Activists planning a die-in for Pioneer Square, to mark the 3,000th soldier killed in Iraq, have called for the action on January 6. They believe the 3,000th death will occur before this Saturday, but there’s a conflicting event in Pioneer Square this Saturday.

From the press release:

Demonstration to Mark 3,000 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq Number exceeds live lost at World Trade Center

People from all walks of life will mark the death of 3,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq by holding a Die-In at Pioneer Courthouse Square on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at noon. The protestors will simply lay down on the ground and pretend to be dead. The idea is to bring attention to death toll in Iraq.

Organizers expects between 100 and 300 people to show up for the demonstration, as opposition to the war is growing. Even Republican Senator Gordon Smith openly questioned the war on the floor of the US Senate, saying that the war strategy is a failure and that war itself might be “illegal.”

The 3,000 mark is significant because it now outstrips the number of people killed in attacks on 9/11/2001 but the real death toll far exceeds that number. It doesn’t include the deaths in Afghanistan, contractor deaths or deaths of people from outside the United States. A recent report published in the British medical journal the Lancet estimated the number of Iraqi deaths at over 600,000.

The theme of the protest is "No more deaths. No more dollars."� The monetary cost of the war could be as high as $2 Trillion according to a paper recently published by the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Blimes, a Harvard professor. Mr Stiglitz told the British newspaper the Guardian that despite the staggering costs laid out in their paper the economists had erred on the side of caution. "Our estimates are very conservative, and it could be that the final costs will be much higher. And it should be noted they do not include the costs of the conflict to either Iraq or the UK." Stiglitz said that one quarter of the war budget would have fixed Social Security for the next seventy-five years, "Or just think what we could have done to stop global warming if we had spent that two trillion developing cheaper photovoltaic cells to convert solar energy into electricity."�