LANCET: Study: !600,000! civilians killed in war in Iraq

[kpete]

EXCLUSIVE! Study: 600,000 civilians killed in war in Iraq!!!
by EZ writer
Tue Oct 10, 2006

The Lancet, the respected British medical journal, will come out with this on Saturday. (it is not on their Web site yet).
The death toll is appalling!

This is account will be in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON -- A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate.

more at:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/10/10/20737/582

[Greyskye]

1. unbelievable

We've got to get this mis-adminsistration out of power.

:kick: & R!

[bloom]

68. I'm not surprised.

I think it's unbelievable that people think that it would be less.

Of course - the media (along with the military) has done everything they can to try to suppress the information/perception that people are dying.


Yea Rah! - that's what everyone is supposed to think. :eyes: :(

[Kadie]

2. .

I have no words.

:cry:

[RC]

37. I have a few...

Guilty of War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity, Treason, Incompetence, Hague Netherlands.

[Greeby]

3. Holy Jeebus

:wow:

[Richard D]

4. Time to retire . . .

. . . Godwins law?

[lcordero2]

5. That "law" should have been retired a long time ago

the exact second that Florida was stolen in 2000

[durrrty libby]

6. Utterly reprehensible and intolerable

Shame....shame


:hurts: :spank: :grr: :thumbsdown: :hangover:

[rumpel]

7. criminals!

k&r

[NNN0LHI]

8. But, but we have Saddam on trial for killing Iraqis n/t

[Viva_La_Revolution]

59. 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.

Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.


I think this means we can try the Chimp for war crimes twice, at least.

[pooja]

9. And of those 600,000 people dead from violence, how many leave

behind pissed off family members?

[Toucano]

19. Rummy's working on that.

Trying to bring that number to zero, I imagine.

[Philosoraptor]

10. Bring on the U.S. Holocaust deniers

I can hear them already

[babylonsister]

11. And we've been better than Hussein how? nt

[Red Right and BLUE]

12. Damn * to HELL!!!!!!!!!!!! nt

[Glimmer of Hope]

21. What a tragedy. Those responsible will rot in hell.

[MnFats]

35. already they are warming up a special level for them...

...bring the sulphur and brimstone, and plenty of it.

[civildisoBDence]

54. Sulpher and brimstone, and don't forget the depleted uranium and the

white phosphorus.

The Lancet is apolitical--little room to question these figures.

We're responsible for 600,000 deaths to avenge 3000 deaths at the hands of another fucking country--Saudi Arabia--whose leaders are in bed with DUHbya?

God damn.

Newsprism

[leftchick]

13. seriously

does this shock anyone paying attention? :(

[mmonk]

41. Unfortunately no.

[EST]

14. I want to echo "unbelievable"

But that word and its more eloquent "incredible" have become hackneyed and lacking in their original meanings.

In this case, this is too horridly believable. The republican desire for power has brought more misery into the world than perhaps even Saddam Hussein.
Anyone, even a mere voter, who supports this modern Hitler is morally responsible for the horrible state of affairs and should be held accountable for the evil results of their mindless support.

[Mnemosyne]

15. And this isn't being considered a genocide?!

I just don't understand.:cry:

[RC]

39. The US is doing it. We don't do genocide.

gitmo is a movie set in California. :sarcasm:

[Mnemosyne]

74. And Abu Graib only a

rough camping trip.:grr:

What has been wrought?...

[Jcrowley]

16. The toll will climb

- a destroyed infrastructure, sewage-water-delivery of needed goods etc,
-completely inneffectual rebiulding,
-purposeful gutting of state resources through privatization giveaways,
- Bombings of "weddings" and "safe houses"
- Depleted Uranium
- sheer chaotic and unhygienic environment coupled with lack of medicines from destroyed infrastructure
and, the insurgency: which has grown and seems to be growing with plenty of EXPLOSIVES - on hand.
-Dying in prison beatings

or maybe the general chaos and stress of chaos just makes it too difficult to keep it together?



A Time To Break Silence

[brer cat]

26. OMG! !! And the children...always the children.

When will it ever end?

Not in my name, please God!

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

17. Yeah but it's so much better that they die from U.S. bombs/bullets than

from Saddam... :crazy:

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

18. Dear God, I hope that's wrong... K&R

[MelissaB]

46. Me, too....

:cry:

[rman]

79. It was 100,000 in the first year of the war

We're 3 years down the road now, and the situation has only gotten worse.

[panader0]

20. I remember two years ago I cut an article out of the paper

and put it on my fridge that asserted that 100,000 were dead. As sickening as this number is, I believe it. Does anyone remember the number that bush admitted a few months ago? It was way smaller. Every drop of that blood is on these assholes hands. bush and cohorts.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

23. That was the earlier Lancet study.

100,000 was the lower estimate. 200,000 the upper.

Bush claimed it was 30,000.

[Red Right and BLUE]

25. Every drop.

:cry:

[glitch]

34. The number they usually float is 30k. They must think they can't get away

with a lie claiming any fewer.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

22. I believe it.

Lancet released a study showing 200,000.

That was a couple of years ago before Fallujah and the "civil war."

[ConcernedCanuk]

24. The PNACer's War has killed more than twice what Saddam did in 20 YEARS!!

.
.
.

Da PNACer's chose well.

Putting the Texecutioner in charge of this genocide.

From the Article:

"Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years."

"Mission Accomplished" alright George

YOU and your PNAC gang are the biggest killers of the 21st Century!

And will probably remain so

Just wait until History discovers the results of you and your father spreading Depleted Uranium all over the ME

You'll beat Hitler yet - -

At least when Hitler and his gang died the killing stopped

Long after the BFEE and PNAC are nothing but History,

You will still be killing.

"Mission Accomplished" indeed

SICK MoFo's you

(sigh)

[davekriss]

47. Just to add insult to injury...

...George W Bush's elective, illegal, and immoral invasion of Iraq has now also killed as many U.S. citizens as Osama Bin Laden purportedly killed on 9-11. Just f*cking insane and dripping in evil in every dimension, this Bush mis-administration, its rubber stamp Congress, and complicit major media.

[4morewars]

27. Is it OK to compare bush* to hitler now ?

I know that was frowned upon for awhile, mostly by right wing pundits.

I wonder what their magic number is ?

[Auntie Bush]

28. Bush is responsible for all these deaths! How does

the man sleep at night? Maybe Laura has to club him over the head with a baseball bat. No wonder he can't speak or make a sensible decision. Actually, I think he's zonked out on Ambien.

[npincus]

29. NBC said 1 million Iraqis have fled the country

[BlueEyedSon]

30. Assuming it's accurate, that would translate to 6 million Americans

(population is about 10 to 1, US to Iraq)

[glitch]

31. Compound this with the knowledge that when the US started this war the

average age of Iraqis was 14.

[usregimechange]

32. And for what?

[peanutbrittle]

33. I used the original 100,000 study before the election

to confront a religious group of co-workers who had decided to vote for Shrub do to their "moral values" issues. Of course it had no effect. Will they see the light now?

Politically, this is going to be very bad for the Republicons.

Dems are being vindicated more and more every day.

This is tragic

[blue cat]

42. You should notify them

and see what they have to say. It would be interesting.

[davekriss]

48. I've used "who would Jesus shoot?" with good effect

Ends debate, anyway.

[BattyDem]

36. I have no words ...

:wow: :cry:

[Uncle Joe]

38. The lies, the lies, the lies,

all this shit coming from the lies that put the corrupt, incompetent bastard and his fascists cohorts in power to begin with.:grr: :mad:

[stepnw1f]

40. Congratulations GOP.... but Bush Gets the Golden Star

fucking war criminals

[malaise]

43. WTF

This is unfuggingbelievable genocide. Send them to The Hague!

[Peace Patriot]

44. If the world survives this genocidal and sadistic junta, to write the

history of this era, they will point to the date Oct. 29, 2002, as the day that the American people lost control of their government, and were dragged into a war on Iraq that 56% of the American people opposed, way back before the invasion, and before all the lies were exposed--opposition that grew to 60% to 70% before the slaughter of Iraqis was over.

Oct. 29, 2002, is the date that George Bush signed the "Help America Vote Act," by which the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress--Tom Delay and Bob Ney--abetted by corporatist 'Democrats' Christopher Dodd, Terry McAuliffe and others--engineered a $3.9 billion electronic voting boondoggle, by which the U.S. election system was converted to electronics run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations.

If you are going to perpetrate an unjust, illegal, genocidal war, in a democracy, you have to rig the elections. That's what they did.

---------------------------

Throw Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

Bust the Machines--Vote by Absentee Ballot this November!

If everyone who despises the Bush Junta--60% to 70% of the American people--votes by Absentee Ballot this fall, the reign of these diabolical machines will be OVER. Election officials cannot defend this rigged and highly non-transparent system--and will be forced to reform it, or resign--if NOBODY WILL VOTE ON THEIR GODDAMNED MACHINES!

It won't insure accurate vote counts this fall--nothing can--but it CAN give election reformers the clout they need to DEMAND transparent vote counting. And we may have only a limited window of opportunity to achieve this essential, priority #1 reform, while power over election systems still resides at the local level. Who knows what the Diebold II Congress will do to our right to vote? They could make the system un-reformable, for instance, by federalizing it. (--and beware of phony reform; any reform that does not include removal of ALL secret code and privatization in our voting system is merely cosmetic; we must insist on no central electronic tabulators, no optiscans and no components at all, run on secret code!).

Think of electronic voting machines as segregated buses. DON'T COOPERATE with your own oppression. BOYCOTT the machines!

-------------------------

Over half a million people slaughtered is a war crime of Hitlerian proportions. But we can do NOTHING about it, if we do not have the power of the vote! THAT is the problem. It is difficult to comprehend this horror, and it tends to paralyze people. Don't let that happen! Look to the POWER MECHANISM by which they accomplished it--rigged elections! And work to re-enfranchise the American people!

[kpete]

45. This X 5

trying to wrap my brain around this number-kpete

[LuckyLib]

76. 600,000 over 42 months. An averageof 14,285 per month. 475

each day. Their lives are expendable and our nation is the catalyst.

[Elidor]

49. I've long thought the estimates of Iraqi casualties are too low

I wish I was surprised. Just before the assault on Fallujah, an Iranian friend and I discussed this great length. He was emphatic that there had already been over 100,000 civilian casualties. He "walked me back" through the invasion, the initial ground campaign and the taking of Baghdad, pointing out that after just one month in the country, the US was running out of bombs to drop on them and hurrying the defense industry for more (publically reported at the time). I forget the number of bombs he suggested we hypothesize for our conversation, but it seemed a very conservative estimate to me. He had me picture these bombs falling in a heavily populated urban area. And though Rumsfeld did his best to emasculate the news media in this country, it was widely reported elsewhere that our talk of "surgical strikes" was a sick joke. (Some of that even made it through later, when we famously began taking out entire buildings full of innocent people in the hope of getting just one terrorist, to say nothing of wedding celebrations.) Then throw in the street-to-street fighting as the US Army mopped up the holdouts and secured the city. (And how ironic that 3 weeks into the war Iraq was probably the closest it would come to peace in the whole miserable, unnecessary conflict.) It was easy to see that a conservative estimate would be 25,000 to 50,000 civilian casualties in the first 6 months of the war. And at the time we spoke, the troops were surrounding Fallujah, cordoning off the exits for what was obviously going to be an extermination campaign against large numbers of the inhabitants. Men and boys of fighting age were being turned back at the roadblocks, told they were not permitted to leave the city. Later, apparently taking our cues from the Israeli Defense Force, we strafed the ambulances trying to rescue the wounded in the city.

Imagine it: in response to September 11, George W. Bush has killed roughly half a million men, women and children from a country that had nothing to do with Bin Laden's attacks. If that isn't reason enough to impeach the bastard and try him for war crimes, this country has lost most of its humanity, and all of its sanity. America is profoundly shamed by these war pigs.

[bloom]

73. When you think about how journalists have been killed

presumably to keep any remaining journalists from reporting outside of the limits the US military imposed - and knowing about the various bombing campaigns - I have to be skeptical about any numbers that are put out. 600,000 could be low.

[riderinthestorm]

50. I am sick. Take action! Email this far and wide. Repukes and Dems

alike need to understand how horrifying our actions in Iraq have become.

[AntiFascist]

51. Bush should catch up to Hitler in no time at all! K&R n/t

[Poiuyt]

52. The original Lancet study also found that Iraqis were 58 times more

likely to die under George Bush than Saddam Hussein.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3962969.stm

Iraq death toll 'soared post-war'

Poor planning, air strikes by coalition forces and a "climate of violence" have led to more than 100,000 extra deaths in Iraq, scientists claim.

A study published by the Lancet says the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the US-led invasion.

[Bjorn Against]

53. This better be on the front page of every newspaper in the country

If they try to downplay 600,000 deaths I am going to be seriously pissed.

[mmonk]

57. Be prepared to be pissed.

[Raksha]

63. Tony Snow will say: "It's a number." n/t

[kpete]

83. a number

with a comma...

freeing Iraqis through death...

[Kablooie]

75. It is. Front page news everywhere.

[Tatiana]

55. When do we start calling the mess in Iraq 'mass murder' or genocide? n/t

[SunDrop23]

56. 600,000...that's almost unimaginable...

God rest their souls.

[NobleCynic]

58. By all that's holy

That number can't possibly be correct. 2% of the entire population? One can only hope that that is an overestimation or an arithmetic error.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

64. I doubt it's an error, unfortunately.

we picked apart the first Lancet study when it came out with a low estimate of 100,000. It was sound.

Now we have Iraqi's killing each other, on top of us killing them. Unfortunately, I think history will show that the number is correct. :(

[rman]

80. There are many indirect casualties due to destruction of infrastructure.

People become ill and die because of open sewers and lack of clean drinking water.

[Avalux]

60. Horrific. But will anyone care?

I mean really - sometimes I wonder if most Americans even give a damn how many Iraqis die. :cry:

[Singular73]

65. White lives are worth 1000 Brown lives are worth 1000 black lives

[sweetheart]

61. how many before its a war crime?

How many will the bloodlust assholes take as revenge for 9/11?

If we build a mountain of heads outside every warmonger's dooor, will they be satsified?

Or is it really somethign else, the desire to estabish an american egoicana, like a big depleted finger,
that can deploy in asia and lean on people to fuck them up.... vengeful, tiresome, ugly, small, indeed.

[burythehatchet]

62. more or less

[Vidar]

66. Our tax dollars at work--certainly will make the conviction of

certain war criminals easier.

[orwell]

67. Add to that...

...estimates of 500,000 dead (including many children) from 10 years of the sanction regime under Bush/Clinton/Bush and the US has topped 1 million dead in Iraq alone.

Now who is the terrorist?

[Irreverend IX]

69. Dubya says...

Dayum! Ya mean ta say that after I did all this hard work, Hitler still killed ten times as many folks as me? I need a drink...

(well, the Holocaust was 8 million and not the oft-quoted 6 million but the Moron can't be expected to know that)

[savemefromdumbya]

70. Jesus wept

[MisterP]

71. that's what, twice that of the Rape of Nanjing?

[stevedeshazer]

72. My God. I'm speechless.

I don't know what to say.

600,000. :(

[Kablooie]

77. More than the U.S. lost in WWII

[ClayZ]

78. .

:cry:

[cassiepriam]

81. And how many injured? Tortured? Raped?

The death toll is only a part of the evil we have done.

[sofa king]

82. Oh, my.

Excuse me for dragging Godwin into this, but I'm going to say it: I will be f^%king damned if I'm gonna become a modern-day Nazi.

This shit has to stop right now, no matter what the consequences to America. I think the Democratic Party needs to make it a priority to end the occupation of Iraq by 2008, whether the election is stolen from us or not.

We can do it whether or not we take Congress back. We can do it by focusing our efforts exclusively on this one issue.

Then, when the soldiers are gone, we've got an even more difficult moral task ahead of us: we have to figure out a way to atone for this crime. I don't know where to begin on that, but my conscience tells me it's very important.

[Imagevision]

84. So Bush is doing more killing then Saddam

[al bupp]

85. Zogby on CNN International now, vouching for the figures /nt

[Tigress DEM]

86. There were 200,000 -300,000 people in Fallujeah before it was wiped.

How many were able to flee before the city was locked down and water shut off?

So much senseless death and the US doing all in it's power to take away the doctor's rights to tell the truth.

My guess is this is a good conservative estimate and that some day we will find out about even more. This number is appalling enough, but some day when it isn't a cat and mouse game to get at the truth, it will come to more, I'm sure.

[Timbuk3]

87. The Liar/cover up artist/dissembler in chief...

...is already on record minimizing the damage he's done.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq. A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December, at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure, and do you consider this a credible report?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials. I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me and it grieves me. And I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to -- that there's a level of violence that they tolerate. And it's now time for the Iraqi government to work hard to bring security in neighborhoods so people can feel at peace.

No question, it's violent, but this report is one -- they put it out before, it was pretty well -- the methodology was pretty well discredited. But I talk to people like General Casey and, of course, the Iraqi government put out a statement talking about the report.

Q -- the 30,000, Mr. President? Do you stand by your figure, 30,000?

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I stand by the figure. A lot of innocent people have lost their life -- 600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just -- it's not credible. Thank you.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061011-5.html

The problem is, the "left wing" (HAHAHAHA...sometimes I crack myself up!) WSJ quotes:

Paul Bolton, a public-health researcher at Boston University who has reviewed the study, called the methodology "excellent" and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on. "You can't be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark," he said.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB116052896787288831-lMyQjAxMDE2NjEwMDUxMjA4Wj.html

Who ya gonna believe? Mr. "16 words" himself, or the RW WSJ?