Last week, 14 members of the same Iraqi family were reportedly killed when their house was hit by a missile. There were no military installations nearby.
On August 11, an unconfirmed number of people died when a 4th-century Christian monastery was bombed as they gathered to watch the solar eclipse. In May, a friend travelling in northern Iraq came upon the remains of a flock of sheep with blast injuries. A shepherd and his family of six had been bombed to death on one day, his sheep the next. Apart from a news-in-brief item in the Guardian, this was not news in Britain.
Such acts of murder are routine, carried out by US and British pilots over Iraq. “We do not target civilians” and “pilots are defending themselves”, say the foreign office. It is a deceit reminiscent of the long-running lie that Hawk aircraft were not operating in East Timor. Mostly, lying is unnecessary, as Orwell pointed out in the preface to Animal Farm, when “inconvenient facts [are] kept dark”. A recent Unicef report that child deaths in Iraq had doubled to half a million briefly broke the silence, presumably because it was “measured” – that is, it usefully shifted the blame a few centimetres from the Anglo-American- led sanctions to the Iraqi regime.
Numerous other studies on the suffering of the civilian population of Iraq have been ignored or buried. A Unicef report in 1997, which left no doubt that the malnourishment of a million children was caused by “the impact of sanctions”, was confined largely to an article in the Economist. In 1995, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation concluded that
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 24 Aug 1999