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April 20, 2005
We'll Publish Your Photo, But That's It
So we learn a bit more about something that came to light just as Marla Ruzicka was killed. The U.S. military does indeed have some form of tracking for the number of Iraqi civilians killed by their actions:
A week before she was killed by a suicide bomber, humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka forced military commanders to admit they did keep records of Iraqi civilians killed by US forces.Tommy Franks, the former head of US Central Command, famously said the US army "don't do body counts", despite a requirement to do so by the Geneva Conventions.
But in an essay Ms Ruzicka wrote a week before her death on Saturday and published yesterday, the 28-year-old revealed that a Brigadier General told her it was "standard operating procedure" for US troops to file a report when they shoot a non-combatant.
She obtained figures for the number of civilians killed in Baghdad between 28 February and 5 April, and discovered that 29 had been killed in firefights involving US forces and insurgents. This was four times the number of Iraqi police killed.
Can you imagine if all those media outlets that jumped on the story of her death, publishing many pictures of the photogenic, blond Marla hugging children of Iraq and Afghanistan, directed just a small portion of that attention to the cause for which she was willing to put her life on the line?
Posted by zeynep at April 20, 2005 10:36 PM
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