“We don’t do body counts” -- General Tommy Franks

[Hatalles]

I need to choose a quote to go along with a poem I just finished writing. The piece is to be workshopped tomorrow and I've hit a brick wall -- I'm trying to think of some other quotes from BushCo that have to do with Iraqi body counts and lack of interest or care concerning innocent casualties. Can anyone remember any?

[Bluebear]

1. Certainly the mother of them all

"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths," Barbara Bush said on ABC's "Good Morning America" on March 18, 2003. "Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0429-11.htm

[Hatalles]

2. Wow.

Thanks for the find.

[blogbear]

5. Shock and Awe

Barbara Bush: "beautiful"? "mind"? (Which? Where? When? How? Who??? Barbara Bush???) By the looks and sounds of her those words "beautiful" or "mind" aren't at the tip of ones tongue! Ironic that G W would "push" fitness in America (mental or physical fitness) when obviously that subject wasn't overly stressed at home! I'll bet Barbara would need to be "pushed" to achieve fitness or even more likely would have to be dragged along by that pearl necklace!

[LynnTheDem]

3. Powell, when asked about number of Iraqi deaths, 1991 Gulf War;

"Frankly, that's a number that doesn't interest me very much."

1991 Shia & Kurdish uprisings;

"I'm not sure whose side you'd want to be on," then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said as the uprisings began.

And there was a rethug senator who said last year "We can always just nuke them" but I can't find the dang quote!

[Swamp Rat]

4. Here's some Rummy quotes in a pic:

[gandalf]

6. Here are some sources

The International Herald Tribune
April 2, 2003 Wednesday
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 1

"You know, we don't do body counts," General Tommy Franks said a year ago in response to reports that American bombing killed 1,000 Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters during the Afghan campaign of 2001-2002.


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The Boston Globe, January 7, 2005, Friday THIRD EDITION
SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A13

HEADLINE: THE VICTIMS WE DON'T COUNT

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Iraqi commander Tommy Franks both said, "We don't do body counts." Then, right in our faces, Powell said civilian casualty figures were "relatively low." Central Command spokesman Pete Mitchell hailed the invasion for its "unbelievably low amount of collateral damage and needless civilian death." Paul Bremer, Bush's former civilian reconstruction envoy, said, "We have freed people with one of the great military battles of all time, in a period of three weeks, with almost no collateral damage, very few civilian deaths, and they are now free."

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The Guardian (London) - Final Edition
December 9, 2004
SECTION: Guardian Foreign Pages, Pg. 17

General Tommy Franks, the US commander in the Iraq war last year, spelled it out before the invasion began.
"We don't do body counts," he said, referring to the Iraqis that might be killed in the forthcoming conflict.
His deputies were left to explain why a careful toll of American dead was kept but Iraqi deaths went unrecorded.