2000, but who is counting?

Of course the latest body count milestone of American troops killed in Iraq is tragic. Some of the mainstream press seems to be shedding their self-imposed blindness; but they are doing so largely under cover, using reportage on the "outing of a CIA agent" to insure that when they raise questions about administration duplicity and dissembling, they have a convenient rationale. How about the simple fact that Bush and Company have not only lied from day one but are wholly unrepentent?

The last I knew my insipid hometown newspaper the Democrat & Chronicle (to which I do not subscribe) still refuses to report casualty and death figures for fear that facing reality is somehow unpatriotic. By contrast our local, independent City Newspaper regularly runs the grim numbers and names the names. Here are a couple of early photos (2004) of dead service men and women arriving at Dover AFB. Of course, these had to be pried away from the government in a freedom of information procedure.

These photos are a reminder of some of the costs that the Bush administration has imposed on families in the United States. While we contemplate that, of course, we need to recall that the death toll among Iraqis dwarfs our two thousand. As Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked of the Vietnamese in 1967, the Iraqis surely must see us as "strange liberators."