“The UK government should try to minimize civilian casualties, rather than the reporting of them,” Independent

LONDON, April 4 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – A bi British newspaper Friday, April 4, used its editorial to hit back at UK Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon who, on Thursday, tried to discredit the paper’s account of heavy civilian casualties among the Iraqis.

“Hoon is a smooth politician who relies on nuance to do his dirty work. He did not say, in plain terms, that he disbelieves The Independent's accounts of civilian casualties sustained in Iraq. He did not say that Robert Fisk, our award-winning reporter, is a willing dupe of Saddam Hussein's regime. He simply allowed those suggestions to hang, unspoken, in the House of Commons chamber Thursday,” wrote the Independent.

"A piece of a cruise missile was handed to the journalist," Hoon said, to explain how the paper’s renowned correspondent, Robert Fisk, was able to publish the serial number of the missile likely to have been responsible for the second Baghdad marketplace explosion last Friday, which killed about 62 civilians.

“Fisk has a proud record of reporting what he sees. He has traveled to dangerous places and described unflinchingly what is happening. He prefers to speak to the people caught up in conflicts rather than report what the generals, politicians and spokesmen are saying,” the paper lashed back.

“Any careful reader of his reports from Iraq would know that he holds no brief for the Saddam regime. Indeed, he was among the first journalists to report Saddam's use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war.

“Anyone who read his reporting of the Kosovo war will remember that, when NATO headquarters denied that its aircraft had hit civilian convoys, he went to the spot on the ground where the missiles fell and found the markings on casings of U.S. munitions. NATO spokesmen later admitted responsibility,” the editorial went on.

Exaggeration, Half-truth, Backtracking

“Hoon's handling of the news from this war has been characterized by exaggeration, half-truth and backtracking. It was Hoon who claimed on BBC Radio that local people had "certainly" risen up in Basra.

“When asked how he knew, he blustered. It does not seem to have been wholly true. It was Hoon who claimed that chemical suits found by advancing coalition troops showed "categorically" that Saddam was preparing to use chemical weapons, to be contradicted by Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, Chief of the Defense Staff, who warned against jumping to conclusions.

“Thursday night, the MoD (Ministry of Defense) was forced to concede that an estimate of PoW numbers given only hours earlier by Hoon was wildly inaccurate,” the paper said.

“Yesterday's innuendo against this newspaper and our correspondent was a miserable attempt to brush aside unwelcome truths. This is no way to reassure a doubtful British public that the Government genuinely wants to minimize civilian casualties, rather than simply the reporting of them,” it concluded.

Two days after the launch of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, Fist toured Baghdad hospitals to get a hands-on experience of the situation there after deadly two nights of air strikes, exposing the barbarism and heinous crimes of the U.S.-led occupation forces against the Iraqi civilians.

Less than a month before the eruption of the invasion, he also predicted “U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would definitely be subject to a lot of censorship from the U.S. media itself, let alone the U.S. wartime administration”.