The U.S. government has caused the deaths, as of September, of as many as 100,000 Iraqi civilians. This report appeared in the Lancet, Oct. 29, an internationally respected medical journal. The suggestion here is that for the U.S. political leadership to inflict murder and mayhem in our name is to violate the principles by which we live and basic standards of human decency.

We observe that, by and large, U.S. newspapers – yours included – and television news have all but ignored the story of civilian deaths in Iraq. The coverage has been incomplete and sporadic. The result, we fear, is that far too many U.S. citizens are unaware of the harm their government is doing. We think of those citizens of Germany, who, on being asked about the murder of Jews during the Nazi era, said, “we did not know.”

Why are news reports on these matters so thin? What accounts for an apparent lack of curiosity? We fear that the idea is about, especially among political leaders, that some people have less worth than others. These would be the ones with hard-to-pronounce names, or dark skin, or who are poor, and not one of us.

We believe in one great principle upon which our nation was founded: “All men [humankind] are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

We urge that your paper do what a free press in a democracy should do: search out and give people the facts. If their nation is falling short of its promise – as we think it is – they need to know.

Dud Hendrick

Deer Isle

This letter was also signed by 50 other people