CARL CONETTA
Co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives, Conetta wrote the just-released report “The Wages of War: Iraqi Combatant and Noncombatant Fatalities in the 2003 Conflict.” Conetta said today”Reviewing U.S. combat data, battlefield press reports, and Iraqi hospital surveys, we have found that approximately 13,000 Iraqis (plus or minus 16.5 percent or 2,150) were killed during the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The report covers the period from March 19 to the end of April. Among the Iraqi dead were between 3,200 and 4,300 noncombatants.”
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DAVID ENDERS
Enders is editor of Baghdad Bulletin and has spent much of this year in Iraq. He said today”Iraqis seem to agree attacks will continue as long as there is an occupation force in the country. The Red Cross is just one of the many possible ‘soft targets.’ There have been threats against companies working with the occupation administration just as there have been continued attacks on Iraqi police and other officials whose only identifiable ‘crime’ seems to be compliance with the occupation.”
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NERMIN AL-MUFTI and AMAL AL-KHEDAIRY, [via Rev. Patty Ackerman, ]
Al-Mufti and Al-Khedairy are currently on a speaking tour in the United States. Al-Mufti is an Iraqi journalist who has received fellowships in international journalism from Hungary and the UK. Her writings appear on a regular basis in Al-Ahram, a weekly paper in Cairo. Al-Mufti is also an expert on the history and governance of Iraq. Al-Khedairy is the founder and director of Al-Beit Al-Iraqi (Iraqi House), an arts, cultural and crafts center in Baghdad. Located in her family’s Ottoman-style home, Al-Khedairy opened the center in 1988. After Al-Beit Al-Iraqi was destroyed as a result of the Gulf War, it was re-built and remained the only intellectual center in Baghdad throughout the ’90s. The center hosted exhibitions of contemporary Iraqi artists, concerts, lectures and classes on a regular basis until its destruction by U.S. bombs in the spring of this year. The exhibit on display prior to the recent invasion was an exchange of drawings between Iraqi and Japanese children.

ROBERT BUZZANCO
Associate professor of history at the University of Houston, Buzzanco is author of Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life. He said today”The recent revelations of U.S. atrocities committed by an elite U.S. Army unit known as Tiger Force over several months in 1967 in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, broken by the Toledo Blade, have shocked Americans. The official coverups of atrocities such as My Lai … and those committed by the Tiger Force were never investigated. If history is any guide, the picture we are getting out of Iraq is not ‘just the bad news’ as we are sometimes told, but a very sanitized version of events that leaves out the worst that our government does.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167