U.S. invasion responsible deaths of over 250,000 civilians in Iraq

[mom cat]

U.S. invasion responsible deaths of over 250,000 civilians in Iraq

Original address http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Iraq_war.php

by John Stokes


New studies make the Bush administration's "liberation" argument for a 'pre-emptive' war against Iraq seem questionable.

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by U.S.-led coalition forces has been responsible for the death of at least 150,000 civilians (not including certain of Iraq), reveals a compilitation of scientific studies and corroborated eyewitness testimonies.

The majority of these deaths, which are in addition those normally expected from natural causes, illness and accidents, have been among women and children, documents a well-researched study, that had been released by The Lancet Medical Journal.

The report in the British journal is based on the work of teams from the Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University in the U.S., and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11674.htm

[niallmac]

1. Gee, Ever notice how similiar "Spreading Democracy" is to Genocide? eom

[mom cat]

2. This is a quarter of a million killed. How can this be ignored?

I thought that the real numbers was much higher than previously reported and probably over 200,000. I am not at all glad to be correct.

[mike_c]

45. a million civilians died between 1990 and 2000 and few cared....

What's another quarter-million or so? We've been killing Iraqis with machine-like precision for almost 2 decades now. I don't see how it can be called anything other than genocide. The democratization will continue until the beneficiaries have all been murdered.

[mom cat]

60. You are so right. Madalyn Albright thought that all those deaths were

worth it. I don't.

[Minstrel Boy]

3. That's 1% of Iraq's pre-war population

The US equivalent would be nearly three million Americans.

[mom cat]

7. The upcoming anti war protest must focus on the genocide and

to make sure to download pictures of the wounded and dead in Iraq.

[Roland99]

30. It's nearly as many killed during Saddam's entire reign

Although, many of those deaths have stained the US with their blood.

[NYC]

4. Comment on Fallujah:

...That estimate excludes Falluja, a hotspot for violence. If the data from this town is included, the compiled studies point to about 250,000 excess deaths since the outbreak of the U.S.-led war...

[bullimiami]

5. bush had better hope there is no hereafter, no god and no devil.

[mom cat]

15. It is clear that he does not really believe in any God that would suggest

the idea that "thou shalt not kill" or "love thy neighbor". His elite upbringing taught him that there is no punishment for his crimes, a commonly held assumption of the sociopathic class.

[cassiepriam]

39. If there is an afterlife, he will have much to answer for.

And so will we, the American people.

[mom cat]

9. Here is a part of the article that deals with Falluja:

The figure of 100,000 had been based on somewhat "conservative assumptions", notes Les Roberts at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, U.S., who led the study.

That estimate excludes Falluja, a hotspot for violence. If the data from this town is included, the compiled studies point to about 250,000 excess deaths since the outbreak of the U.S.-led war.

Many Americans have complained that more than $200 billion U.S. tax dollars have been diverted from vitally needed public services in the United States, into apparently reckless activities. These activities are resulting in inflicted mass-casualities against totally innocent civilians, which have worsened conditions for political extremism, and ensuing "terrorism".

It is well documented that such activities are being viewed by many Iraqis, and other peoples internationally, to undermine a popular feeling of international security in general. Indeed, polls suggest that Americans felt much more secure under the former political ledership of U.S. President Bill Clinton, as compared to the militaristic strategies which are being pursued by the George W. Bush administration.

[EFerrari]

6. The Lancet called civillian deaths over 100,000 more than a year ago.

Oh, America, we have blood on our hands.

:(

[mom cat]

10. This report builds on the Lancet study.

We are committing crimes against humanity.

[EFerrari]

11. And have been for years.

America, do you know this?

:kick:

[mom cat]

13. I think that many Americans do not want to know what they might secretly

fear: that their overflowing malls are bought with blood. Of course, our "lifestyle" has been bought with blood since Columbus in this hemisphere and since the patriarchal overthrow of equalitarian cultures in Old Europe and beyond.

[EFerrari]

23. Even more simply, we have blood on our hands.

Our military has killed thousands of innocents.

With our money.

In our name.

[cassiepriam]

40. Yes, our collective karma is going to be very bad. nt

[bread_and_roses]

50. yes. (n/t)

[mom cat]

59. And without sufficient protest!

[babylonsister]

8. Tell me again why US rule is better than Saddam? nt

[mom cat]

12. Because little lord pissypants says so.

:sarcasm:
Obviously it is not better. People are much worse off since the invasion and the crimes of Saddam were mostly done at our behest.
Besides the genocide and the large number of wounded and severly disabled, the country is in shambles, and now Bush has declared that he will not support reconstruction (Katrina analogy anyone?).

[babylonsister]

20. Sure would be nice if the clueless would open up their

eyes. :(

[mom cat]

26. That is the main reason I posted this ... to get another piece of

information out there. Eventually, this kind of information turned the tide in Nam.

[cassiepriam]

41. And maybe their hearts and minds too.....

[radio4progressives]

14. boy oh boy... thanks for posting this..

:kick: :thumbsup:

[mom cat]

16. You are welcome. I thought that the number was about this high. It is

at genocidal proportions.

[bluedog]

17. St Petersburg Florida.::::Iraqis suffer a deadly toll

Iraqis suffer a deadly toll

....... no official count of civilian deaths, but it's certain that violence has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis in three years.


Published March 11, 2006

BAGHDAD - Three years into the war, one grim measure of its impact on Iraqis can be seen at Baghdad's morgue: There, the staff has photographed and cataloged more than 24,000 bodies from the Baghdad area alone since 2003, almost all killed in violence.

Despite such snapshots, the overall number of Iraqi civilians and soldiers killed since the U.S.-led invasion in spring 2003 remains murky.

snip


President Bush has said he thinks violence claimed at least 30,000 Iraqi dead as of December, while some researchers have cited numbers of 50,000, 75,000 or beyond.

snip


The health ministry estimates 1,093 civilians died in the first two months of this year, nearly a quarter of the deaths government ministries reported in all of 2005.

snip


At the Baghdad morgue, more than 10,000 corpses were delivered in 2005, up from more than 8,000 in 2004 and about 6,000 in 2003, said the morgue's director, Dr. Faik Baker.



**heres the kicker****************
By contrast, the morgue recorded fewer than 3,000 violent or suspicious deaths in 2002, before the war, Baker said.

snip



.........a former Bush administration envoy to Afghanistan, is among those who believe the United States bears some responsibility for the Iraqi dead, even if insurgents actually cause most of the deaths.

"The U.S. has never been able to protect the population and has thus never won its confidence and secured its support," Dobbins said.

Wayne White, who headed the State Department's Iraq intelligence team until last year, adds that regardless of whether Americans believe they should be blamed for these casualties,


"many, many Iraqis hold the U.S. responsible for all of them."




http://www.sptimes.com/2006/03/11/Worldandnation/Iraqis_suffer_a_deadl.shtml

[FogerRox]

18. K n R

[bluedog]

19. and to think this is a Florida Paper........good for them!!

[mom cat]

22. They do some good reporting at times. They did well here.

[mom cat]

21. Thanks so much for the information at that link.The butchery is

unfathomable. And now we are sending the helicopter gunships in to crank up the bloodbath. This administration has disgraced this country and done irrevocable harm to a country whose only crime was harboring oil.

[Coexist]

34. great link

thanks for posting that.

[hiley]

24. k & r

we are dripping in blood

[IndyOp]

25. May God Forgive Us For What We Have Done

May Our Brothers and Sister in Iraq Know Peace

No Bravery

James Blunt - No Bravery

There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
Tears drying on their face.
He has been here.
Brothers lie in shallow graves.
Fathers lost without a trace.
A nation blind to their disgrace,
Since he's been here.

And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.

Houses burnt beyond repair.
The smell of death is in the air.
A woman weeping in despair says,
He has been here.
Tracer lighting up the sky.
It's another families' turn to die.
A child afraid to even cry out says,
He has been here.

And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.

There are children standing here,
Arms outstretched into the sky,
But no one asks the question why,
He has been here.
Old men kneel and accept their fate.
Wives and daughters cut and raped.
A generation drenched in hate.
Yes, he has been here.

And I see no bravery,
No bravery in your eyes anymore.
Only sadness.

[mom cat]

27. I hope God kicks our sorry asses before any forgiveness comes down.

Thanks for posting "No Bravery" again.

[cassiepriam]

42. self del nt

[Nothing Without Hope]

28. EXTREMELY IMPORTANT - K & R. Here's a thread on the Lancet article

that is another reference for this:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5616912

Bookmarked - this is a vital resource. Thanks for posting!

[mom cat]

32. Thanks. This Global Research info is invaluble. Thanks so much.

[mom cat]

33. Please also see this thread posted by Clara T: Up to 650,000 dead.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5611142

The article is here: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_333.shtml

Burying the Lancet ... and the Children

snip:

Thanks to Les Roberts, his international team, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the editorial board of the Lancet, we have a clearer and very different picture of the violence taking place in Iraq than that presented by the "mainstream" media. Allowing for an additional 14 months of the air war and other violence since the publication of the Lancet report, we can now estimate that somewhere between 175,000 and 650,000 people have died as a direct result of the war; that 120,000 to 500,000 of them have been killed by "coalition" forces, and that 50,000 to 250,000 of these were children below the age of fifteen. In addition, the combined effect of conservative, even unrealistic, assumptions made to arrive at the lower of these figures makes it extremely unlikely that the actual numbers of deaths are close to the bottom of these ranges.

If you find yourself troubled or torn between accepting the "official story" of the war and the picture that emerges from the Lancet report, I would suggest the following. Both versions of events are efforts to tell a story or paint a picture from a patchwork of samples or snapshots taken in different parts of Iraq. However, the way that the samples are selected and pieced together is very different. In one case, the choice of samples and the way they are put together is clearly influenced and circumscribed by powerful political, military and commercial interests. In the other, the samples were chosen according to objectively established epidemiological practice, and the results were analyzed with scientific rigor.

As someone who has followed the reporting of this war very closely, I find the results of the study to be consistent with the picture that I have seen gradually emerging as the war has progressed, based upon the work of courageous reporters and glimpses through the looking glass as more and more cracks appear in the "official story." We are still left with civilian casualty figures that can only be described by very wide ranges. The responsibility for the failure to obtain more precise casualty figures and thus a more accurate view of this crisis falls fairly and squarely on the doorsteps of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington and 10 Downing Street in London, two households that have experienced no excess deaths to children or adults as a result of the war.

[Nothing Without Hope]

29. Now Sen. John Warner signals a new meme: if major civil war sweeps

Iraq, the US will leave and let the Iraqis deal with it alone:
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-1588471.php

The numbers of deaths the US is responsible for would increase manyfold then, I fear. And the US WOULD be responsible, though the GOPs, of course, will never admit that. Suddenly it's "they must take responsibility for their own fight."

I assume the permanent US bases the neocons are continuing to build in Iraq would still be there, barricaded and guarded while the people outside kill each other. And Halliburton would find a way to profit from it all. Maybe they could sell coffins.

[mom cat]

31. Bush could rely on his budies at Service Corporation International:

the ones who fed bodies of Jews to pigs. These people are the embodiment of evil.

[stillcool]

35. On an emotional level....

this shit is getting really hard for me to deal with. For Christ's sake...it's not as though I am even a little bit surprised....but seeing the number in print....My God...what does that many people look like? This is so so fucked up...

The on-going American Occupation has also created worsened civil strife as well as mass environmental destructions and related public health problems that is associated with American bomb-related released radioactive and other life-threatening pollutions. The American Occupation has also prevailed over the neglect to the repairing of vital public services-related infrastructure, which include U.S.-led destructions of water systems.

The figure of 100,000 had been based on somewhat "conservative assumptions", notes Les Roberts at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, U.S., who led the study.

That estimate excludes Falluja, a hotspot for violence. If the data from this town is included, the compiled studies point to about 250,000 excess deaths since the outbreak of the U.S.-led war.

[cassiepriam]

43. I have been haunted by the Iraqi deaths for a long time now...

The killing, maiming, torturing of innocents is beyond horrific.
We have become a nation of monsters.

[mom cat]

52. I wholeheartedly agree. We must stop the sleughter.

[mom cat]

51. This coming weekend we should all be carrying pictures of kids

in Iraq who have been killed or injured. It is time we react to the outrage of what we are doing to the Iraqis, not just what is happening to our troops!

[Judi Lynn]

36. This is something a lot of us have suspected, yet the info. just wasn't

available. We knew it was going to be horrendous when, soon after the invasion of Baghdad, there was a sudden announcement that the Iraqi government was not going to be keeping a total of the dead. That's simply not normal. OF COURSE a government would want to have some idea of what was happening to its people.

That left us with the understanding that what was really being told us was that the _Bush administration expected there would be a bloodbath and didn't want Americans to know the details, so that's how the story got started.

Thanks to the DU'ers who posted the information we need on this thread, and also for the poem. It's definitely one to bookmark, as suggested above.

What a tragedy beyond anything anyone of us could ever imagine in our lifetimes. All done for greed, pride, and the drive to flex the US taxpayer-financed "muscle" _Bush acquired by stealing and cheating his way into the White House.
I hope he and his "base" are goddamned proud of their filthy work on this precious planet.

[file83]

37. Only 650,000 more and Bush can top Rwanda's genocide!!

Goody for Chimpy the Terrible! :puke: The "little warmonger that could" is well on his way to beating his Psychopathic Hutu Genocidal rivals. And to think there were those that doubted the abilities of the little retard from Texas. :dunce:

[mom cat]

53. He may be up to 650,000 already: ... please read:

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_333.shtml

Burying the Lancet report . . . and the children

By Nicolas J S Davies
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Dec 14, 2005, 01:26

Email this article
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Over a year ago, an international team of epidemiologists headed by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health completed a "cluster sample survey" of civilian casualties in Iraq. Its findings contradicted central elements of the narrative of the war that politicians and journalists had presented to the American public and the world.

After excluding the results from Anbar province as a statistical anomaly and half the increase in infant mortality as possible "recall bias," they estimated that at least 98,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the previous 18 months as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of their country. They also found that violence had become the leading cause of death in Iraq during that period (51 percent or 24 percent with or without Anbar). However, their most significant finding was that the vast majority (79 percent) of violent deaths were caused by "coalition" forces using "helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry," and that almost half (48 percent) of these were children, with a median age of eight.

When the team's findings were published in the Lancet, the official journal of the British Medical Association, they caused quite a stir, and it seemed that the first step had been taken toward a realistic accounting of the human cost of the war. The authors made it clear that their results were approximate; they discussed the limitations of their methodology at length and emphasized that further research would be invaluable in giving a more precise picture.

A year later, we do not have a more precise picture. Soon after the study was published, American and British officials launched a concerted campaign to discredit its authors and marginalize their findings without seriously addressing the validity of their methods or presenting any evidence to challenge their conclusions. Today the continuing aerial bombardment of Iraq is still a dark secret to most Americans, and the media still present the same general picture of the war, focusing on what appear in the light of this study to be secondary sources of violence.

snip

Thanks to Les Roberts, his international team, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the editorial board of the Lancet, we have a clearer and very different picture of the violence taking place in Iraq than that presented by the "mainstream" media. Allowing for an additional 14 months of the air war and other violence since the publication of the Lancet report, we can now estimate that somewhere between 175,000 and 650,000 people have died as a direct result of the war; that 120,000 to 500,000 of them have been killed by "coalition" forces, and that 50,000 to 250,000 of these were children below the age of fifteen. In addition, the combined effect of conservative, even unrealistic, assumptions made to arrive at the lower of these figures makes it extremely unlikely that the actual numbers of deaths are close to the bottom of these ranges.

[cassiepriam]

38. This number is going to be much higher before it is all over.

And the poverty, illness, suffering is going to be horrific, and will continue for long time.

[mom cat]

54. Especially if you consider the impact of depleted uranium.

[cassiepriam]

61. Yes absolutely. And then the destruction of basic services

and sanitation, food supply etc.

The damage psychologically is immeasurable as well.

[Judi Lynn]

44. Here are some good points made by the [i]Jamaica Observer:[/i]

ON TO IRAN!
In Our Time
Wayne Brown
Sunday, March 12, 2006


~snip~
Meantime, the Washington Post reported that workers at the Health Ministry had been ordered to stop tabulating 'execution-style shootings'. Government hospitals and morgues were told to continue cataloguing deaths caused by US firepower or (Sunni) insurgent bombings, but to discontinue recording those caused by (Shia) death squads. The Health Ministry is in the hands of a religious party headed by Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militia is the Mahdi Army.

Clearly the Shia have learnt a lesson from the US occupation, whose policy from day one has been to forbid any tabulation of 'collateral damage'. In attacking Iraq, this was one of the Bush Administration's earliest measures: not merely omitting to count but forbidding the counting of innocent Iraqis: men, women and children killed by American ordnance.

(That's how, when the respected British medical journal, Lancet, estimated 18 months ago that, at that point, over 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed by the Bush Administration's attack upon Iraq, the White House was able to respond with a roar of indignant denial. Counting the killed innocents had been forbidden.)

So now it's the turn of the Sunni dead to just evaporate. (Which is how, when a week ago the Post, working from hospital and morgue reports, tabulated a body count of over 1,300 Iraqis in the wake of the Askariya mosque bombing, the Shia-controlled government and US commanders alike were able to respond with indignant denial and affirm, instead, official death figures that hardly exceeded the normal monthly rate of Iraqi's killed by the Sunni insurgency over the past year).

If it's one thing the blood-soaked 20th Century teaches - the century of Stalin and the Holocaust, of Mao and Pol Pot - it's that when the counting of the dead is forbidden what's being planned is serious mass murder: killing on the scale of genocide.
(snip/...)

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20060311T100000-0500_100390_OBS_ON_TO_IRAN__.asp

[Nothing Without Hope]

48. This is a superb article - if you have not yet posted a thread on it, I

hope you will consider doing so and let me know so I can support it. Thanks for posting on this. Bookmarked.

[mom cat]

55. Please let me know also. Thanks.

[fooj]

46. Hold the war criminals accountable.

Peace.

[Nothing Without Hope]

47. This terrible ***PAINTING*** tells the story all too clearly:

It reminds me of Picasso's Guernica in spirit (see more below the image). As the older of us recall, the central image comes from a famous photo disclosing the inhumanity of the Viet Nam war:



All the more appropriate since apparently napalm has been used in Iraq. In the famous original photo (by Nick Ut) of that fleeing Vietnamese girl, she had shed her burning clothing.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x135363

Thread title: "Incinerating Iraqis: The napalm cover up"

The horror of war has always been a dark inspiration for artists - who can forget Goya's images or Picasso's "Guernica"?

Artist web site here: http://www.coolon.net

[mom cat]

57. What a painfully powerful picture.

[understandinglife]

49. Kick.

Peace.

[zulchzulu]

56. Free Dumb Is On The March

At least the dead are with Jesus now... that sounds like something Bush or Robertson would say...

:sarcasm:

[mom cat]

58. Free to be dumb! and also blind to the suffering of humanity.

This genocide must stop!

[obreaslan]

62. "It's a Free Society, and in a Free Society people are...

Free to die at the hands of a foreign nation. In the end, those 250,000+ people will thank the US for allowing them to die as free Iraqis instead of as non-free Iraqis. Wouldn't they rather die under a 'democratically' elected government than under a totalitarian regime?"

-Donald Rumsfeld, sipping a Pina Colada pool-side

:sarcasm: