Wednesday, December 10, 2003
For Shame
I exaggerate often. I speak in grandizing, lyrical sentiments a lot of the time. I'm not doing that now when I say that today is the first day I am actually completely ashamed to be an American.
The Coalition Provisional Authority, which is the governing body from the US and her allies in Iraq, has ordered Iraq's health ministry to stop the official count of civillians who were killed during the war and subsequent occupation of Iraq and to destroy the figures gathered thus far.
For those keeping count, the closest we've been able to get so far was an AP count of 3,240 civillians who were killed between March 20 and April 20, but that only surveryed about half of the hospitals, and the totals were supposed to be much higher. This count would have been the accurate one, as it would have surveyed all hospitals.
How hypocritical can we be? We are exhuming the mass graves of Sadaam's terrible and unhumane killings to catalog each death for future prosecution...while at the same time halting a record of the deaths we have caused ourselves, one which would be unbiased by either the US Military or anti-war sentiments. It makes one wonder how high it was going if it garnered this sort of reaction.
I'm literally sick.
PS: I'd post a link, as I originally read this earlier, but now every time I attempt to go to any of the sources with this story, IE crashes due to some sort of stack error. It's strange because the rest of the web is working no problem, even the rest of the AP site and the ABC site and the Yahoo! News site..I've visited 10 sites total..everything works except this story. Conspiracy theorists feel free to ponder.