For instance, when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in 1975, the Western press applied very loose standards to estimate the dead blamed on these agrarian communists who themselves had been on the receiving end of savage U.S. air bombardments.
Though the Khmer Rouge clearly conducted tens of thousands of executions with little or no judicial justification, they also were blamed for many other deaths because of their drastic decision to largely empty the cities and force people into the countryside.
A typical reference to the Khmer Rouge "genocide" can be found in Wikipedia, which writes "over a million Cambodians, out of a total population of 8 million, died from executions, overwork, starvation and disease." Note the inclusion of indirect deaths from "starvation and disease" problems that also could be laid, in part, at the devastation inflicted by the U.S. military.
However, since the brutal Khmer Rouge understandably had no defenders in the U.S. news media, the death toll could be safely bid up without anyone stepping forward to insist on more precise methodology. Some estimates went as high as three million dead blamed on the Khmer Rouge.
Clearly, the opposite rules apply when the Washington Post's neocons want to minimize the blood on their hands from the butchery in Iraq.
Dismissing the News
The Post's Tuesday editorial dismissed the significance of the nearly 400,000 secret military field reports released by WikiLeaks. Though one might have expected a newspaper to praise this bonanza of ground-level truth, the Post instead mocked the documents as adding little new.
"In fact the mass leak, like a dump of documents on Afghanistan in the summer, mainly demonstrates that the truth about Iraq already has been told," the Post declared.
"The news organizations granted privileged access to the documents, including the New York Times and Britain's Guardian, have focused on reports that Iraqi security forces abused and tortured prisoners; that private security contractors often acted recklessly and violated rules of engagement; and that U.S. soldiers sometimes killed Iraqi civilians at checkpoints.
"All these stories are troubling. But the incidents were extensively reported by Western journalists and by the U.S. military when they occurred."
Instead the Post maintained that the main value in the documents could be found in undercutting the higher estimates of Iraq War dead, placing most of the blame for those deaths on Iraqis, and bolstering U.S. claims that Iran "was behind much of the violence."
"There is evidence that Iran supplied Iraqi militias with rockets, car bombs, surface to air missiles, and roadside explosives that killed or wounded hundreds of Americans," the Post said as it resumed pounding its latest war drum, for "regime change" in Iran.
But the Post's harshest criticism was directed at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who was mocked for believing "his leaks, like the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers will radically change perceptions of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which he says he is trying to end.
"Instead he has offered abundant evidence that there is no secret history of Iraq or Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Wikileaks appears to have put the lives of courageous Afghans at risk, by identifying them as American sources. In Iraq, it has at least temporarily complicated negotiations to form a new government.
"We are all for the disclosure of important government information; but Mr. Assange's reckless and politically motivated approach, while causing tangible harm, has shed relatively little light."
Downing Street Downer
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