Punished For Reporting Gulf War Deaths

Posted by lakshmi on January 7, 2003 @ 12:37PM

A Census Bureau demographer saw her career go up in flames just because she issued a report stating that 158,000 Iraqis died as a result of the Gulf War. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, Beth Osborne Daponte "was reprimanded by her government, and saw her report rewritten and her career sidetracked."

According to Daponte's report, 86,194 men, 39,612 women, and 32,195 children died during and immediately after the war as a direct and indirect result of the U.S.-led attack. Of these casualties, 40,000 were Iraqi soldiers in combat. The rest were all civilians. No wonder the Pentagon has refused to release even an estimate of Iraqi deaths.

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