$5,000 for your wife and kids
The uncounted thousands who're now dead thanks to the US occupation of Iraq will remain that way. Although the US is compensating their families ($5,000 for one man who saw his wife and three kids die as their house burned to the ground after a US missile struck it) according to this New York Times story (registration required):
It has been nearly a year since the war in Iraq started but American military commanders are just now reckoning with the volume of civilian casualties streaming in for assistance. Twice a week, at a center in Baghdad, masses of grief-weary Iraqis line up, some on crutches, some disfigured, some clutching photographs of smashed houses and silenced children, all ready to file a claim for money or medical treatment. It is part of a compensation process devised for this war.
Outside the room where the captain was saying he was sorry, a long line of people waited. One was Ayad Bressem, a 12-year-old boy scorched by a cluster bomb. His face is covered by ugly blue freckles. Children call him "Mr. Gunpowder."
"I just want something," the burned boy said.
"Come back later," a guard told him. "You'll get some money. But we're busy."
Military officials say they do not have precise figures or even estimates of the number of noncombatant Iraqis killed and wounded by American-led forces in Iraq.
"We don't keep a list," said a Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Cmdr. Jane Campbell. "It's just not policy."
But nonprofit groups in Iraq and the United States say there were thousands of civilian casualties. According to Civic, a nonprofit organization that has surveyed Iraqi hospitals, burial societies and hundreds of families, more than 5,000 civilians were killed between March 20, when the war started, and May 1, when major combat operations ended. "It says a lot that the military doesn't even keep track of these things," said Marla Ruzicka, Civic's founder.