John Pilger, lying again

For those of you fortunate enough to have avoided Pilger's dreary far-leftist drivel in the past, you would have missed classic lies such as these:
[Pilger] claimed that in the first Gulf War, no less than 250,000 Iraqis were killed. He cited the Medical Educational Trust of London as his source. In 2003, the Australian journalist Tony Horwitz checked this out. He did a search of every English-language newspaper since 1990 but could find no mention of this trust or its alleged report—except in articles with the byline John Pilger. Studies by both Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. and the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London put the plausible death toll, of both soldiers and civilians, at between 10,000 and 20,000 dead.
So it's no surprise that his latest effort is, to be blunt, a crock. The following lies are put forward by Pilger:
Blair brought home to this country his and George W Bush's illegal, unprovoked and blood-soaked adventure in the Middle East.
Erm, wrong.
There were no suicide bombers in Iraq until Blair and Bush invaded. What about Palestine? There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an accredited war criminal sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power.
Actually, suicide bombings began in 1994 in Israel. Ariel Sharon didn't become Prime Minister until 2001. As for suicide bombings in Iraq, I guess Pilger doesn't count Saddam's funding of suicide bombers.
In the 1991 Gulf "war", American and British forces left more than 200,000 Iraqis dead and injured, and the infrastructure of their country in "an apocalyptic state", according to the United Nations.
Of course, Pilger doesn't mention that 200,000 is the highest of the serious estimates, and this figure is mostly comprised of dead Iraqi soldiers, not civilians.
In 2001, in revenge for the killing of 3,000 people in the twin towers, more than 20,000 Muslims died in the Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan. This was revealed by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian but never became news, to my knowledge.
That's because other figures like 1,201 from a Los Angeles Times study are more plausible. A popular study that claimed around 4,000 had died was shown to be full of double counting and other huge errors.
More than 100,000 Iraqi men, woman and children have been killed not by suicide bombers, but by the Anglo-American "coalition", says a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet, and largely ignored.
The UN's study, which had 26.7 times the survey size, gave a far lesser figure. And Pilger shows he hasn't even read the Lancet study, which didn't include deaths in Fallujah, and was only counting additional deaths in the first place. As for it being "largely ignored", it's been in every major newspaper in the world, multiple times over:

IHT, Washington Post, CNN, more CNN, BBC, Slate, CBC, New Scientist, Time Magazine, NZ Herald, The Economist, Washington Times, Bloomberg, Weekly Standard, OC Register, News 24, New York Times, Boston Globe, Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, AM, USA Today, LA Times, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, The Age, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald... I could go on and on and on, but I think you get the point. Most news outlets covered it; conservative outlets kept covering it, because they were busy debunking it.

John Pilger's reputation for ignoring the facts preceeds him - this sort of "anti-Western-civilisation first, facts shaped to suit" argument is fairly typical for him. However it's a shame his editors don't force him to do any fact checking. For someone purporting to be a journalist, these sins are unforgivable.

(Via Damian Penny. Cross-posted to The House Of Wheels.)

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