The Intercept (5/8/20) was the only outlet FAIR found that gave serious coverage to the Pentagon report on civilian deaths.
The Pentagon released in early May its congressionally mandated annual report on the number of civilians the US military has killed. The report concluded that the military was responsible for 132 civilian deaths in all theaters of war, including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Somalia.
Multiple NGOs have published evidence indicating that the real numbers are several times what the Pentagon admitted to. In Afghanistan, for instance, the Pentagon report found that the US was responsible for 108 civilian deaths; a United Nations report (2/22/20) on civilian casualties in Afghanistan found 559 deaths had been caused by “international forces” in the country. As the New York Times (5/7/20) pointed out, the United States is the only foreign country in Afghanistan with soldiers and aircraft that actually conduct offensive operations. This means the Pentagon could be undercounting civilian deaths in Afghanistan by a factor of five.
In Syria and Iraq, the US military said it had killed 22 civilians during its operations against ISIS. Airwars, an organization that tracks civilian harm from military air power, found the US responsible for up to 72 deaths in Iraq and Syria. Here, the Pentagon’s numbers could be off by more than a factor of three.
As Murtaza Hussain, writing for the Intercept (5/8/20)—the only outlet that covered this story with any seriousness—points out, “All this raises the question of who exactly the military has been killing over nearly two decades of war.”
In the days following the release of the report—when the story would be most newsworthy—US media were largely silent on the matter. The Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, LA Times and Boston Globe all neglected to report on or publish editorials regarding the report, according to searches on these papers’ websites. A review of three days’ worth of transcripts from CNN and MSNBC, and searching the sites of ABC, NBC and CBS, shows that none of these TV outlets thought that US responsibility for civilian deaths was worth a brief pause in Covid-19 coverage.
Neither the New York Times‘ headline or subhead (5/7/20) gave any indication that the Pentagon’s numbers were challenged by independent sources.
Among major US print and TV outlets, the New York Times (5/7/20) published the only story we could find on the subject, consisting of just 538 words. Though the headline, “US Military Killed 132 Civilians in Wars Last Year, Pentagon Says,” took the military’s numbers at face value, the piece largely consists of dissenting opinions, including the United Nations, Amnesty International and Airwars. For example, Daphne Eviatar, head of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International, told the New York Times that the Pentagon needed to develop “reliable means for investigating and reporting on who it has killed and injured” during lethal operations.
Unfortunately, the paper failed to treat the serious discrepancies in the numbers as anything important. Why, for example, does the headline feature the Pentagon’s dubious line, rather than call attention to the stark differences from independent numbers? And why did no opinion columnists have anything to say about it?
Yahoo! News (5/7/20) also reported on the story, carrying an AFP story that cited NGO dissenters, but decided it was best consigned to the Sports section.
Perhaps the constant stream of death from our military has made media figures and politicians jaded; the subhead of the New York Times piece noted that “the tally has changed little since the previous year’s report.” As the country approaches two decades of endless war, however, it is more necessary than ever for the public to have a full accounting of the human costs. The media institutions set the agenda for the national conversation, but none of them seem to think that the number of civilian lives claimed in America’s forever wars is a priority, or that the public should give those deaths much thought.
Featured image: The Intercept‘s depiction of the aftermath of a US airstrike in Bagouz, Syria. (photo: Chris McGrath/Getty Image)
Seems like a good place to mention Nancy E. Bernhard’s book Television News and Cold War Propaganda, in which she notes the origins of the American networks during the emergence of the Cold War military posture of the US when it shifted from containment to roll-back theory and the close – one might even say ‘incestuous’ relationship between the (then four, with DuMont network) major networks and the Pentagon.
In her book she details this close relationship and the reliance by these networks upon the pentagon and the US State Department for materials, which the later was happy to provide. The close association between the head of CBS – William S. Paley – and the Military Industrial Complex is well documented and features in Bernhard’s telling as well. What seems worth noting in the context of the print media of today is the same tendency toward centralization and consolidation that existed ab-origine, in the television industry.
Preachin’ to the choir!
Your report does not deal with the question of how the military defines a “civilian death” and what it includes and excludes under that rubric. I have a suspicion that it considers most of the people it kills to be “militants” which is very dubious. My suspicion also is that if a correct definition of civilian was used there would be thousands of casualties of the military.
Does the military ever tell the truth—as in—how many of its own soldiers has it killed? YOU know—- like the burn pits that the military had all over the ME, and how many US soldiers died from the military poisoning the air?
I suppose that the military doesn’t keep track of who they killed, because, they are the enemy and I doubt if the military cares. In fact, if you were to ask today, 5/23/20 they would probably add up the numbers form the date 5+23+20= 48 dead today! The military also uses new math on its received dollars—as these numbers seem to magically disappear. Maybe on Memorial Day, they’ll remember.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just shoo our enemies away like flies? I much doubt it could work.
Wouldn’t it be nice if our government would stop making enemies by murdering children all over the planet? I doubt it can happen while warmongers have billions of dollars with which they buy our government.
At one point during military action in Afghanistan and the ME, the definition of a hostile or military combatant or unlawful combatant, was any male above the age of 12 (citation needed). This came to light during the release of the video (Manning) showing the killing of civilians in a ‘double tap’ hit on a van loaded with people. Double tap refers to the tactic of waiting for persons to come to the aid of those injured and hitting the target as they assist.
In military terms, these casualties would be classified as enemy or unlawful combatants. An egregious misrepresentation of the facts.
Under Obama, Men Killed by Drones Are Presumed to Be Terrorists
by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, in The Atlantic, MAY 29, 2012
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-obama-men-killed-by-drones-are-presumed-to-be-terrorists/257749/
“It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent,” the newspaper reports. “Counter-terrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.”
New York Times and The Atlantic, 2012