| Submit your comments on this article |
| Afghanistan |
| AP: Number of dead civilians not that high |
| 2002-02-11 |
One factor contributing to inflated estimates was the distortion of casualty reports by the Taliban regime. Afghan journalists have told AP that Taliban officials systematically doctored reports of civilian deaths to push their estimate to 1,500 in the first three weeks of the war in an attempt to galvanize opposition to the bombing. So much for the thousands "estimated" by various fifth columnists. The Taliban inflated civilian casualties? Wotta surprise! Who'da thunkit? I bet dollars to donuts that no left-wing organizations revise their figures about the casualties. Any takers? I'll be very surprised if they do. I only just a day or two ago encountered an anti-war 'thinker' who took the Saddam Hussein claim of 35,000 civilian casualties in the Gulf War completely at face value. (It's a factor of ten higher than Human Rights Watch's estimates.) So Herold's 3767 will be with us for a very long time to come. But I think again they provide a useful marker as one blogger pointed out, a big fluorescent orange cone marking the departure from mainstream traffic over to the lane of unproven propaganda. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |