-First because bush & Cartel are LIARS; They lied about the "incubator babies".
They lied about "Iraqi troops massing on the Saudi border".
They lied about their "huge coalition".
They lied about their "darn good intell" that "there is no doubt" of "WMD" in Iraq.
They lied by implying Iraq did 911.
They lied about al Qaeda ties to Iraq.
They lied about Iran-Contra and IraqGate.
They are LIARS PERIOD.
-Second, because the number used and then exaggerated upwards was NEVER anything to do with "mass graves";Do you know where the "300,000" figure originated? It came from an estimate of an estimate of 290,000 given to Human Rights Watch of Iraqis UNACCOUNTED FOR, many assumed dead, during the Ba'athist regime, NOT about any "mass graves". This included Iraqis who left Iraq for whatever reasons (fell in love with someone not their spouse, went AWOL, committed a crime & ran away, etc); Iraqis disappeared by family or enemies or random criminals or the Iraqi government; Iraqis missing from the decade-long Iran-Iraq war; missing from the 1991 Gulf War, etc.
And that 290,000 was rounded up to 300,000 and termed "Iraqis in mass graves killed by Hussein"...by the BUSH Cabal in 2003. And that 300,000 then got rounded up to 500,000 by bush & his Cartel and bushbots...until recently. Notice bush only says "thousands" now?
-Third, because to date not one body has been exhumed by the US or "coalition" forces;-And fourth, as Islam requires immediate burial, mass graves are what happens during wartime...how many were killed by the US; during the Gulf War -mass-graving thousands of Iraqis by bulldozing over them, the Basra Highway massacre, and more bombs dropped during the Gulf War than the entire tonnage dropped in WWII...during a decade of almost daily bombing...during a decade of killing sanctions...and now during another 2 years of war and daily "shock and awe" bombing the crap out of Iraq cities and slaughtering of Iraqis.
Unrecorded victims
July 21, 2004Tony Blair and others claim 300,000 bodies have been found in Iraqi mass graves.
In fact, there have been no official exhumations - or count. So what is the coalition's evidence to substantiate the numbers cited? The coalition's claims are based less on investigation and excavation than on guesswork.
Blair stated that the graves of 300,000 have already been found. Yet when I asked
Joanna Levison of the US state department how many bodies have been exhumed, she said: "Through official procedures? None." Jonathan Forrest of Inforce, the International Forensic Centre for the Investigation of Genocide at Bournemouth University, also says that no bodies have been exhumed, except unofficially by Iraqi communities.
Forrest believes that he might, inadvertently, have played a part in giving prominence to this figure. He says journalists in Iraq constantly asked his team how many were in the graves.
"So we adopted the Human Rights Watch figure of 290,000, and rounded it up to 300,000." Yet HRW's figure is an estimate for the number of Iraqis who disappeared under the Ba'athists, "many of whom are believed to have been killed" - not for the number buried in mass graves.
HRW itself refuses to use its figure of 290,000 as an estimate for the number of bodies in mass graves. The group's senior researcher in Baghdad says: "How can we conclude that they are all in mass graves? We won't know that until there have been full-scale exhumations of the grave sites. There have been no official exhumations yet." http://www.guardian.co.uk/analysis/story/0,3604,1265520,00.htmlOne week later:
PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
July 18, 2004Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1263830,00.html"Iraqi Mass Graves" In PerspectiveIn the past few months the graves of thousands of civilians have been unearthed in war-torn Iraq. Not surprisingly, the White House has wasted no time in declaring the dead to be prime examples of Saddam Hussein's brutality and a further justification for our invasion.
But a check of the historical record on this matter reveals yet another calculated distortion by the administration and its supporters. At the end of the 1991 Gulf War
legions of Shia radicals - the kind we've seen clamoring for an Islamic state - attacked and killed anyone connected to Iraq's secular government. Urged to "take matters into their own hands" by the first Bush administration and mistakenly believing that Iraq's army had been destroyed, armed militants went from city to city in southern Iraq mercilessly butchering scores of innocents.
All told,
several thousand military personnel, policemen, clerks, and employees of the government were slain, according to Omar Ali, another regional authority.
Accepting Washington's pronouncements about a vanquished Iraqi military,
up to 400,000 Kurds undertook a ferocious spree of mayhem that rivaled that of the Shia. According to Mackay, in the city of Kirkuk
"no one bothered to count how many servants of Baghdad were shot, beheaded, or cut to shreds with the traditional dagger stuck in the cummerbund of every Kurdish man. By the time Kurdish rage had exhausted itself, piles of corpses lay in the streets awaiting removal by bulldozers."http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/09/12_graves.htmlHuman Rights Watch agreed:The Uprising In Iraq
In the immediate wake of Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, a new human rights crisis unfolded, this time in war-ravaged Iraq itself. Residents of at least two dozen southern Iraqi cities, joined in many cases by disaffected returning soldiers, rose up against the government in early March, ousting government forces from nearly all of those cities. Similar rebellions broke out within days throughout the predominantly Kurdish north of the country.
For their part, rebels and their sympathizers in both northern and southern cities killed hundreds, if not thousands, of members of the security forces and others allegedly working for the Baath Party or the government. While many were killed in battle, others were summarily executed after they had surrendered and were taken into custody, sometimes after summary people's "trials."
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1992/WR92/MEW1-02.htm "It was a revolution," says one Basrawi rebel named Mohamad, who deserted his army unit after the intifada began and eventually made it to the United States.
"It was glorious. There were demonstrations and shooting. There were bodies all over the place. The persons who got killed on the Ba'athi side deserved to be killed."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2001/11/iraq.htmlThis, then is the primary source of the "mass graves" of Iraq. What government in the world would refrain from using all necessary means to quell a violent uprising of this kind? No one denies that the regimes response was swift and merciless, or that many innocents were caught up in the retaliation and destruction. But if blame is assigned, shouldn't it start with the instigators of the carnage along with the foreign government who misled them about the forces they were going up against and yet egged them on?
Like claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or Baghdad's links to al Queda, the mass graves of Iraq are another example of history and reality being distorted to fit the ulterior motives of the White House. http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/433 Saddam's 'Mass Graves': The Third Big Bush Lie?The mass graves announcement was made November 8, 2003 by (bush appointee) Sandra Hodgkinson, at the time director of the Provisional Authority’s Mass Graves Action Plan. Hodgkinson reported that there were “reports” from Iraqis and that they believed the estimates of sites and bodies. She said they had confirmed 40 sites and identified 2,115 bodies.
But in July of 2004 Tony Blair’s office admitted that the number of bodies that had been found in mass graves had been exaggerated by 88%. The number of bodies was put at 5,114 and the estimates of 300,000-400,000 unsubstantiated.
The British are the source of USAID’s report on the subject. Therein they also cite Human Rights Watch. But Human Rights Watch did not consider the conditions in Iraq defensible in terms of humanitarian intervention: "The lack of ongoing or imminent mass slaughter was itself sufficient to disqualify the invasion of Iraq as a humanitarian intervention.” Amnesty International is also enlisted as support.
Is this Strike Three? Has mass graves taken its place with WMD and the 9/11-Iraqi-Al Qaeda connection? Has Bush struck out in his attempt to provide any justification for the Iraq War?
To exaggerate the scale of human liquidation for geopolitical ends is the moral equivalent of a capital crime, not a successful at bat in a political game.http://edstrong.blog-city.com/read/1040713.htm Thousands of Iraqi troops were buried alive in their trenches, with US troops bulldozing over top of them;"Many Iraqi soldiers were killed by the simple expedient of burying them alive: in one report, American earthmovers and ploughs mounted on tanks were used to attack more than 70 miles of trenches. Colonel Anthony Moreno commented that for all he knew, 'we could have killed thousands'.
One US commander, Colonel Lon Maggart, estimated that his forces alone had buried about 650 Iraqi soldiers.
"What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with peoples arms and things sticking out of them,' observed Moreno.
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=45The US Pentagon defended this atrocity, saying there was a "gap" in international law that allowed for burying the troops alive.
http://jeff.paterson.net/aw/aw4_buried_alive.htm********
Poll: Only 2% of Iraqis View the US as Liberators, 97% as Occupiershttp://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=7752... Study puts Iraqi toll at 100,000Most killed by US & "coalition" forces; 2003-2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/29/iraq.deaths /
Human Rights Watch; Iraq invasion cannot be justified as humanitarian interventionhttp://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0126-07.htm ********
If "hundreds of thousands" of remains are uncovered in those "mass graves", and if it's proven by forensics they were not killed by US forces during the Gulf War, or the current invasion & occupation, then I will believe the "Hussein mass-graved hundreds of thousands" rhetoric.
Until then, the facts say otherwise.
But every lie helps when one is lying a nation to death & destruction.