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[Big_Bird]

One in 40 Iraqis 'killed since invasion'

US and Britain reject journal's finding that death toll has topped 650,000

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Thursday October 12, 2006
The Guardian


Corpses of Shia family members strewn across a road after they were killed by suspected insurgents near Baquba, Iraq. Photo: Helmiy al-Azawi/Reuters

The death toll in Iraq following the US-led invasion has topped 655,000 - one in 40 of the entire population - according to a major piece of research in one of the world's leading medical journals.
The study, produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and published online by the Lancet, claims the total number of deaths is more than 10 times greater than any previously compiled estimate.

The findings provoked an immediate political storm. Within hours of its release, George Bush had dismissed the figures. "I don't consider it a credible report," he told reporters at the White House. "Neither does General Casey [the top US officer in Iraq], neither do Iraqi officials."

The Foreign Office also cast doubt on the findings, stating that the government preferred to rely on the body count of the Iraqi ministry of health, which recorded just 7,254 deaths between January 2005 and January 2006.

But the US researchers have the backing of four separate independent experts who reviewed the new paper for the Lancet. All urged publication. One spoke of the "powerful strength" of the research methods, which involved house-to-house surveys by teams of doctors across Iraq.

The Johns Hopkins researchers published an earlier study in the Lancet in October 2004, which caused similar shock waves. They say the new work validates the old and shows an alarming escalation in violent deaths.

Nearly a third of the deaths (31%) were ascribed to the coalition forces. Most of the deaths - 601,000 out of 655,000 - were due to violence and of those, 56% were caused by gunshot wounds. Air strikes, car bombs and other explosions accounted for a further 13-14%.

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[Big_Bird]

This terrible misadventure has killed one in 40 Iraqis

The government will do all it can to discredit the latest estimate of civilian casualties since the invasion: 650,000

Richard Horton
Thursday October 12, 2006
The Guardian


Many people refused to believe the Lancet report in 2004 from a group of American and Iraqi public-health scientists who surveyed homes across the country and found that about 100,000 additional Iraqi deaths had taken place since the coalition invasion in March 2003. Several government ministers were deployed to destroy the credibility of the findings and, in large part, they succeeded. But now their denials have come back to haunt them, for the figures from Iraq have been confirmed by a further study.

The same team from Johns Hopkins University worked with Iraqi doctors to visit over 1,800 homes in Iraq, selected randomly to make sure that no bias could creep in to their calculations.
They identified more than 12,000 family members and tracked those who had died over an interval that spanned both pre- and post-invasion periods. The Iraqi interviewers spoke fluent English as well as Arabic, and they were well trained to collect the information they were seeking. They asked permission from every family to use the data they wanted. And they chased down death certificates in over four out of five cases to make sure that they had a double check on the numbers and causes of death given to them by family members.

All of these checks and balances mean that the 650,000 additional Iraqi casualties they report since the invasion is the most reliable estimate we have of civilian deaths. Most of these deaths have been of men aged 15 to 44.

Not only do we have a better understanding of the toll our invasion has had on the country; we also understand better just how those deaths have come about. Before the invasion only a tiny proportion of deaths were due to violence. But since the invasion over half of all deaths have been due to violent causes. It is our occupation and our continued presence in Iraq that is fuelling this violence. Claims that the terrorist threat was always there are simply disproved by these findings.

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[dogbert]

It's stupid for Bush to quibble about the numbers -- it would be no less horrible were it 1 in 400.

[Hank Scorpio]

[dogbert]

[Big_Bird]

[Big_Bird]

The lowest estimate given is still nearly 400,000. Weren't we supposed to be doing them a big favour?

[Pyongshin Sangja]

Thank God Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.

[Big_Bird]

Here is another article featuring graphs and diagrams:http://electroniciraq.net/news/2533.shtml

The Lancet Survey: Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Authors: Prof Gilbert Burnham, MD, Prof Riyadh Lafta, MD, Shannon Doocy, PhD, Les Roberts, PhD. Participating institutions: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.

[Kuros]

I'm going to agree with Big Bird, here.

*shudders*

Even if these numbers are wrong, the deaths are too many. Even if the percentage cited as killed by coalition troops is higher than is true, the real percentage would be too high. I don't think it is unpatriotic to suggest that America has made many mistakes in Iraq, and not just 'tactical' mistakes.

Ugh, now I need to take a long shower...so...dirty...

[Big_Bird]

[thepeel]

[Big_Bird]

The numbers do add up

The attempts to rubbish the Lancet study on the massive Iraqi death toll are devious hack-work.

As Richard Horton's post says, the latest Johns Hopkins University study of mortality in Iraq, published in the Lancet is horrible news. When the previous study was published, a horrendous chorus of hacks sprung up and suddenly discovered a new-found expertise in epidemiological statistics.

Tim Lambert, the Australian science-blogger, and I ended up spending a lot of time and energy fighting on the online front of this Campaign For Real Statistics, and so it is with heavy heart that I see that President Bush - who is probably a better statistician that many of his online supporters as he has at least been to business school - has already expressed an uninformed opinion on the matter.

....

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party's rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage "small samples extrapolated to the whole country". The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.

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[Big_Bird]

[thepeel]

Maybe you mistake the notion of a "crime" generally and a "crime against humanity" more specifically? Murder, mass murder, mega-mass murder and genocide are quite different.

But more to the point. If a member of my family was killed it would be a crime. If they were killed along with many, many other people in an act that attempted to kill them all, that would be a "crime against humanity"

Words have meanings. Learn them.

In a world as horrible as ours, hyperbole is hardly needed. All you do is make those who need to hear the truth about Iraq think you are some crazy fool with an agenda. You don't help the cause. You hinder it. Got that?