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Topic: 655,000 Iraqis killed since invasion
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JKR
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7904
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posted 12 October 2006 09:44 PM
quote: Originally posted by VanLuke: Not even the most rabid US neocon I read has suggested that Saddam killed anywhere near this number of people.
Actually, the Bush Administration claims that Saddam's regime was responsible for a similar amount of carnage. The White House - Life Under Saddam Hussein
quote: Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam's 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds.... According to Human Rights Watch, "senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south." ... "Over the past five years, 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition and disease, preventively, but died because of the nature of the regime under which they are living."
It's interesting how the Bush Administration are such good number crunchers when it supports their propoganda.
From: Vancouver | Registered: Jan 2005
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eau
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 10058
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posted 12 October 2006 11:26 PM
I had this in my favorites. USAID was busy putting this about and then... quote: PM admits graves claim 'untrue' Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor Sunday July 18, 2004 The Observer Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered. The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.
In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.' On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.' The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.
If Google is your friend there are numerous reports of the Forensics team from Denmark and the UK who left Iraq after a year without finding much of anything to support the American claims in the run up to war.
From: BC | Registered: Aug 2005
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Briguy
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1885
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posted 13 October 2006 04:23 AM
Keep in mind that this number is a statistical calculation, and represents the midpoint of a range of possible numbers. As callous as that sounds. The Guardian article lists the 'lowest number in the range' as 392,979. I presume that the low number is the 90% probable number. Assuming an even distribution, the high number in their range (10% probability: which is unreported in the MSM, even the Guardian) would be somewhere near 900,000 people.The fact that the Lancet researchers can't narrow the range of the dead to range spanning less than 500,000 really indicates how chaotic a situation the US, the UK, and junior partners are fostering in Iraq. The fact that Bush, Cheney and Blair are still smiling through all this, saying we can't cut and run, shows just how little they care for human life.
From: No one is arguing that we should run the space program based on Physics 101. | Registered: Nov 2001
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VanLuke
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7039
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posted 13 October 2006 08:08 AM
quote: Actually, the Bush Administration claims that Saddam's regime was responsible for a similar amount of carnage.
Even if true we haven't seen the light at the end of the tunnel yet. The killing continues. Don't forget to add the roughly 750,000 Iraqis - 500,000 of whom were children - killed by sanctions. Madeline Albright is proud of having done "the right thing", as she recently admitted. So with The Lancet's low point it means over a million Iraqis killed due to western intervention. At the high point it's almost 2 million. Btw, the very creation of Iraq - putting three "incompatible ethnic groups" within one state was to suit Biritsh and US imperialist (mainly oil) interests. The slicing off of Kuweit was done almost as an afterthought by the British. How long does one go back to acknowledge wrong? The Holocaust happened over fifty years ago and the Germans are still reminded of their misdeeds(and everybody should be). The Brits and Yanks created Iraq - and hence sowed the seeds for the unfolding tragedies - 90 years ago. Is that too long to acknowledge responsibility (not that either Yanks or Brits are in the habit of doing that)? [ 13 October 2006: Message edited by: VanLuke ]
From: Vancouver BC | Registered: Oct 2004
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VanLuke
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7039
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posted 13 October 2006 03:32 PM
quote: any SOB will do
....as long as he's our SOB ... just like Saddam used to be before he lost it. ... And a lot of business that cost US
From: Vancouver BC | Registered: Oct 2004
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Tom Vouloumanos
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3177
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posted 17 October 2006 08:00 AM
EXCESS DEATH IN IRAQ quote: Most of what we have heard reported, prior to this survey, had been deaths in Baghdad, with headlines like "50 Bodies Found in Baghdad" and "Baghdad Morgue Reporting 100 Bodies per Day." They are stories that have failed to take into account the rest of the country, although Baghdad is roughly 20% of the total population of Iraq. What has been happening in the rest of the country is a question that the latest survey answers: that there are approximately 500 unexpected violent deaths every single day throughout Iraq. The survey found that 87% of the deaths had occurred during the occupation rather than during the initial invasion, and that 31% of them were a consequence of attacks and air strikes by the coalition forces. It was no surprise that Mr. Bush dismissed the findings of the study. He did not consider the report credible and said that the methodology used was "pretty well discredited." I'm sure that the feeble-minded Mr. Bush took a very close look at the methodology used in the study.
The bulk of deaths are due to the occupation and not the actual invasion. Wherever the numbers are exactly, the statisitcal ball park figure seems to be somewhere between 400,000 and 900,000. With the 1 million people who died during the US-UK ("UN") sanctions on Iraq during the 90's, not to mention the birth defects and pre-natal deaths due to Gulf War 1 (caused by depleted uranium and other bombing-related pollution), and with the ongoing occupation and descent into all out civil war, it seems that years from now historians will be taling about an Iraqi Holocaust caused by the (Anglo-American Empire. quote: For over a year now many Iraqis have been referring to what is happening in their country as genocide. With over 500 Iraqis being killed every single day as a direct result of the occupation, it is difficult to argue with them.
From: Montréal QC | Registered: Oct 2002
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sgm
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5468
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posted 17 October 2006 04:00 PM
Apparently, this report has clinched National Post columnist Jonathan Kay's judgment that the Iraq war has been a disaster: quote: It's been three years and seven months since the United States invaded Iraq. But only last week did I become definitively convinced that the war I once cheered on was a failure -- that it made the world a more dangerous place overall.As I saw things in early 2003, there were three good reasons for deposing Saddam Hussein, any one of which, by itself, was sufficient to justify his ouster: (1) Saddam was a maniac who had weapons of mass destruction; (2) The creation of a democracy in the heart of the Muslim Middle East would transform the region by firing a fatal crack into the monolith of Arab tyranny; and (3) Putting the wrecking ball to Saddam's dungeons would end the wanton slaughter of Iraq's long-suffering people. Turns out I was zero for three. [snip] And then, last week, the third and final zero: a new study of 1,849 randomly selected, geographically representative Iraqi families conducted by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. These 1,849 families had collectively suffered a staggering 547 violent deaths since the American invasion, a number almost eight times higher than one would expect based on pre-invasion death rates. If you extrapolate that increase to the whole of Iraq, you come up with a total of about 600,000 violent deaths. [snip] George Orwell once wrote that thinking people should keep a journal of their thoughts so they can track of all the discredited views they once held. In the case of a newspaper columnist such as myself, that isn't necessary -- because they're all there on the yellowing page. You can't hide from your mistakes. All you can do is own up to them and apologize. And so, for whatever it's worth to anybody, mea culpa.
Link.
From: I have welcomed the dawn from the fields of Saskatchewan | Registered: Apr 2004
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VanLuke
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7039
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posted 18 October 2006 11:59 AM
Tom Vouloumanos wrote: quote: The bulk of deaths are due to the occupation and not the actual invasion.
Just how do you seperate the two? Moreover, many voices warned of the unfolding tragedy before the invasion. [ 18 October 2006: Message edited by: VanLuke ]
From: Vancouver BC | Registered: Oct 2004
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Briguy
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1885
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posted 23 October 2006 05:43 AM
IBC uses different methods to arrive at their numbers. This is a clash of research methods, and frankly it appears that the IBC people don't understand that the 655,000 number is simply the midpoint of a range of estimates (from 400,000 - 900,000, roughly).IBC actually admits that their own range (44000 - 50000) is low, because they don't include unreported deaths, nor deaths that can't be verified by two independant sources. Also: quote: "Does your count include deaths from indirect causes?" Each side can readily claim that indirectly-caused deaths are the "fault" of the other side or, where long-term illnesses and genetic disorders are concerned, "due to other causes." Our methodology requires that specific deaths attributed to US-led military actions are carried in at least two reports from our approved sources. This includes deaths resulting from the destruction of water treatment plants or any other lethal effects on the civilian population. The test for us remains whether the bullet (or equivalent) is attributed to a piece of weaponry where the trigger was pulled by a US or allied finger, or is due to "collateral damage" by either side (with the burden of responsibility falling squarely on the shoulders of those who initiate war without UN Security Council authorization). We agree that deaths from any deliberate source are an equal outrage, but in this project we want to only record those deaths to which we can unambiguously hold our own leaders to account. In short, we record all civilians deaths attributed to our military intervention in Iraq.
The IBC project is arguably more important, though, because each death that they record is directly attributable to the criminal occupation by the US, UK, and junior partners.
From: No one is arguing that we should run the space program based on Physics 101. | Registered: Nov 2001
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Québécois in the North
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 10727
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posted 23 October 2006 12:22 PM
655 000 that's alot of corpses indeed, but at least they're getting coverage in The Lancet. Maybe a glossy hemoglobin painted centerfold in the next Adbusters too.I wonder who's performing the bodycount in northern Uganda ? According to a UN estimate of july 2005, the civil war kills a thousand Ugandeses each week. And this has been going on for ten years. Olara Utunnu, an ex-UN special rapporteur for children in war zones, has been quoted using the G-word to describe this situation. "The humanitarian catastrophe in northern Uganda is a genocide", he said. "The intention is, in effect, to totaly extermine a human group". The media interest in this particular genocide, however, hasn't kicked in much yet. Why? Oh yeah! it's not oil-driven nor US-led. [ 23 October 2006: Message edited by: Québécois in the North ] [ 23 October 2006: Message edited by: Québécois in the North ]
From: Yellowknife | Registered: Oct 2005
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jeff house
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 518
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posted 23 October 2006 02:13 PM
Let us imagine we had a leader. Let us call him "Scriblet".Scriblet proposes that we drive off a cliff in a bus containing numerous babblers. We protest. Scriblet claims to know best. We scream: Noooo!!But Scriblet won't listen. Scriblet goes right ahead, and drives off the cliff. Then, as we fall to our doom, Scriblet turns to us and says: quote: So whats the answer, we can't go back in time and reverse what happened
But there is one partial response we would take in those circumstances. Get rid of Scriblet.
From: toronto | Registered: May 2001
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Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594
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posted 23 October 2006 02:25 PM
There were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. And the means for Saddam to wage chemical and biological warfare was provided by the west.I think pulling out of both Afghanistan and Iraq would save lives. But I don't think the decision to do something like that is for our weak and subordinate colonial administrators in Ottawa to make. They've made "commitments." We are constantly reminded by our two old line parties of how impotent they are to make these kinds of executive decisions all by themselves. Tiny Belgium has balls. They accused Bush of war crimes. What do our guys do but hold a knife to their own throats over softwood lumber and hope the serfs are too broke to pay attention. [ 23 October 2006: Message edited by: Fidel ]
From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004
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Briguy
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1885
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posted 24 October 2006 04:37 AM
quote: Originally posted by scribblet: So whats the answer, we can't go back in time and reverse what happened so what do we do?How about finding Saddam innocent and letting him go back to sort them all out, its Muslim killing Muslim for the most part. Would pulling out now make it all better?
Fuck off. Nobody wants Saddam back. In case you didn't notice, violent occupations tend to beget violence. Your solution to spilt milk is to pour more milk on the floor in the hopes that the ever-increasing milk puddle will hide the original spill.
From: No one is arguing that we should run the space program based on Physics 101. | Registered: Nov 2001
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arborman
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4372
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posted 24 October 2006 10:01 AM
quote: Originally posted by Briguy: Keep in mind that this number is a statistical calculation, and represents the midpoint of a range of possible numbers. As callous as that sounds. The Guardian article lists the 'lowest number in the range' as 392,979. I presume that the low number is the 90% probable number. Assuming an even distribution, the high number in their range (10% probability: which is unreported in the MSM, even the Guardian) would be somewhere near 900,000 people.
I don't get it. Why do you assume that the low number is 90% probable? Wouldn't it be equally as probably/improbable as the high number? Are you not assuming a bell curve of probability, meaning that the 655000 number is the most likely (50%)? If not, why not? Is there something I've missed in the methodology? In fact, on rereading the article I found this quote: quote: "Thus they calculate that 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of the invasion. It is an estimate and the mid-point, and most likely of a range of numbers that could also be correct in the context of their statistical analysis."
[ 24 October 2006: Message edited by: arborman ]
From: I'm a solipsist - isn't everyone? | Registered: Aug 2003
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scribblet
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4706
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posted 26 October 2006 06:31 AM
I wonder how accurate the Lancet's figure really are. Counting Iraq's dead two methods
Amir Attaran and Edward Mills, National Post Published: Thursday, October 26, 2006 To put the new figure in context: 655,000 deaths is over 200 times the number of people killed during the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. -snip- Why the disagreement over the number of civilian deaths? There are basically two ways of counting the war dead -- active and passive. In the active method, which was used for the Lancet study, researchers fan out and sample random clusters of homes, interviewing occupants about deaths in the family. This kind of demographic survey is not unusual -- hundreds of such studies are done each decade, tracking the epidemiology of all manner of diseases. In the case of the Johns Hopkins and Iraqi teams, they interviewed 12,801 people in 47 clusters. Doing this, they found 82 deaths pre-invasion, and 547 post-invasion -- a huge increase, with most of the increase in deaths occurring among young men, as is typical in civil wars. The researchers extrapolated from their sample, as pollsters do, to all of Iraq. They also verified the respondents' claims of deaths, where possible, with death certificates. They thereby concluded that the post-war excess civilian deaths are 655,000. Since asking about the dead in a war zone is trickier than, say, quizzing voters in downtown Toronto about their voting intentions, the researchers concede the margin of error to their study is higher than usual, ranging from 392,979 at the low end to 942,636 at the high end. Now compare this to the passive method, which Iraq's government uses, and which critics of the Lancet study invoke in support of their position. The Iraqi Health Ministry counts civilian deaths reported to hospitals and morgues. If a body is brought to the morgue, the death is counted. But if a dying person is brought to hospital and the family takes the body home for burial, the death is counted in a second set of statistics, which, oddly, the Health Ministry does not amalgamate with the first. (The UN was doing this for them, until Iraqi officials cut off the release of casualty data last week.) Further, the health ministry's counts are biased downward, because many Iraqis are scared to venture too far outdoors during a civil war, and because of the harrowing gauntlet of government and insurgent roadblocks one must pass to get to a hospital. This explains why data collected through passive methods in a place like Iraq will inevitably be biased downward...... more here http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=41e61702-d141-4fe8-9447-4788f8e15edb
From: Canada | Registered: Nov 2003
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oktibbeha_publius
recent-rabble-rouser
Babbler # 13417
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posted 27 October 2006 10:36 PM
Having spent 14 months in Iraq, I came to know the Iraqi people, and became very close to many of them. It saddens me to know that so many have died. However, to lay the blame for all of the dead at the feet of the US is unfair and demonstrates your political bias, and brings your objectivity into question. I'm not a statistician (?sp), but by far the biggest majority of these deaths can be blamed on the Bathists, foreign terrorists and secular militias. Hindsight being 20/20 maybe we shouldn't have invaded. But we did. 300K to 600K Iraqis have died. Nearly 3K US military personnel have died. Tragic....but the question as always must be where do we go from here? Stay the course, doing everything we can to reestablish a country that can govern and defend itself or pull out and let the secular militias slaughter the innocents on a massive scale? Let the Iranian backed Shiites and the Saudi and Syrian backed Sunni slaughter each other by the millions. Do not be deceived believing that this culture values life as you do. The winner of the secular battle will be as ruthless as Sadam ever was. Being a soldier sworn to my duties, I will go when and where the duly elected leaders of this great nation send me. I will perform my duties as professionally as God gives me the wisdom to see it. The US Military is not slaughtering innocents out of spite or on purpose. War is hell, and we are at war. Regardless of what has transpired, our morale obligation is to establish security as best we can. The other guy's mae culpa is meaningless, and it serves no purpose to say I told you so. George Bush can not be reelected. Where do we go from here? I say "Stay the course". I mean that in the way George Bush meant it. We must commit ourselves to staying in Iraq until we can secure our objectives of establishing a country capable of governing itself and defending itself. We can not afford to "Redeploy" is it is referred to now. We can not afford to leave an ineffectual state dominated by Iranian power which will provide a platform and oil wealth for future attacks against the US. Sadly, many more Iraqis will die at the hands of the foreign terrorists and secular death squads before this accomplished.
From: South | Registered: Oct 2006
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Briguy
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1885
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posted 30 October 2006 07:04 AM
Better dead than Red, eh? Hindsight is 20/20, which is why most observers looked at the criminal lesson that was Vietnam when predicting the instability, chaos, insurgency, and scale of death that could occur in Iraq.My prewar estimates were much lower, sadly. I thought maybe 100,000 Iraqis would be killed and maybe 2,000 US Patriots. I couldn't even come close to comprehending the true horror of a full scale occupation and a simmering civil war. Nor could my imagination come up with war crimes like Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, or Haditha. Good job, soldier. Keep the peace.
From: No one is arguing that we should run the space program based on Physics 101. | Registered: Nov 2001
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Noise
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 12603
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posted 30 October 2006 09:13 AM
quote: I'm not a statistician (?sp), but by far the biggest majority of these deaths can be blamed on the Bathists, foreign terrorists and secular militias.
It was the US led invasion that provided the means for above to cause these deaths (were they happening prior?). Yes, it is unfair to blame the US entirely, but they gave the means to these groups to do as they do. The 20/20 hindsight that I take from Iraq was how incredibly poorly planned and researched the invasion was before jumping headlong into it. Bush has admitted that he wasn't even aware there was a difference between Sunni and Shi'a (they're all dirty muslim terrorists afterall). The second 20/20 hindsight to take away from this is the assumption that democracy solves problems and brings freedom/peace. The American style of Democracy that has been brought to Iraq requires about the same level of consumerism for it to be maintained ^^. Without an informed electrate voting on the issues, you simply get voters lining up to be counted for what faction they belong to (How many people voted for the candidate that was the same religion as opposed to basing their vote on an issue?). So all you get is the majority implementing their will on the minority (hence a civil war.. Espcially when the now Sunni minority was previously the ones in power. I guess one way of ensuring your victory in a democracy would be killing as many of those not voting for you ^^). The second portion of the American Democracy is the constitution as interpretted by judges to protect the minority from the majority (hence whenever the judges protect the minority, the majority calls them liberal judges trying to legislate from the bench ^^). That constitution is flawed an unimplementable at this time. This assumption that our flawed ass style of democracy will bring happy freedom along with the rest of our (far far superior) values defiantely needs to be reevaluated. These deaths... This incomprehensible number of dead... is a direct result of assumption, misinformation, and our huge superiority complex. The attempt to blame the deaths "Bathists, foreign terrorists and secular militias" is pure stupidity as it's a direct result of pathetically smug Western policy that we should have seen coming a mile away. To get a Democratic nation such as ourselves to suport a war, you need such a massive media campaign to coax your population into the war... Much much more effort was spent on getting us to go to war than on our target, better yet it appears the leaders that be started to beleive their own propaganda campaign. [ 30 October 2006: Message edited by: Noise ]
From: Protest is Patriotism | Registered: May 2006
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