25,000 killed in Iraq > Full-scale air war?

BBC News
Last Updated: Tuesday, 19 July, 2005, 15:46 GMT 16:46 UK

'25,000 civilians' killed in Iraq

Nearly 25,000 civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003, a report says. The dossier, based on media reports, says US-led forces were responsible for more than a third of the deaths.

The survey was carried out by the UK-based Iraq Body Count and Oxford Research Group - which includes academics and peace activists.

SOURCE - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4692589.stm

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In the incredibly revealing words of journalist Seymour Hersh from his terrifyingly brilliant talk at Berkeley:

"I've been doing an alternate history of the war, from inside, because people, right after 9/11, because people inside — and there are a lot of good people inside — are scared, as scared as anybody watching this tonight I think should be, because [Bush], if he's re-elected, has only one thing to do, he's going to bomb the hell out of that place."

"He's been bombing the hell of that place — and here's what really irritates me again, about the press — since he set up this Potemkin Village government with Allawi on June 28 — the bombing, the daily bombing rates inside Iraq, have gone up exponentially."

"There's no public accounting of how many missions are flown, how much ordnance is dropped, we have no accounting and no demand to know. The only sense you get is we're basically in a full-scale air war against invisible people that we can't find, that we have no intelligence about, so we bomb what we can see."

SOURCE - http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/10/11_hersh.shtml

So, it could be 25,000, it could be 100,000, it could be... anything.

Peace, < (NOW!!!)
BK

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BONUS: Word Of The Day

Word of the Day for Thursday June 17, 2004

Potemkin village \puh-TEM(P)-kin\, noun:

An impressive facade or display that hides an undesirable fact or state; a false front.

When will the West have the guts to call Russia what it really is: a semi-totalitarian state with Potemkin village-style democratic institutions and a fascist-capitalist economy?
--"Western Investors Defend a Potemkin Village," Moscow Times, January 9, 2004

It's a lie, a huge Potemkin village designed to give North Korea the appearance of modernity.
--Kevin Sullivan, "Borderline Absurdity," Washington Post, January 11, 1998

Unless U.S. imperial overstretch is acknowledged and corrected, the United States may someday soon find that it has become a Potemkin village superpower -- with a facade of military strength concealing a core of economic weakness.
--Christopher Layne, "Why the Gulf War Was Not in the National Interest," The Atlantic, July 1991

The "evil empire" had been a mighty facade at least since Kruschev, a termite-infested Potemkin village congenitally incapable of regeneration.
--Frank Pellegrini, "Reagan At 90: Still A Repository For Our American Dreams," Time, February 6, 2001

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A Potemkin village is so called after Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, who had elaborate fake villages built in order to impress Catherine the Great on her tours of the Ukraine and the Crimea in the 18th century.

SOURCE - http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/archive/2004/06/17.html