This comes from Elisa in San Francisco...
Today's SF Chronicle had a short piece that talked about the high numbers of Iraqi civilians that have been "war casualties." They get their high estimate of 30,000 from Iraq Body Count, and didn't even mention the study by the journal Lancet that calculated Iraqi deaths as around 100,000. They didn't even mention it, though I guess that should not come as a surprise.
Last May, I wrote about an anti-war vigil held by Scott Blackburn of Voices in the Wilderness (now Voices of Creative Nonviolence), to recognize the deaths of the then 1.594 American troops. In his vigil, Scott rang a bell once a minute to mark each death. He was ringing the bell from 8 am on a Friday morning until 10:34 Saturday. I commented that you would need more than 70 days of bell ringing to reach the numbers in the Lancet study, plus those American deaths.
This week, in a way, both have happened.