December 10th is International Human Rights Day.
In Iraq, the US may have celebrated by stopping the count of Iraqi dead civilians. The Associated Press is reporting:
Iraqi Health Ministry officials ordered a halt to a count of civilian casualties from the war and told workers not to release figures already compiled, the head of the ministry's statistics department told The Associated Press on Wednesday.Dr. Nagham Mohsen, the head of the ministry's statistics department, said the order came from the ministry's director of planning, Dr. Nazar Shabandar, who told her it was on behalf of Abbas. She said the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which oversees the ministry, didn't like the idea of the count either.
The US-led forces occupying Iraq refused to comment for the AP report. It is the policy of the United States not to count civilians they kill in combat operations. No one thinks the US forces target civilians, but clearly civilians have been killed in large numbers in Iraq. Their lives deserve to be accounted for.
In the meantime, the US did admit today that another six children were killed by American forces in Afghanistan. Nine children were killed last week.
