"Where is Pilger's evidence to support his statement that "hundreds " of Iraqis have died in the custody of the British army?"

Excellent question, and one which will make the Pilger fans very angry. How dare you question Pilger?

The simple answer is that Pilger is quoting someone else saying it, thereby passing the responsibility on to a third party. Classic Pilger technique, he can throw his hands up in the air and say "hey they said it, not me, I'm not responsible for backing it up".

But the funny thing about this quote is that is has clearly been garbled and reformulated. What did the original passage look like? Well, when you google excerpts of it, all you find is hundreds of left wing websites requoting it from Pilger. There is no original source online that I can find. I googled Shiner, who is being quoted, and read many other articles about him. Strangely, this shocking allegation never comes up.

And most suspiciously, what word is left outside the quotes? 'killed'. How odd that the most important word in the whole passage is not part of the quote. Did Shiner say killed? Did Pilger? We are deliberately left in the dark.

So classic Pilger. Unexplained, unverifiable, clearly manipulated. Pilger must spend hours carefully crafting each sentence for maximum dishonesty and deniability.

'Mr Danger' claims that neither John Pilger nor any of his 'fans' ever admit to their mistakes. A large, unverifiable and false claim.
John Woods on 7/12 wrote, "Needless to say, Pilger was making this up. No such conversation took place, nor was he able to name the paper or the US city where this allegedly took place."
Why 'needless to say'? Unless JW assumes - not proves – that JP never does anything but makes things up. Another very large and false claim.
How does JW ''know' that this conversation never took place? Did he bug every possible site and find no evidence?

As for millions of deaths, those who are genuinely interested should read World poverty and human rights, by Thomas Pogge, Polity, 2nd edition, 2008:
Every year, 18 million people, a third of all who die, die early from poverty-related causes. In this brilliantly original study, Thomas Pogge, Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, shows how the rich countries’ governments’ policies cause the poverty. The world order they impose ‘foreseeably produces an avoidable massive human rights deficit’.
One reviewer called this book ‘an analysis without villains’, but in fact Pogge shows that our governments, corporations and ‘those who represent us in WTO negotiations and at the IMF’ are true villains. Doing harm foreseeably and avoidably is morally indefensible.
Pogge explains that we cannot excuse ourselves by blaming the poor countries or their rulers because “the national causal factors we most like to highlight – tyranny, corruption, coups d’état, civil wars – are encouraged and sustained by central aspects of the present global economic order.” We are implicated because we let our rulers do this great harm to the poor.

Shame on western mass media and its journalists’ conspiracy of silence when it comes to criticizing the west and Israel and identifying facts from fiction – this is the same media dominated by influential biased pro-Zionism lobbyists that until 1970s no where would allow the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinians’ to be mentioned in the American press - thanks to the efforts made by people like the late Edward Said. Where is the committed investigative journalism today? Where are the western intellectuals today? Mostly, as Chomsky calls them, are press thinkers. Western political speeches have become exercises in creative writing courses. Media and political analysts are bought and sold, warned and rewarded as half a century ago. As Kafka rightly said of his time, ‘falsehood’ has become the ‘order of the day’! Violence even Genocide is no longer a horrific crime but an exciting sport for a vast majority of western television viewers. Our world has changed, but not western politicians and their quest for the return of colonial hegemony and glories.
The US-UK-Israel antagonism towards Iran derives from the most powerful challenge to their hegemony in the Middle East since the collapse of Communism. Iranians are proud and intelligent people who may cope with repression inside Iran but not with double standards imposed on them by foreign powers, in particular by countries regarded by them as morally corrupt and colonial - that is one reason for refusing to cooperate with the US-UK dominated UN - in fact the UN has lost its legitimacy and moral authority since 1948, especially in view of the Israeli attacks on Gaza and Lebanon in recent years, not to mention the US-UK savage military assaults on Iraqis and Afghans. The majority of Iranians both inside and outside Iran strongly argue that Iran like any other country in the world has every right to defend itself, and in this case every reason to try to have a nuclear weapon to defend its 'sovereignty' against the ongoing threats, economic sanctions, psychological wars and assassinations and military incursions orchestrated for over 30 years by the Anglo-American and Israeli forces armed with nuclear weapons and propaganda machines. Iran has every right to defend its existence regardless of what 'government or regime' is in power in Iran.
Furthermore: unlike the former British Prime Minister who took Britain to war, and the British Parliament that long after the British army had slaughtered 100,000s of Iraqis in 2003 then decided to seriously 'question' the legality of the invasion, in Iran it is the Parliament that decides about war, not the President!
And for those emotionally charged, traumatized and paranoid who do not even read/speak our language: the persistent call for war, based on Israel’s 'deliberate' misreading of Israel to ‘be wiped off the map’, is a desperate paranoiac attempt to divert attention from its declining image and the increasing public awareness of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, especially after 2006 attack on Palestinians, since the misused 'Antisemitism' has lost its concept and the deliberate misinterpretation of 'off the map' is an empty excuse taken for granted by US and UK who are desperate to demonstrate their military innovations before Russia and China, meanwhile manifest their battle of ideas to eliminate what Samuel Huntington considered as the most important enemy of the Imperialist west, the Iranian Revolution, otherwise: to say the Nazi regime in Germany should have been wiped off the map does not mean the German public to be wiped out! So why have Israeli politicians continued to repeat this ‘deliberate misinterpretation’ of that clear speech, and why the world media has joined this conspiracy of silence?!
Since Iran’s anti-Imperialism Revolution of 1979 that challenged the Western values and Hegemony in the Muslim World, America has not been able to overcome its humiliating defeat as a great power - it was just a few years after the American historical humiliating defeat fleeing from roof tops in 1975 in Vietnam - neither has the Zionist regime after its genocidal military attacks on Gaza and Lebanon in 2006 and 2008 that exposed the shallow myth of Israel’s ‘invincible’ army.
It is time for the world media to focus on Israel's politicians' 'paranoia' which as with any paranoid patient leads to 'irresponsible' violence, as the world witnessed in Israel's 2006 military attack on civilians! It is time for the world media to show responsibility by 'investigating' and 'reporting', rather than engaging further in the widespread and deliberate campaign of 'misinformation' to report another genocide in order to secure western hegemony on oil resources in the name of democracy.
Iran is a multicultural country and has been so for thousands of years; no matter how much they may hate their government they love their country and never welcome outside forces: the Iraqi invasion of 1980 and the sacrifice the people made set an unbelievable example.
Iranians are not Anti-Semitic; we've lived with Iranian Jews for 1000s of years; we've also shown to be defensive not offensive towards our aggressive neighbours. We welcome rational discourse but not double standards that will be rammed down our throats like an insult to our intelligence.
As a nation we believe in peace because we have seen the disasters of war, a brutal savage war, and after 2 decades our victims of chemical attacks are still dying a slow death in Iran; the chemical bombs provided by your 'honourable' government in 1980s, and with your conspiracy of silence, yes your silent approval - yours, since, as Sartre said, there is no neutrality: one cannot be neutral when women, children and elderly are being slaughtered and burnt alive by a savage army backed by British and American military, intelligence and media support; that was the moral high ground of your Western Enlightenment; yes your Enlightenment, your Free World, your Civilized World. Your media too remained silent, because we Iranians had said no to Imperialism; no to western hegemony, no to insult to our culture and integrity; no to cultural domination; no to political domination; no to economic exploitation and no to client state and no to denying our identity, but you, you the civilized world, you didn't allow us to breathe for a moment; we were still mourning for our fallen friends and children who had said no to western hegemony when you inflicted the war that killed every chance of having a decent democratic society; indeed you murdered our democracy for the second time since your military coup of 1953 that had murdered our hopes, and now you speak of 'democracy', and you speak so eloquently and you speak of ‘justice’ just as your president Bush spoke of bringing to ‘justice’ - the phrase he had stolen from Huston’s movie ‘China Town’; you even speak of 'human rights'! Shame on you and your political and historical amnesia, shame on your media’s conspiracy of silence, shame on you hypocrites, shame on your double standards, shame!

" "But why do you assume that I, and all other "Pilger supporters" are admirers of soviet communism or Josef Stalin ?"

I didn't say all, you did. But KC is one example, as we can now see. "

You're not even bothering to read what other people write, so quite honestly, this cannot be called a debate. I'm not an admirer of Stalin, because he was NOT A BENEVOLENT dictator. And if you had bothered reading my post, you would have realised that.