Maybe they should have figured that out before they started the war.
Why doesn't the military or anybody dare to count or find out?


http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=9349
100,000
A Controversial Report From Johns Hopkins Researchers Estimates Iraq
Civilian Death Toll

By Edward Ericson Jr

On the Friday before the election, Oct. 29, a startling claim hit the pages
of mainstream newspapers like The Washington Post and The Sun, only to be
dismissed out of hand and, apparently, forgotten.

The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, printed the results of the
first and only scientific canvassing of Iraqis to determine how many had
died as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. The conclusion:
100,000. At least.

The study, designed and led by a pair of researchers from the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, estimated the Iraqi death
toll to be at least six times the tally published by Iraqi Body Count, the
Britain-based nonprofit that compiles news reports of civilian casualties.
the Lancet figures were so high that a Brookings Institution analyst,
quoted in The Sun, deemed them “preposterous.”

“These numbers seem to be inflated,” Marc E. Garlasco, an expert with Human
Rights Watch, told the Post.

With both the liberal Brookings Institution and the anti-war Human Rights
Watch apparently dismissing the Lancet study as incredible, most observers
felt no need to read the study itself. “When Human Rights Watch says you’re
crazy, then you really must be crazy,” a spokesman at the federal Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention told City Paper. He asked not to be
quoted by name.

Other mainstream American news organizations fell in line, either repeating
the incredulity of the first experts quoted or, like The New York Times
did, suggesting that The Lancet and perhaps the report’s authors aimed to
sway the election against President Bush.

Few reporters, apparently, understood what the study actually said. Fewer
still called Garlasco after he himself had time to read it. “I hate the
interview I did for The Washington Post,” he says. “I was on the train, I
hadn’t read the report yet [when the Post’s reporter called for comment].
In general, I’m not as negative as that [Post] report made me seem. This is
raising issues that are not heard of much in the U.S.”

Garlasco, who previously performed bomb-damage assessments for the
Pentagon, was by then taking numerous calls from the press for comment on
the Lancet study. But 90 percent of those calls came from foreign
reporters, he says, and so the issue of just how many Iraqis have died
because of the U.S. invasion remains a taboo subject here. The Pentagon has
pointedly refused to count the dead (despite international law that
requires any occupying military force to count its victims and pay
reparations). Conservative commentators regard all efforts to assess
noncombatant deaths in Iraq as propaganda for the insurgency; the New York
Post called the Lancet study, and CBS News’ airing of it on Oct. 28, “a
politically timed hatchet job from a blatantly partisan source.”

Report researchers Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham, both from Hopkins’
Bloomberg School of Public Health, say their aim was to count the dead—and
to alert the public about their count—in order serve the Iraqi people.
Rushing their study into print before the U.S. election meant it would
stand a better chance of making news, Roberts says, but he also admits to
an ulterior political motive: protecting the life of his co-researcher, Dr.
Riyadh Lafta of Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.

“Baghdad is an absurdly political place,” Roberts says. “The chief of
police will not allow his name to be known” because insurgents would kill
him. If the study were held from the press until after the U.S. election,
then, Lafta “would have been perceived to have been a tool of the
Americans,” Roberts says, and he likely would be dead today. “There were
political considerations here, but they were all related to the health of
people in Iraq.”

The study, which was carried out over four weeks by a team of seven medical
researchers in Iraq, did not say that U.S. soldiers killed 100,000
noncombatants. It said that 100,000 excess deaths occurred since the start
of the ground war. That counts the people shot or buried under rubble—and
it also counts the people who died of malnutrition or starvation, who
became sick and died from drinking polluted water, and people who died from
all other causes directly and indirectly related to the war, including the
skyrocketing crime rate.

The study was done by teams of interviewers who fanned out across Iraq,
visiting 33 neighborhoods in 11 cities, knocking on doors and interviewing
the occupants of 990 households. The researchers asked the families if
anyone who had lived in the house had died in the preceding years, covering
a period both before and after the U.S.-led invasion. By comparing the
death rate before and after the military attack, the research team
calculated the number of “excess deaths” attributable to the war.

This is the same methodology Roberts used in 2000 to estimate that the
civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo claimed at least 1.7
million lives. That estimate made the front page of The New York Times,
without caveats about Roberts’ political beliefs.

Despite the criticism, the Iraq count was “less susceptible to bias” than
the Congo study, Roberts says, because the researchers had access to the
entire country and not just a section of it, as was the case in the
Congo. “Every Iraqi had an equal chance that we would knock on their door,”
Roberts says.

When the researchers entered Fallujah, the city now under attack by
coalition forces, they found more deaths than in the other 32 places
combined. So many civilian deaths were reported in Fallujah that the
researchers threw out the data, reasoning that the tremendous mortality
rate in that city could not be extrapolated to the rest of Iraq. If the
Fallujah data were included, the group’s estimate of Iraqi casualties would
have tripled, to 300,000. (Again, the data includes Iraqis who may have
been fighting as insurgents.)

Some critics have seized on this and other caveats in the study to claim it
is imprecise. Roberts and Burnham say that at every point where they had a
choice they went with the most conservative assumptions. They say they were
surprised by their own data—particularly the increasing death rate over the
past summer and the amount of death attributable to violence.

“We assumed that most of the deaths were going to be from typhoid” or other
disease, Burnham says. Instead, more than half the reported deaths were
from violence, particularly coalition air strikes.

“We’ve dropped in the neighborhood of 50,000 bombs in a very densely
populated area where the enemy is hiding among civilians,” Roberts notes.
High casualties should come as no surprise, he says.

Garlasco, the Human Rights Watch worker who used to conduct bomb-damage
assessments, says he found that cluster bombs launched from land-based
rockets caused the most civilian casualties, while helicopter gunships were
more precise. He cited his own study of the civilian casualties in
Iraq, “Off Target,” as an example of precision counting combined with an
understanding of military reality. “One issue I have with the [Lancet]
report is that most of the combat takes place in very specific areas, so I
don’t know how valuable it is to propagate overall death numbers throughout
the country,” Garlasco says. “My bottom line is that whether the number is
10,000 or 20,000 or 100,000, more Iraqi civilians have been killed than
people realize. It’s avoidable.”

Roberts says he respects Garlasco’s work, “but Marc didn’t really have any
notion about how to get at the broader civilian death rate.”

There have been at least a dozen private efforts to count the dead in Iraq,
including an ongoing project by a group called CIVIC—the Campaign for
Innocent Victims in Conflict—to pay reparations to victims of the U.S.
military. That effort is funded by $10 million from Congress.

At least one scientific study counting Iraqi civilian deaths was published
by the U.S. military in the New England Journal of Medicine in July,
although that study was not designed as a casualty count. That study,
called “Combat Duty in Iraq and Afghanistan: Mental Health Problems, and
Barriers to Care,” surveyed U.S. soldiers returning from active duty about
their combat experience, in order to correlate battle experience to mental-
health issues. Surveying them anonymously, the researchers asked if the
soldiers had been ambushed, shot at, handled dead bodies, been wounded,
etc.

Of 1,650 or so soldiers and Marines in Iraq surveyed, more than 900 claimed
kills of at least one “enemy combatant.” Remarkably, more than 330 reported
that they had been “responsible for the death of a noncombatant.”

Writing for The Nation magazine, reporter Jefferson Morely extrapolated
those numbers to the ground-combat units in Iraq, concluding that ground-
combat troops alone would have been responsible for at least 13,881
civilian deaths so far.

The study’s lead researcher, Dr. Charles Hoge of the Walter Reed Army
Institute of Research, did not answer an e-mail seeking comment for this
story.

The Hopkins researchers say they had not seen Hoge’s study. “That will be
interesting to look at,” Roberts allows, adding, “I don’t think you could
validate one [study] by another, just like you can’t necessarily validate
the Iraq Body Count numbers” using The Lancet.

Roberts and Burnham don’t plan to return to Iraq soon, but if more data
becomes available, estimating Iraq’s casualties with “a lot more
statistical power” will be more likely, Burnham says. The job, according to
these researchers, is essential to creating a free Iraq.

“I think the whole concept of civilization is increasing your spheres of
empathy,” Roberts says. “Some argue that not being able to count births and
deaths is a marker for a failed state.”



On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:08:21 -0800, Craig Lalley <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>Sorry, repost to include Iraqi civilian casualties, but how do they
determine who is a civilian?
>
>-Craig
>
>--- Michael Baier <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> then put yourself in the Iraqi sandals.
>> maybe he was a civilian whos family was killed by the same marines or
other
>> US bombs.
>> Who knows? Not you and neither do I.
>> So far, we have 1200 US Soldiers and 100,000 Iraqi civilians not counting
>> Iraqi soldiers.
>> Does this mean anything to you?
>
>It means that you can't count or want to continue a lie
>
>http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/
>http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/index.php#count
>
>I wonder how many would be dead under Saddam, certainly not the 40 US
soldiers who lost thier
>lives last month.
>
>One other detail left out of the video, a second wounded man was in the
room, he moaned and showed
>his hands, he was not shot.
>
>-Craig
>
>
>
>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
>http://my.yahoo.com
>
>* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
>* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *