Winslow Wheeler has kindly provided a convenient reference for the much-discussed Lancet article putting the number of "excess civilian deaths" since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003 at over 650,000. The Lancet is the premier medical journal in the UK, so its findings are not easily to be dismissed. Nonetheless, the numbers concerned (some 550 per day for over 3 years) are so far in excess of any other number previously in play that is it not surprising that they have met some resistance.

The study is available at the Lancet site http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/j...73606694919.pdf.

October 12, 2006


Disturbing New Study on Civilian Deaths in Iraq



The October issue of the British medical research journal, The Lancet, updates its previous research on the number and causes of civilian deaths in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003. The findings of the statistical study are astounding: as of July 2006 there have been approximately 650,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths “as a consequence of the war.” This is 2.5 percent of the total Iraqi population. Of the 650,000 deaths, just over 600,000 were the result of violence. Most of those deaths (56 percent) were the result of gunshots; air strikes caused 13 percent; car bombs caused 13 percent; and other terror attacks using explosives caused 14 percent. Of the total, coalition actions caused 31 percent.

The trends have been changing over time. Mortality has increased each year since the U.S.-led invasion. Deaths from U.S. air strikes are less common in 2006 than they were in 2003 and 2004, but while the proportion of deaths attributable to the coalition has declined, the absolute number has increased. Moreover, deaths from car bombs have increased since 2005, but gunfire remains the predominant cause of violent death.

Given the huge numbers of deaths calculated, many will be eager to attack or discount the study. However, the article describes the methodology in detail, and it has every appearance of being conducted according to reliable professional standards. Nevertheless, some will surely ignore or attack the study for the simple reason that it does not conform to their own understanding of events in Iraq. On the other hand, the study would seem to explain to those willing to consider it objectively just why the American effort in Iraq has been so problematic and so thoroughly unpopular with Iraqi civilians -- according to polling data from other research organizations.

The study is available at The Lancet’s website at http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/j...73606694919.pdf.

Winslow T. Wheeler
Director
Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information @ www.cdi.org/smrp
202 797-5271 in DC
301 840-8992 in MD
301 221-3897 cell

winslowwheeler@comcast.net

Herr Bush dismissed the study as discredited.

Well, it wasn't just dismissed by Bush, a good number of mathmaticians question the extrapolation used as hoodoo. The left is it's own worst enemy.

Oh, added on edit, I forgot to mention they also questioned the sampling method, if the sample was really representative of the population, and the statistical methods used also.

Dahr Jamail liked it though.

No one in this administration gives a d*#@ about how many Iraqi civilians die, nor how many are children. I believe we had this topic up when the first study was done.

If you would like to hear a detailed explanation of the method, there was a guest on Washington Journal this morning that worked on the project. You can still access that program by clicking on the Washington Journal nav bar left column over on C-Span's site and you will get a page where you can select listening to today's program, or if you don't get around to it right away, it will still be listed for quite a while under the Oct 12 date.

That guest had appropriate credentials, some posting here have only their agenda.

lenal
:hexe:

On this point I think we can probably all agree.

Their was also a report from John Hopkins that Bush said over stated the numbers. I will look for a link to that one also. I do beleive the numbers were about as high or higher then the Lancet study.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayst...tory_id=3352814

article sights Lancet and John Hopkins

ABC Online

PM - Iraq death toll disputed

[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1763697.htm]


PM - Thursday, 12 October , 2006 18:33:00
Reporter: David Mark
MARK COLVIN: 650,000 Iraqi civilians dead, or, less than a tenth of that number. That's the extent of the difference of opinion today over the Iraqi death toll since the invasion of 2003.

So many are killed in Iraq each day that even big bombings often go little reported in the daily media. And so dangerous is the situation that it's hard for journalists and other independent observers to make their own counts.

The 650,000 figure comes from a report by America's Johns Hopkins University. But other groups which also track the Iraq death toll, put the figure at around 50,000.

Today the United States promised once again to stay the course. The country's top commander in Iraq said troop levels would remain steady until 2010.

David Mark reports.

DAVID MARK: It's impossible to examine Iraq without discussing the dead.

The Johns Hopkins University report estimates as many as 655,000 civilians may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003.

That estimate comes from a nationwide survey of 1,800 households throughout Iraq, but the United States' top commander in the country, General George Casey, has no faith in the report's findings.

GEORGE CASEY: That 650,000 seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I have not seen a number higher than 50,000 and so I don't give that much credibility at all.

DAVID MARK: Nor does Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard.

JOHN HOWARD: It's not plausible. It's not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey. I think that's absolutely precarious. It is an unbelievably large number and it's out of whack with most of the other assessments that have been made.

DAVID MARK: A more reliable count of the number of civilian deaths in Iraq may be found on the Iraq Body Count website.

Based on 38 media sources, the site records civilian deaths caused by Coalition military action, insurgent and terrorist attacks and criminal activities since the war began in 2003.

EXCERPTS FROM WEBSITE (voiceovers): Bodies found shot/tortured; People in market; US military convoy; Gunfire; People in market; Gunfire; Motorcycle bomb; Gunfire. Executed. Tortured; Bodies found shot. Tortured.

DAVID MARK: As of the 15th of September, the site is reporting the number of civilian deaths is between 43,800 and 48,600.

Add to that list an estimated 5,500 Iraqi military and police deaths. Then there's the casualties from the Coalition forces, including 2,749 US deaths, 119 UK deaths and 118 from the other countries, including two from Australia.

JOOST HILTERMANN: I think the nation is disintegrating.

DAVID MARK: Joost Hiltermann is the Middle-East Project Director for the International Crisis Group.

JOOST HILTERMANN: About three-and-a-half years after the war, we face an Iraq now that is descending into civil war. There is rampant violence in the streets, especially Baghdad. We also have a weak central government that cannot effectively govern.

We have a growing sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shi'ites and we also see conflicts arising between Kurds on the one hand and Arab and Turkmens on the other hand.

We also see rampant criminality.

All of this in the absence of an effective state apparatus with security arms that can restore law and order and we see a dwindling American appetite to stay.

DAVID MARK: The US appetite to stay in Iraq may be diminishing, but publicly, it's a different story.

Today General Casey said America planned to maintain its current level of 142,000 troops for another four years.

John Howard supports America's decision to stay the course in Iraq.

JOHN HOWARD: Were they to withdraw prematurely would plunge the country into much greater chaos and carnage. It would be the worst possible thing to do.

DAVID MARK: The question now is how to bring order to a country already in chaos?

Joost Hiltermann.

JOOST HILTERMANN: Iraq is being divvied up into different small units in which local gang leaders or tribal leaders, or political party leaders, militia leaders, rule. And it's impossible to live in that kind of situation safely.

DAVID MARK: So what is the way forward for Iraq?

One option suggested by the former secretary of state and the Chairman of the Iraq Study Group, James Baker, is to set up a loose federation incorporating three virtually autonomous regions for Iraq's Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds.

It's not a view shared by the International Crisis Group's Joost Hiltermann, although he concedes it's one of the more likely outcomes.

JOOST HILTERMANN: Borders are, simply cannot be drawn that way peacefully. It can only be done through civil war, which is going to be extremely bloody.

But this is what may emerge after some time, with lines actually being drawn, rather arbitrarily in my view.

But I'm not so sure that neighbouring states can afford to stay out of a situation in Iraq of virtual vacuum. And you may therefore see a regional escalation, which would be extremely destabilising.

But I do think that it is critically important that the United States, with the international community, undertake all possible steps to prevent the situation from deteriorating.

It can only backfire on the international community, on the world in a very, very negative way.

MARK COLVIN: Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group with David Mark.

Methinks Slate, certainly not a tool of the ridiculous right, did a pretty good job destroyin' the basis of data of a Johns Hopkins study Lancet based a similar article on a few years back. In fact methinks we discussed that quite thoroughly in a few threads here on CGCS, eh?

October 13, 2006
Iraq: The Hidden Horror
650,000 Iraqis dead – now that's 'liberation'!
by Justin Raimondo
The new study estimating that 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion was – naturally – dismissed out of hand in Washington and London and disdained by the War Party's pet pundits. My favorite comment came from the president, who announced: "The methodology is pretty well discredited."

Yes, our genius of a chief executive is an expert on the subject of methodology: the methods he and his confreres utilized to project we'd be greeted by Iraqis throwing rose petals in our path are a monument to his expertise. Asked about his previous estimate of 30,000 dead Iraqis, Bush replied:

"I stand by the figure. Six hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at… it's not credible."

That Bush has the gall to challenge anyone's credibility is a testament to his complete cluelessness. Here, after all, is a president who went to war under false pretenses, and now demands that we "stay the course" right over a cliff. Let him look at his own methodology, which involves reading – or, at least, skimming – a presidential daily briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S." and then going blithely on his merry way, oblivious to all dangers but a nonexistent one in Iraq.

Are we to be spared nothing?

Tony Blair, too, put on his scientific genius hat and dismissed the Johns Hopkins University study, saying through a spokesman:

"The … figure is an order of magnitude higher than any other figure. It's not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate and that is not in any way to downplay the seriousness of the security situation in Iraq."

This argument assumes that the conventional wisdom can't be wrong: by Blairite standards, the West's early ignorance about what was happening in Hitler's concentration camps is all we need know about the Holocaust. It means that low-ball estimates of the toll taken by Stalin in the former Soviet Union never required revision.

Anthony Cordesman, a security analyst who is no friend of the Bush administration and has always been highly skeptical of the Iraq war, says this study is just "politics." This characterization is baffling when one takes into account the traditional willingness of Americans to countenance casualties – so long as they aren't our own.

When Truman dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was no national outcry: rather, there was a celebration of unassailable American power. Likewise, the bombing of Dresden caused nary a ripple of protest. A long string of American-sponsored and -countenanced atrocities, ranging from the torture methods employed by the shah of Iran's U.S.-trained SAVAK to the "free-fire zones" of Vietnam, to the terror manual written by the CIA for the Nicaraguan contras during the 1980s, and on and on – none of this bothered much of anyone, either in Washington or in the country at large. We withdrew from Vietnam not because we were repulsed by our murderous tactics, and those of our Vietnamese sock-puppets, but because we were beaten militarily by a ragtag bunch of insurgents.

If the Johns Hopkins study is "politics," then it is an oddly ineffective effort: it is hardly politic to imply that your own side is engaged in mass murder on a scale approached by only the worst regimes of the modern era.

The U.S. military has steadfastly refused to maintain Iraqi body counts: for obvious reasons, they'd rather we didn't know how many Iraqi souls have been permanently "liberated" from their bodies. More importantly, they'd rather the Iraqis didn't know. Independent sources of such information invariably depend on reported deaths: the Iraqi media, Western news accounts, and figures from the UN and other humanitarian agencies. Yet this kind of passive approach is not sufficient in wartime: the chaos makes it more than probable that a great deal of the killing goes unreported. It therefore makes perfect sense that the Johns Hopkins survey – which involved researchers personally interviewing a total of 1,849 Iraqi households, most of whom produced death certificates – would be far higher. That it is 10 times higher is not all that surprising – although quite sobering when one realizes the total represents 2.5 percent of Iraq's population.

The study has proved controversial, and anyone can summon their favorite experts to either support or debunk it. Yet one has to say that, even if the figure of 650,000 is off by half, the vastness of U.S. war crimes in Iraq is quite a shocker. No wonder the Americans are denying it: they can't stand the sight of their own ruthlessness. And the hypocrisy! Here, after all, is a nation that was supposed to be "liberated" – and, instead, it has been turned into a slaughterhouse. Whatever the numbers, that is the cruel reality.

The Iraqi government derides the Johns Hopkins numbers, as well they might: either that, or they'd have to admit they were installed into power by a pack of mass murderers. And that would be far too close to the truth.

I have no technical expertise in statistical analysis, so I won't try to put on scientistic airs by waffling on about "baselines" and "clusters." I'll just cite the testimony of someone who is on the scene and has to deal with the horror on a daily basis:

"Some readers and viewers think we journalists are exaggerating about the situation in Iraq. I can almost understand that because who would want to believe that things are this bad? Particularly when so many people here started out with such good intentions. …

"I don't know a single family here that hasn't had a relative, neighbor, or friend die violently. In places where there's been all-out fighting going on, I've interviewed parents who buried their dead child in the yard because it was too dangerous to go to the morgue."

The hidden horror is so much worse than we imagine, yet the invisibility of evil isn't at all unusual when it comes to the modern world. The sheer scale of the crimes committed by the Nazis, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge, and all the other mad tyrannies of the 20th century didn't come to light until well after their demise. One wonders if it will take the fall of the American Empire to uncover the full extent of Washington's war crimes.

Copyright 2006 Antiwar.com

Just outa curiosity is this thread posted here under "U.S. Military Issues" 'cause the originator considers all these civilian casuaties, however many there really are, to be the fault of the American military?

In response to flydangler's question, I would say this piece in the CSM is pretty definitive:

--
So instead, the researchers, backed up by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, relied on the same polling methodology that is used to measure voter preferences or what their favorite TV shows are.

"I loved when President Bush said 'their methodology has been pretty well discredited,' " says Richard Garfield, a public health professor at Columbia University who works closely with a number of the authors of the report. "That's exactly wrong. There is no discrediting of this methodology. I don't think there's anyone who's been involved in mortality research who thinks there's a better way to do it in unsecured areas. I have never heard of any argument in this field that says there's a better way to do it."

--
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org

--------

Iraq casualty figures open up new battleground
By Dan Murphy | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor CAIRO
From the moment the Iraq war began, the question of who is suffering and in what numbers has been a hotly contested battleground for supporters and opponents of the US decision to invade. Each side has sought to score moral points for their cause by pointing to an alleviation, or growth, in Iraqi suffering.

It's not surprising that a finding this week that 601,000 Iraqis have been killed as a result of the war is controversial. The figure, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, is 10 times higher than previous estimates. "Not credible,'' President Bush said succinctly following its release Wednesday. "Exceeds reality in an unreasonable way,'' was the assessment of an Iraqi government spokesman.

There is no doubt that Iraq is now an extremely violent place, as Baghdad's official September murder toll of 2,667 makes clear.

But why are the number of Iraqi deaths so difficult to pin down? The short answer is that much of the country is too dangerous for researchers or government officials to travel in search of accurate statistics. The best tally would come from counting every death certificate issued in the country in the three years before and three years since the invasion. But there is no central reporting mechanism for this in the country.

So instead, the researchers, backed up by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, relied on the same polling methodology that is used to measure voter preferences or what their favorite TV shows are.

"I loved when President Bush said 'their methodology has been pretty well discredited,' " says Richard Garfield, a public health professor at Columbia University who works closely with a number of the authors of the report. "That's exactly wrong. There is no discrediting of this methodology. I don't think there's anyone who's been involved in mortality research who thinks there's a better way to do it in unsecured areas. I have never heard of any argument in this field that says there's a better way to do it."

Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the paper and a public health professor at Johns Hopkins, adds, "There are several ways of counting, one is simply counting the number of bodies that come to the morgue or reports from hospitals or in newspapers. The problem is those numbers may be valid from the site they're collected from but from nowhere else. So if you want to look at numbers that affect population as a whole, the best way is to do surveys."

The survey relied on face to face questions carried out by Iraqi researchers with members of 2,000 Iraqi families, geographically distributed to best reflect Iraq's demographics. The authors extrapolated from this number that the mortality rate per 1,000 Iraqis was 5.5 in the years immediately before the invasion, and has averaged 13.3 since. That yielded the number of 601,000 murdered and an additional 54,000 who have died of natural causes, likely due to the declining quality of healthcare.

Dr. Burnham says he and his collaborators were acutely aware of the possibility of large errors if their study wasn't well designed. "The possibility of introducing bias in any kind of survey is real, and you spend more time designing the survey to eliminate the sources of bias then actually carrying it out,'' he says. "One of the real risks in this is that people report deaths that don't occur, so we did ask for death certificates. And in 92 percent of cases, they were provided."

To be sure, the researchers of the Lancet study says possible errors leave a range between a low of 392,979 additional deaths and a high of 942,636. The 601,000 figure is the median.

The commonly accepted numbers until now have been much lower than Lancet surveys. The Iraq Body Count, a website that tracks civilian deaths in the war by compiling data from news reports, estimates 48,000 deaths have been reported in the media, while the Iraq Index sponsored by the Brookings Institution in Washington has counted 61,000 civilian deaths. President Bush estimated 30,000 civilian deaths late last year.

The Lancet report follows a 2004 survey published in the same publication and carried out by largely the same group of researchers that found 100,000 excess deaths had resulted in Iraq since the war, which was confronted with the same criticism at the time.

Dr. Burnham says that in the most recent survey, which had twice the sampling size of the original one, the numbers of deaths reported for 2004 mirrored the earlier report.

"Our key message is not to produce numbers but to ask in conflict situations, how can we think more effectively about protecting populations,'' he says. "The general pattern is as time goes along in conflicts that the host population takes more and more of the hits, which is what we're seeing here."

The survey also argues that most of the violence is now Iraqi on Iraqi. It found that 31 percent of violent deaths were claimed to be caused by American forces, a smaller proportion than in the 2004 survey but still a larger absolute number, because of the overall rise in the death toll.

Some critics of the report have charged that the research was politically motivated and that its release was timed to come shortly before upcoming US elections. Dr. Burnham says his "goal was to get this out in July or August, just so people wouldn't say this was tied somehow to elections" but that peer review and other administrative issues slowed up publication.

Dr. Garfield says that critics who charge the release of the paper was politically motivated to "assign to scientists far more conspiratorial ability than we can produce. When would have been a good time to release this? People who don't want to hear this won't ever want to hear it. Even if it came out six months ago, it would still be an inconvenient truth."

He says the most striking result of the survey, to him, is its finding that 2.5 percent of Iraq's population has died as a result of the war. "You can compare that to the civil war, our bloodiest war, in which 1.4 percent of our people died and look at what that meant to the US. Like then, what these numbers are saying is that every family is being touched."

"The numbers don't necessarily argue for an immediate withdrawal, or whatever. The point is we're not going to make good policy if we're not dealing with the true human costs."

My guess is that is an incorrect assumption.
But how does one separate war from military ? No one here has blamed the
troops ... note the references to the insurgency, the administration, etc.

Here's what one of the critics (a statistician) said about the report:

Cluster sampling can be valid if it uses reliable data, rather than on inherently unreliable self-reporting. But it can also be easily skewed by picking out hotspots — like determining how much of a nation’s population wears dentures by surveying only nursing homes.

In fact, intentionally or otherwise, that’s pretty much what The Lancet did. Most of the clusters had no deaths whatsoever. But here’s the real bombshell: “Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja,” the journal reported. That’s it; game over; report worthless.

I don't think any of you people comprehend what it means when you throw so much of your argument upon something so obviously flawed.

Well gosh golly gee whiz, eh? Methinks "there's a better way to do it in unsecured areas" confirms my suspicions that they did this study the same way they did the last one, by doin' a limited survey in poorly chosen areas where casualty figures might be unusually high, thus badly skewin' the results.

If I ain't mistaken that's exactly what Slate found the last time, eh? When Slate went to the Johns Hopkins math folks and asked statisticians to evaluate the methodology of the study 'twas found that usin' them same methods the resultin' study had a potential error rate greater than +/- 90%!

Also 'twould seem the same researchers that did the previous discredited survey performed this study too. Methinks they'd have at least gotten a clue from the last go round, but I wouldn't bet on it.

'Twould seem the Master Guns picked up on this and commented on it above too, eh? Guess I ain't the only one askin' the question.'Twasn't an assumption, just a simple question which I thought was valid, eh? Methinks when somethin' really seemin' to have more to do with the politics of the Iraq situation than military issues gets posted here there must be a reason for it. What's happenin' in Iraq has many more facets than just the military ones you know, which methinks is why we got a sub forum specifically for such discussions, eh?Exactly what part of the U. S. military do the insurgents or the administration fall under? If 'tain't the troops bein' blamed then why's it posted here?

Realizin' I only served for 30 years in the American armed forces methinks I may be a little deficient in recognizin' what is and what isn't topical under "U.S. Military Issues". That's why I was askin' folks obviously smarter'n me 'bout it, eh?

Added on edit: I ain't tryin' to be a smart ass. Just tryin' to keep stuff in this section on topic and not turn it into the anti U. S. military forum, just as I've tried (unsuccessfully) in the past and will continue to do in the future.

48 American soldiers killed this month, 76 killed last month
regardless how many hundred have been killed it is one to many
just how is the military winning this war are they keeping count on the IED's are just the body count of the Iraqi's????

No military, no insurgents to insurge upon anything. Last I heard the administration directed the military, as in CIC, DOD. etc.

QUOTE

Added on edit: I ain't tryin' to be a smart ass. Just tryin' to keep stuff in this section on topic and not turn it into the anti U. S. military forum, just as I've tried (unsuccessfully) in the past and will continue to do in the future.

Well, I guess it's all in perception, 'cause I do not see
any anti-military fomenting here.

I don't think the whole damned country of Iraq is worth the life of one American boy or girl. But I think if fighting in Iraq contributes towards stopping radical Islam's assault upon Western culture that is a different story.

Methinks I owe you a much better answer than I gave before, so here goes.

IMHO war is the result of politicians not doin' their diplomatic jobs properly, eh? When politicians really screw up then 'tis all too often the military that gets called in to clean up the mess.

In both diplomacy and war the military is only one of the tools politicians use. Unfortunately, as we saw in Vietnam and now in Iraq, when politicians insert themselves into the actual war fightin' then things turn sour.

That's when folks start blamin' military personnel for the problems, even politicians do it like you'll see discussed in the Haditha thread, and the slippery slope gets embarked on. You'll also see situations, as methinks we've seen in this forum in the past, when the anti war fervor of some evolves into what sounds like anti military sentiment.

In case you never noticed when I said it a coupla couple times before, let me say it again. Based on my own experience methinks most military folks, especially the more senior enlisted ones, hate war. Wars get people shootin' at you and are unpleasant in other ways too. They get your people hurt, killed and other bad stuff happens to 'em.If I ain't mistaken the insurgency is attackin' the civilian population of Iraq far more'n they're attackin' the military, eh? Yup, just like it says in our Constitution. Just the same methinks I don't see anywhere in that document where the civilian leadership is tasked with the war fightin' though. We had a thread on differences in perception in military matters, eh? Methinks it died prematurely 'cause of lack of participation. Maybe folks just wanted to keep the misunderstandin' due to these differences alive.

The BBC last night did stories that both British commanders and Canadian commanders say it is time to withdraw from Iraq.
Did any one else hear these stories. If so can they start a new thread on that issue.
The Brits and Canadian Officers seem to be reaching the same place as those American Generals who have spoken out.

I think a long time ago I mentioned that when the British were in Iraq before they had to send in Winston Churchill to get them out. When Americans went to Vietnam the French had just pulled out and warned Americans of what they were getting into.
Funny but when did America start believing they could accomplish things other countries couldn't.
Britain was the great invader for along time. Africa, India and middle east and on.
If we can't learn from our short history maybe we need to study the long history of the world.

I have been a member at the beginning here and frequent this CGCS website regularly and I have yet to detect any anti-war fervor.

Can you provide links to the posts your conclusion is based upon?


lenal

Please provide the link.
lenal
:football:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/145222

More than 650,000 people have died in Iraq since the U.S. led invasion of the country began in March of 2003. This is according to a new study published in the scientific journal, The Lancet. The study was conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Researchers based their findings on interviews with a random sampling of households taken in clusters across Iraq. The study is an update to a prior one compiled by many of the same researchers. That study estimated that around 100,000 Iraqis died in the first 18 months after the invasion.

As I understand it The Lancet is the scientific journal which published the study. The study was conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/145222

Les Roberts is one of the main researchers of the study. He was with Johns Hopkins when he co-authored the study but has just taken a post at Columbia University.

Here are excerpts from an interview Mr. Roberts did this week answering questions about the methodology.

Cluster Sampling

LES ROBERTS: ... I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.

So, I think we used a very standard method. I think our results are couched appropriately in the relative imprecision of [inaudible]. It could conceivably be as few as 400,000 deaths. So we’re upfront about that. We don’t know the exact number. We just know the range, and we’re very, very confident about both the method and the results.

Skewed by Picking Hotspots

LES ROBERTS: Sure. That’s a great question. And you’re right. In Iraq, there is a huge difference in death rates between, for example, the Kurdish north, which is relatively safe, and the Sunni Triangle, where the death rates are extremely high. And what we did was we got a population estimate of every government, from the Iraqi government, and we randomly allocated these 50 clusters that we were to go visit proportional to the population in each of those governments, so that, if in the Kurdish north there is only 20% of the population living in the couple safest provinces, we would naturally end up with a sample that’s 20% or so from that zone.

And then, once we had picked that we were going to visit two or three neighborhoods in a certain governance or province, we would then make a list of all the villages and towns and cities, and again randomly pick one of those to visit, so that big places had a larger chance of being visited than smaller places. And then, finally, when we got down to the village level or to the section of a city, we would pick a house at random, visit it and the other 39 houses closest to it to grab a cluster of 40 houses. And luckily, in the analysis, we can sort of look at how much variation there was between clusters.

And when we reported this, we didn’t say it was 655,000 deaths. We said it was 655,000 deaths, and we’re 95% sure it’s between about 400,000 and 950,000. And that range of imprecision is capturing that variance between neighborhoods that you described, some places having a lot of violence, and some not. So there is less than a 2 percent chance that the number is well below 400,000. So, you know, it’s not precise. It’s incredibly hard to do this kind of work in times of war, and I think that this is awfully good, given the conditions.

How to Verify Study's Findings

LES ROBERTS: ..... And more importantly, is it true? It is easy -- it’s going to be very easy for a couple of reporters to go out and verify our findings, because what we’ve said is the death rate is four times higher. And a reporter will only have to go to four or five different villages, go visit the person who takes care of the graveyard and say, “Back in 2002, before the war, how many bodies typically came in here per week? And now, how many bodies com in here?” And actually, most graveyard attendants keep records. And if the number is four times higher, on average, you’ll know we’re right. If the numbers are the same, you’ll know we’re wrong. It is going to be very easy for people to verify this and get all of this talk about whether it’s political out of the way, because the fundamental issue is, a certain number of Iraqis have died, and if our leaders are saying it’s ten times lower than it really is, we are driving a wedge between us and the Middle East.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/145222

Well, 'twould seem it died, didn't it? How 'bout threads like this, much of this, maybe even the one we're postin' in now, a whole bunch of previous threads where folks were protestin' a military draft that don't even exist and/or were even arguin' for its reinstatement, those threads where CGCSers seemed to be indicatin' American military personnel don't deserve the same treatment and protection under the U. S. Constitution that the rest of Americans get and just about anything in this forum based on somethin' found on "t r u t h o u t", CounterPunch, wsws.org, antiwar.com and similar sources? That's just a smatterin' of the most recent stuff, there was even more in the past, eh?

Methinks I ain't gonna spend my Friday night searchin' out specific posts I've seen, if you've been readin' this forum I'm pretty sure you've seen 'em too. Others've sure commented that they've noticed 'em also.

IRAQ CASUALTY FIGURES OPEN UP NEW BATTLEGROUND - DAN MURPHY (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, OCTOBER 13)
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1013/p01s04-woiq.html

FOR IRAQIS, DEATH COUNT HIGHER THAN EVER; BUSH SAYS THEY CAN "TOLERATE" IT - EDWARD M. GOMEZ (WORLD VIEW, SF GATE, OCTOBER 12)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/det...5&entry_id=9780

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 (GUARDIAN, OCTOBER 12/COMMON DREAMS)
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1012-21.htm

COUNTING THE IRAQI DEAD - EUGENE ROBINSON (WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 13): We now have reputable evidence that the humanitarian tragedy in Iraq is much, much worse than anyone had suspected.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1201670_pf.html

CRITICS SAY 600,000 IRAQI DEAD DOESN'T TALLY BUT POLLSTERS DEFEND METHODS USED IN JOHNS HOPKINS STUDY - ANNA BADKHEN (SAN FRANCISCO, CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 12)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...&type=printable

FIXED FINDINGS: ANOTHER COOKED UP STUDY FROM THE LANCET - RICHARD NADLER (NATIONAL REVIEW, OCTOBER 12): The Hopkins researchers don't record 655,000 extra casualties -- they extrapolate them.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmRmY...TRiNTM4N2UxZjM=

THE PUNDIT PATH FOR DEATH IN IRAQ - NORMAN SOLOMON (COMMON DREAMS, OCTOBER 12): The invasion of Iraq has led to ongoing carnage on a massive scale.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1012-30.htm

FOUR MORE YEARS?: AS CIVILIAN CASUALTIES CLIMB, THE U.S. MAKES PLANS TO KEEP 140,000 TROOPS IN IRAQ UNTIL 2010. WILL THE PUBLIC IN EITHER COUNTRY PERMIT IT? - JUAN COLE (SALON, OCTOBER 12): Given what polls in Iraq are telling us about the unpopularity of U.S. troops in the country, given what public health experts are telling us about the inability of those troops to stem the growing tide of sectarian killings, and given the waning support for the whole Iraq enterprise among the American public, the rationale for keeping so many ground troops in Iraq has come increasingly into question.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/...vels/print.html

Readers may be interested in this further commentary courtesy of the MEC Analytical Group on London. The author Gal Beckerman is
a freelancewriter, a regular contributor to the Forward and a former editor
at the Columbia Journalism Review.

Oct. 12, 2006
Counting the Dead
Debating the Body Count in Iraq

When war is waged to improve the lives of a country's people, the body
count -- the number of those killed as a result of the war itself -- cannot
help but be wrapped up in politics. No one who has been trumpeting the
American presence in Iraq as a liberating force wants to hear that so far
654,965 Iraqis have died due to the fighting, sectarian and otherwise. But
those were the results of an academic study released yesterday and published
in the Lancet, the well-regarded British medical journal.

The Bush administration immediately discounted the findings, throwing doubt
on the accuracy of the results. The president himself, at a press conference
yesterday, said the report was not "credible" and that "the methodology is
pretty well discredited." Newspapers paid attention but also offered plenty
of dissenting voices to counterbalance the surprisingly high number.

But should we be so skeptical? This was, after all, not a group of high
school students handing out questionnaires at a Baghdad bazaar. These are
scientists from a respected public health school -- Johns Hopkins --
conducting a study funded by another respected school -- MIT -- using a
methodology that is not quite as contentious as President Bush let on at the
press conference.

Cluster sampling, in which researchers interview families from a few
representative segments of society and then extrapolate out to arrive at an
estimate, is how most surveys are conducted. It's how exit polls are run.
It's also the method by which we've come to the figure 400,000 for the
number of people killed in Darfur, a measurement that has allowed the media
to call what is happening there a genocide.

In this study, 50 clusters were randomly selected from 16 of Iraq's
Governorates, with every cluster consisting of 40 households. And out of the
1,849 households, there were 1,474 births and 629 deaths in the 40 months
post-invasion. Whereas the mortality rate before the war was 5.5 per 1,000
people per year, since March 2003 it has been 13.3 per 1,000 people per
year. Multiply that out for the whole country and they arrive at an average
of 654,965 for the whole of Iraq, with a margin of error between 426,369 and
793,663.

There are two reasons for thinking the survey might be more accurate than
has been portrayed, both of which were not mentioned much yesterday. First,
the researchers were able to duplicate, with different households, the
results of a survey they conducted two years ago (which was also widely
disputed) that put the death toll then at 100,000. And secondly, the
pre-invasion mortality rate of 5.5 per 1,000 people per year, found in both
surveys, is similar to the estimate used by the CIA and the U.S. Census
Bureau.

The researchers point out that organizations counting civilian deaths in>
Iraq -- like the British-based Iraq Body Count research group (which has the
number at roughly 50,000) -- rely almost exclusively on media reports. But
what gets left out of newspaper coverage, they argue, is anything that
happens outside of Baghdad or the Kurdish north.

Here's part of the researchers' convincing argument (and thanks to the Plank
for pointing it out): Much violence is occurring far from the view of
journalists and widely cited mechanisms for counting the dead. Most Western
reporters are based in Baghdad. Even there, large-scale events tend to gain
attention, not the numerous but scattered incidences of violence that also
occur. [...]

The large rise in sectarian violence, and the survey's findings regarding
gunshots being the principal cause of death, correlate closely. They also
reflect the reports of widespread assassinations. If, for example, there
were three such killings daily in each of the 75 or so urban centers of Iraq
(outside of Baghdad and the Kurdish north), the total for the 40 months
covered by this survey would equal more than 270,000; four such killings
daily in those 75 cities would equal 360,000 in that period.

Put this way, it sounds a bit more plausible.

There seems just as much reason to trust these numbers as to doubt them. It
should also be remembered that though the White House or Iraqi authorities
may be unhappy with this news, it is not as if they are offering alternative
figures. As the New York Times reminded us in its article, the Iraqi
government recently barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the Health
Ministry from releasing information about civilian deaths. The American
military won't even give numbers, preferring to stick to percentage
comparisons, citing, for example, a 46 percent drop in the murder rate in
Baghdad in August from July as proof that the recent crackdown has been
effective.

But the really shocking thing for us here in the States, relying as we do on
the media to give us as an accurate a picture of what is happening in Iraq,
is that this report (even if only partly true) points to how much more
comprised by the security situation Western journalists are than we even
imagined. It's true that most reporters don't venture out of Baghdad except
to embed with the military, and the time they spend out of their fortified
compounds in Baghdad is seriously curtailed by the security situation. If
there were extreme violence out in the provinces, it would be difficult for
them to really get a handle on the realities on the ground.

So there is nothing for us then to reliably compare this report against.
The function that journalists serve in any other circumstance -- to verify
things like the level of violence and intensity of fighting -- has been
completely undermined by the circumstances in Iraq. This is all the more
reason to take this new study seriously as a piece of evidence the likes of
which we have lost access to a long time ago.

http://www.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=9859

October 14, 2006
Excess Death in Iraq

by Dahr Jamail
It is the single most important statistic regarding the illegal US invasion and occupation of Iraq. How many Iraqis have been killed?

655,000.

655,000 Iraqis killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I have worked for eight months in Iraq as a journalist, witnessing the carnage on a daily basis, visiting the morgues with bodies and body parts piled into them, meeting family after family who had lost a loved one, or more ... Finally, we get an accurate figure that shows how immense the scale of the long drawn carnage really is.

The first Lancet Report, published on October 29, 2004, reported that there were 100,000 "excess" Iraqi deaths as the result of the US invasion and occupation. (Excess deaths are the difference between pre-invasion and post-invasion mortality rates.) Whenever I have given public presentations about the occupation, I have invariably found myself in a difficult position due to the lack of a more realistic and recent figure I can cite, knowing full well that the number was grossly higher than 100,000.

The least I could do was mention that Les Roberts, one of the authors of that report, is known to have said this past February that the number of Iraqi casualties could be over 300,000. And now, we know it is far higher, which merely confirms what most Iraqis already know.

In the context of the horror stories that have reached us over the three-plus years of the occupation, this latest figure is not nearly as shocking as when the first Lancet report was published in October of 2004. It has been abundantly clear since then that the number of Iraqis being killed by and because of the occupation has continued to increase exponentially.

The recent survey, like the first one, was conducted by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are based on interviews with a random sampling of households from across Iraq. This survey yielded the same estimate of deaths immediately following the occupation, as the first survey. It also found that 30% of the reported deaths are caused by the occupation forces.

This study is the only one, other than the first study published in The Lancet, that calculates mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. It is a technique of "cluster sampling" also used to estimate mortality caused by famines and after natural disasters.

The 2004 survey came under fire from pro-war critics and from the supposedly antiwar group Iraq Body Count (IBC) which currently claims a ridiculously low figure between 44,000 and 49,000 dead Iraqis. In the past, the figure generated by IBC has been quoted by George W. Bush.

The controversial results of the first survey were backed by Bradley Woodruff, a medical epidemiologist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education on January 27, 2005: "Les [Les Roberts, co-author of the first survey] has used, and consistently uses, the best possible methodology ... Indeed, the United Nations and the State Department have cited mortality numbers compiled by Mr. Roberts on previous conflicts as fact – and have acted on those results. [He] has studied mortality caused by war since 1992, having done surveys in locations including Bosnia, Congo, and Rwanda. His three surveys in Congo for the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental humanitarian organization, in which he used methods akin to those of his Iraq study, received a great deal of attention. 'Tony Blair and Colin Powell have quoted those results time and time again without any question as to the precision or validity,' he added."

Further underscoring the validity and authenticity of the survey methodology are two important facts: first, that the leg work has been conducted by eight Iraqi doctors and second, that the recent survey came up with the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the previous survey. Additionally, the figures are backed by official evidence as the greater majority of deaths were substantiated by death certificates.

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention for several years, said that the survey method is "tried and true," and that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have." His view was backed by Sarah Leah Whitson at the Human Rights Watch in New York, who testified, "We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy."

Here it is worth recording that the survey's estimate of Iraq's pre-invasion death rate, which was used as the baseline of the survey, was roughly the same as the one used by both the CIA and the US Census Bureau.

As in the instance of the first survey, this study found that the actual number of dead Iraqis could in fact be higher. The fact that this study tabulated "excess deaths" implies that these people would still be alive if the US had not invaded their country.

While the staggeringly high number of the dead may shock some, for others who have kept track of facts it is no great wonder that surveyors have found a steady increase in Iraqi mortality since the invasion and a steeper increase in the last year. This alarmingly reflects the worsening violence which even the US military, the news media and civilian groups have been forced to admit.

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.

Last December, Bush claimed that 30,000 Iraqis had died as the result of the invasion and occupation. When reporters asked him if he still stood by his estimate, he said he stood by the figure that "a lot" of innocent people have died in the conflict.

One of my contacts in Iraq, a man who works with several Iraqi NGOs that monitor human rights abuses, deaths, detentions and other violations of international law, was furious when I asked him how he felt about IBC's attack on the outcome of the first Lancet Report. I present his outburst here:

"This is a mayday call to all colleagues around the world to STOP writing about the Iraqi issue without having enough information from reliable sources. People are getting killed here and the country is virtually dying and it is not so human to rob the dead! IBC supposedly worked to correct the number of Iraqis killed because of the US occupation of Iraq. All I saw in this violent attack upon the Lancet was a harsh offensive that adds the killing of truth to whatever number of killings that actually took place by gunfire and bombs."

Salih Al-Jabiri is a 55-year-old human rights activist in Baghdad. Jabiri, commenting on the figure offered by IBC at that time of roughly 30,000 dead Iraqis, the figure which was infamously quoted by Mr. Bush, said, "What difference does it make whether the number is 30,000 or 200,000 for God's sake? It is people's lives you are counting here, not farm chickens! Do you people mean we should be happy to believe US statistics of ONLY 30,000? But we are not happy with this insultingly low number, when all of us know the true number is so much higher!"

My aforementioned contact added more recently:

"Whatever the numbers the crime is still big enough to be condemned by all those who claim to be human beings. To our colleagues at IBC and those others who think the way they do, we say, be human enough to condemn the crimes of the occupation in Iraq or do not say you are humans."

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.

http://www.antiwar.com/solomon/?articleid=9858

October 14, 2006
The Pundit Path for Death in Iraq

by Norman Solomon
No one knows exactly how many Iraqi civilians have died from the war's violence since the invasion of their country. The new study from public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimates that the number of those deaths is around 601,000, while saying the actual total could be somewhere between 426,369 and 793,663. Such wartime figures can't be precise, but the meaning is clear: The invasion of Iraq has led to ongoing carnage on a massive scale.

While we stare at numbers that do nothing to convey the suffering and anguish of the war in Iraq, we might want to ask: How could we correlate the horrific realities with the evasive discussions that proliferated in U.S. news media during the lead-up to the invasion?

In mid-November 2002 – four months before the invasion began – a report surfaced from health professionals with the Medact organization and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. "The avowed U.S. aim of regime change means any new conflict will be much more intense and destructive than the [1991] Gulf War," they warned, "and will involve more deadly weapons developed in the interim."

At the time, journalists routinely gave short shrift to that report – treating it as alarmist and unworthy of much attention. The report found that "credible estimates of the total possible deaths on all sides during the conflict and the following three months range from 48,000 to over 260,000. Civil war within Iraq could add another 20,000 deaths. Additional later deaths from postwar adverse health effects would reach 200,000. ... In all scenarios the majority of casualties will be civilians."

During a live TV debate on Dec. 3, 2002, I cited the report's estimates of the bloodshed ahead and then asked: "What kind of message is that from the Bush administration against terrorism and against violence for political ends?"

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer turned to the other guest: "Jonah Goldberg, do you accept that assumption in that report on these huge casualties, including a lot of children, if there were an effort to go forward with so-called regime change in Baghdad?"

Goldberg, a pundit with National Review Online, replied: "Frankly, I don't. I mean, I haven't looked at the exact report, and I think that there are a lot of groups out there that inflate a lot of these numbers precisely because they're against the war no matter what. We certainly heard a lot of that around on the table last time. Before the Gulf War, we were told there were going to be tens of thousands of casualties."

He was playing off a common U.S. media pretense that the bombardment of Iraq in early 1991 had minimal negative effects. Yet a fleeting Associated Press story reported on March 22, 1991, that the six-week war had killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqi people – a figure that came from official U.S. military sources.

American news outlets tend to be rather cavalier about the suffering at the other end of the Pentagon's missiles, bombs and bullets. And there's a strong tendency to brand documented concerns as unfounded speculation – a media reflex that suits war-crazed presidents just fine.

In his major speech on March 17, 2003, just before the invasion, President Bush used boilerplate rhetoric: "Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them: If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you."

The day after that speech, Christopher Hitchens came out with an essay providing similar niceties. He wrote that "the Defense Department has evolved highly selective and accurate munitions that can sharply reduce the need to take or receive casualties. The predictions of widespread mayhem turned out to be false last time – when the weapons [in the Gulf War] were nothing like so accurate."

In fact, Hitchens asserted, "it can now be proposed as a practical matter that one is able to fight against a regime and not a people or a nation."

As a practical matter, journalism like that ends up putting cosmetics on death.

Well, well, well. I see the level of your intellect when presented with information straight from the horses mouth.

I wonder who has more credibility on the subject -- this gentleman from John Hopkins who was in fact one of the researchers and currently holds a post at Columbia University or you?

My goal here is to get informed, to help inform when I can, and to engage in the discussion.

If that's the standard method it's little better than random numbers, too many factors not taken into account. It would be another example of doing things on the cheap instead of doing them right, they were able to use far better methods over 90 years ago to estimate the number killed in the Armenian genocide and had the common sense to know they couldn't even give a good estimate on the number of Kurds killed a few years later.

Clearly the 30,000 is fantasy land and I don't have a problem with a GUESS that it's around 300,000, but calling the method reasonable for the circumstances is just plain bad science, no matter what credentials the person has.

By the way, in that area numbers killed or displaced is an emotional or political thing, the figures get used as expressions rather than factual numbers. As an example, in Turkey (where genocide denial is the law) the people don't notice when the number of Armenians killed (by government statements) goes from 900,000 to 800,000o, to 600,00o0 to 400,000 to 300,000 to 200,000 in a single decade because it's meant to minimize rather than be a real number.

Well, well, well; if the statistical method yeilds numbers which are meaningless then I don't care where the gentleman holds tenure. After spending over 350 credit hours in various Universities in the United States and Europe I have seen many professors who blunty don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.

I would suspect my mathematical capabilities are sufficiently developed to identify when someone is blowing cold air up my kilt, how about you?

I'll reitterate my feelings about the sampling method used.

I am one of the many Mr fly is referring too. Myself and several other vets stand on the principle that war is a failure on the political front, and war should only be engaged in as a last result following the failure of all diplomatic efforts. Mr fly is right, the anti-war discussions here at CGCS were lengthy and passionate. For the most part I believe it was around Dec. 04 when we were in the throws of opposing opinions and verbal darts.

It's just my humble opinion that sticking the Lancet study in the this particular forum is not the right place. It seems to imply that our military men and women are at fault somehow for what is taking place, rather than the fault of this Administration regardless if it's 30K or 900K.

That's how it comes across, though I'd hope that wasn't the intent.

The Snuff's Comment - No Terra, that was not the intent of placing the study in this thread, but this actually is probably the most appropriate place to put it because it is DOD's reponsibility to collect casualty statistics, something that Department has been loathe to do. What is amazing to me is the extent to which Iraq has become the Killing Fields - not by our military, but by the Iraqis themselves. IMHO, what a bunch of barbarians.

Casualty figures, eh? DoD's responsibility based on what?

Could you define "casualties" and provide a reference for it bein' DoD's responsibility to collect data on them? Methinks 'twould be helpful in understandin' this.

Seems this study covered far more than the first Johns Hopkins research. If an Iraqi man shoots his neighbor for lookin' at his daughter, or a religious riot between different Muslim sects results in hundreds of deaths seems that's covered in this data, unlike their first one, eh? If memory serves me right methinks the first was on Iraqi deaths that were a direct result of American involvement in Iraq.

Augh... You all are driving me crazy with the Body Counts. Seems to me a flawed strategy first in Vietnam when the "administration was using it as a metric to determine they were winning the war" Now it is just as flawed here too......

Poll sampling is no way to count dead bodies .... people will claim what ever they want to tell you.... In vietnam it was tell the boss what he wants to hear..... in this case it's probably much of the same.....

I posted my first hand thoughts on the topic here: /////

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...showtopic=64940

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I kind of think its in the middle; the UN estimates 100 a day. thats roughly 36,000 per year. We have been there 4 years thats 144,000 over the last 4 years.

I think that is even a little on the high side, considering that only recently violent crime has been escalating in Baghdad.

How many died during Saddam's era, his war with Iran, against the Kurds? I'm not trying to dispell conclusions just broadening the topic.

It's not uncommon for some Iraqi's to settle disputes.... unrelated to politics or religion violently. If one man shoots another man for flirting with his sister... whose fault is that? If two men begin to argue over a fender bender and one pulls a gun... whose fault is that? A husband killing his wife for indescressions. etc.. etc..

I was witness to the after math of these incidents at the same level as those I would consider to be related to the war.

Of course not all the violence can be attributed to domestic disputes, but on average these things happened more frequently then say New York City. /////

And to Snuffy's point... The Government gives out payments for civilians that were caught in the line of fire by the US. Armed combatants need not apply.

We do not count casualties that are inflicted by insurgents, assasins or other violence... least not that I knew or know of.

Based on being able to prove they're meeting their obligations under the Geneva Conventions as an occupying force.

This study is very broad, it doesn't categorize the deaths it just estimates and counts as excess deaths from all causes. I do have problems regarding assumptions with the sampling method, but the criterion is one of the correct ones (the other being violent deaths , all causes) as it's our obligation to provide security.

It's the antiwar movements attempt to Vietamize the War on Terror Top.

They couldn't sell us on the iminent draft so now we get body counts. They tried equating Haditha with My Lai, looks like that is caving in.

I keep telling em this isn't the same military that fought in Vietnam, maybe one day they'll believe me.

Not to mention these A$$holes purposely hide behind civilians, children in the school yard, market or where ever.

Purposely in hopes that the blood thursty american hethans will accidently kill a non-combatant.... little boy or girl bleeding and the parents crying out on the evening news.

GRRRR... this topic boils my blood. I gotta go for a walk. If you have ever been shot at by one of these spineless worm scum.. from behind a group of school children...... you may relate to the anger and rage I am feeling right now...

I haven't, but I think I can relate to it.

You mean like UN peace keepin' forces do? Hell, methinks we couldn't even keep what someone somewhere referred to as "Occupied New Orleans" peaceful, eh?

That's a time honored Arab tradition Top.

I remember watching a video once where a Palestinian man and his little boy caught between the IDF and some Palestinian thugs. The man took cover behind a concrete barricade and placed his body between his little boy and the Israelis to protect his son.

Then the footage showed the little boy getting shot, from behind; IT WAS SICKENING. The only place the shot could have came from is the Palestinian position. Within an hour Palestinian propaganda was accussing the Israelis of cold blooded murder, then the video showed up showing who really shot that little boy. Nothing more was said about it.