the mainstream media. </div>
<div> </div>
<h3>The power of numbers</h3>
<div>Time and again, the authors remind us of the disparity between
the public perception of the number of dead in Iraq and reality.
In an era where War on Terror propaganda lines the airwaves of all
the world’s media, numbers hold power. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>‘A poll carried out by Associated Press two years ago, found
that on average, US citizens believe that only 9900 Iraqis were
killed during the occupation,’ writes report author Joachim
Guilliard. ‘With such distorted figures, outrage about the war is
hardly to be expected.’</div>
<div> </div>
<div>‘Underreporting of the human toll attributable to ongoing
Western interventions, whether deliberate, or through
self-censorship, has been key to removing the “fingerprints” of
responsibility,’ writes Dr. Robert Gould, director of health
professional outreach and education at the University of
California San Francisco Medical Center. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>It is essential that the world understands the true toll of the
US-led War on Terror on humanity.</div>
<div> </div>
<h3>Problems with the Iraq Body Count (IBC)</h3>
<div>The IBC report most often cited by mainstream mediaconcludes
that 112,000 Iraqis have died before September 2011. However, IBC
figuresare based ondeath tolls reported by English media outlets.
Journalists tally figures registered in morgues, hospitals and by
other authorities, and are themselves under pressure to under
report US atrocities. This method of data collection is known as a
passive method and, according to the PSR report, ‘can only serve
as a minimum’.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>IBC figures do not take into account the fact that local
authorities often underestimate deaths due to pressure from
occupying forces. Many deaths also go unregistered, as families,
in complying with sharia, often bury their dead at home. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>The IBC also has a bias towards the major cities – the city of
al-Qaim, the site of a major US operation is cited as an example.
A physician in the town reported that over 12000 people had fled
and ‘some observers compared the situation to Fallujah in 2004’.
‘For the entire period, however, there is not a single death in
al-Qaim recorded in the IBC database.’</div>
<div> </div>
<div>There are also cases where whole families flee areas where
journalists are posted – most often the major cities like Baghdad
– and also cases where entire families are wiped out: these
factors affect all death count studies, with the result that all
estimates of deaths, including those of the PSR, are more than
likely to be underestimates, rather than overestimates. </div>
<div> </div>
<h3>The Lancet 2006 study</h3>
<div>In comparison to the IBC, the 2006 Lancet study, held up by
numerous experts as being the most reliable to date, estimated
some 655 000 Iraqi dead up to 2006, and extrapolated over a
million dead due to conflict today. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>The Lancet study was based on active methods of
number-gathering. The survey consisted of interviewees going out
to households and actively counting the dead per family. It
selected 1850 Iraqi households across the country, included 13,000
people, and in over 90% of cases, deaths were backed up by a death
certificate. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Even so, the Lancet study has been whitewashed by the
mainstream media, and those who co-ordinated it, increasingly
personally attacked. This, despite the fact that ‘the method
applied here is standard. It was also applied in the DRC, Angola
and Bosnia and was widely accepted’.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The PSR report also comments on the fact that since 2006 – when
most recent studies ended - the situation in Iraq has worsened,
with deaths to do unexploded ordinances and the residue of
chemical weapons (depleted uranium) exacting a critical toll on
the population. It is therefore more likely that the death toll in
Iraq due to conflict is closer to 2 million people.</div>
<div> </div>
<h3>Afghanistan and Pakistan</h3>
<div>For Afghanistan and Pakistan, only the more
under-representative passive methods of counting the dead are
available – and in the case of Pakistan, regional conflicts and in
some cases gang-related deaths blur the line between ‘War on
Terror’ deaths and regional deaths. The numbers also do not focus
on indirect deaths as a result of occupation, which include deaths
due to malnutrition and other health issues. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>In both regions, the PSR report focusses on drone attacks, and
the difficulty in attaining the correct numbers of dead in the
wake of a drone attack – this is due to US forces not declaring
deaths. ‘The US Special Operations Forces operate so secretly that
even the US military has no information about the operations,
never mind about the number of civilian deaths,’ reads the report.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Urbanisation is also more pronounced in Iraq, while conflict
areas in Afghanistan and Pakistan are remote. The indiscriminate
nature of drone attacks, says the PSR report, ‘suggests that the
lion’s share of attacks have been totally random’ and are often
directed at crowds such as wedding parties and funerals – this
goes against the US coined term ‘targeted killings’ which the
report suggests is a lie.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The estimates, therefore, for direct civilian deaths, for both
Afghanistan and Pakistan are conservative, even by the report’s
own admittance.</div>
<h3>The Dirty War on Terror</h3>
<div>The findings of the PSR into Afghanistan and Pakistan are cause
for alarm. As Americans tire of military deployments to Iraq and
Afghanistan, so the Obama administration has responded in kind and
heralded in the second phase of the War on Terror, characterised
by increasingly expanded drone strikes, a broad and judicially
grey definition of‘imminent threat’, males who qualify as
‘militants’ by simply being of military age, and ‘kill lists’
compiled and edited far from judicial scrutiny. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>The Obama administration is riding on what Jeremy Scahill in
his book ‘Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield’ (excerpted <a
href="http://www.thenation.com/article/176869/dirty-wars-continued-how-does-global-war-terror-ever-end">here</a>)
calls ‘the fantasy of a clean war’ perpetrated by drones and drone
operators positioned thousands of kilometres away, sanitised from
their killings.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>‘A 2012 poll found that 83 percent of Americans supported
Obama’s drone program, with 77 percent of self-identified liberal
Democrats supporting such strikes,’ he writes. ‘The Washington
Post/ABC News poll determined that support for drone strikes
declined “only somewhat” in cases where a citizen was the target.’</div>
<div> </div>
<div>A pliant public together with a war-bent administration, has
only to turn to an arms industry that is profit-driven and
expedient in order to make a lethal combination – not only for the
Middle East, but for the world. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>In 2013, Scahill writes, Michael Boyle, a former adviser in the
Obama campaign’s counterterrorism experts group and a professor at
LaSalle University, said the United States drone program was
“encouraging a new arms race for drones that will empower current
and future rivals and lay the foundations for an international
system that is increasingly violent”.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The deaths in the hinterlands of Afghanistan are a warning
light to us all.</div>
<div> </div>
<h3>Perpetual war</h3>
<div><a
href="https://news.vice.com/article/the-justice-department-just-declared-that-the-war-in-afghanistan-is-not-over?utm_source=vicenewstwitter">Statements
made in April</a> by Andrew Warden, a Justice Department
attorney, in response to a legal challenge by Guantanamo detainee
Mukhtar YahiNaji al-Warafi, suggest that the war in Afghanistan
has moved into another phase. In what appears to be a
contradictive sentence, Warden wrote: "Although the United States
has ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, the fighting there
certainly has not stopped.”</div>
<div> </div>
<div>A sworn declaration from Navy Rear Adm. Sinclair M. Harris,
vice director for operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
while Operation Enduring Freedom had ended, Operation Freedom's
Sentinel had begun, which would be “executed under specified rules
of engagement that delineate the circumstances and conditions
under which the U.S. forces may engage …”.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>One only has to look at the military laboratory of Palestine to
know that nothing encourages terrorism more than sustained
occupation. “Many senior coalition and Afghan officials are now
concluding that after nearly 12 years of war, the view of
foreigners held by many Afghans has come to mirror that of the
Taliban,” wrote Matthew Rosenberg two years ago in <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/world/asia/afghan-soldiers-journey-from-friend-to-killer-of-americans.html?hp&_r=1">a
New York Times article</a> tracing the journey of young Afghani
from American ally to Taliban recruit.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The dynamics in Afghanistan are repeated in various guises in
different war ‘theatres’ around the world. Indeed, it is precisely
the relationship between torture and terror that fuels the US-led
War on Terror and makes it self-sustaining. Torture and illegal
detention, combined with sustained military action, whether by
drones or air strikes, work together to fuel terrorism, with the
common casualties of both being unarmed civilians. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>The casualty numbers in the PSR report will seem paltry to our
children if this cycle of violence is not stopped now, through a
return to due process and the boundaries of international law. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>The figures for civilian deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, even though likely underestimates, point to a scale of
human catastrophe that demands all the world’s attention and
action. Such scale of death only makes the path to extremism more
inviting for those who feel marginalised within a system that
seeks to sustain it. </div>
<div> </div>
<h3>CAGE calls for full disclosure and accountability</h3>
<div>‘Decisive for the publishers of this paper is not the exact
number of victims, but their order of magnitude,’ write the
authors of the PSR report. ‘They believe it critical from the
humanitarian aspect, as well as in the interests of peace, that
the public will become aware of this magnitude and that those
responsible in governments and parliaments are held accountable.’</div>
<div> </div>
<div>The facts are clear: two million in Iraq and up to four million
in the region combined, is genocide. The War on Terror is the
greatest threat to our humanity on earth. It is crucial that the
vast amount of resources required to keep it alive, is rather
diverted to truly build nations and combat climate change.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>When 1 million people were displaced and 200,000 killed in
violence in Sudan, the UN was quick to demand sanctions against
the perpetrators – in this case the government of Omar al-Bashir –
even though at the same time, the 2006 Lancet study revealed
already 655,000 dead in Iraq, more than double that of Sudan.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Now, the UN hesitates to hold the perpetrators in the War on
Terror to justice because it cannot, by its very functioning,
stand up to the United States and its allies. As the War on Terror
ticks lethally over into its second phase – that of a perpetual
and far-reaching drone-led global war – the international bodies
that are meant to keep peace are impotent against it. </div>
<div> </div>
<div>CAGE stands for full disclosure of the true toll of the War on
Terror on humanity, and full accountability for all perpetrators.
We call for action on the part of leaders and civilians to stand
united against the cycles of violence that keep it alive. This is
the only way to a more just and equal world where borders are
respected and nations may engage equally, and in peace.</div>
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