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More Civilian Casualties Not Reported in Iraq

The following post comes from the New York Times web site and Schott's Vocab column by Ben Schott. To see more of his columns go to:htt://schott.blogs.nytimes.com.

February 2, 2011, 10:38 am

The Car Crashes of War

Julian Assange's term for the, largely unreported, low-death-toll killings that, it is claimed, constitute the bulk of civilian casualties in conflicts such as Iraq.

Interviewing Julian Assange in The Observer, Ed Vulliamy reflected on his first meeting with the WikiLeaks head, shortly before the October 2010 release of "what was then the biggest single leak of official material in history, pertaining to the war in Iraq":

In partnership with Iraq Body Count – considered to be (and criticised by the left for being) the more exacting and forensic of groups seeking to quantify the toll of Tony Blair's and George W Bush's war – WikiLeaks revealed, via the Guardian and other outlets of its choosing, 16,000 previously unrecorded civilian deaths between January 2004 and the end of 2009, recorded in thousands of leaked US army reports.

Assange had, among many other interesting things to say, a cogent observation about warfare: "What these documents show is that the bulk of civilian deaths are the 'car crashes' of war, not the 'bus crashes' of war that are picked up by the media. It is the vast number slain in incremental events killing one, two or three people which go unreported, as opposed to the deaths of 20 or more, which are reported. The number of 'small kills' is huge – a family here, a kid there, someone in a house, someone caught in a crossfire. It is the everyday squalor of war that takes the life of most."