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Oct. 13, 2006 I’ve posted several articles in the past ridiculing the low, low estimates of the dead in Iraq offered by the US Government and some other agencies and associations. Even those mainstream groups that challenged the official reports of the George W. Bush administration usually did little more than up his figures 50% or so, rarely much more. An example would be Iraq Body Count, which, as of October 12, 2006, put the figure just below 50,000. http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ There were a few estimates that put the count much higher, but these tended to emanate from alternative news websites. I was hesitant to cite such sources, even if I personally found them credible, because I knew other contributors would decry them in unison. They are usually less interested in getting at the facts of an issue than in seeming to justify their own unjustifiable party loyalties. I personally am concerned more with the human tragedy than with which band of political charlatans gets into office in the next election. From the great number of websites I consulted, I personally had concluded that by late summer of 2003, the body count was already 55,000, and may have reached 250,000 several months ago. I posted an article to that effect on February 17, 2005. http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/06feb/article171.html Now according to The Washington Post staff writer David Brown, a new estimate places the excess post-invasion deaths in Iraq at 655,000. That’s probably much more like it than George W. Bush’s simpering little 30,000 last December! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html Here’s another version of the same story, reported by NewScientist.com News Service’s Debora MacKenzie: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10276-enormous-death-toll-of-iraq-invasion-revealed.html By “excess deaths” is meant deaths from all causes that would not have occurred were it not for the invasion. These excess deaths then would include deaths from violence, regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators, as well as deaths from disease, malnutrition and the like brought about by the invasion. The estimates were prepared by researchers from John Hopkins University in Baltimore , Maryland , and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad , Iraq , using tried-and-tested statistical methods. The researchers claim that the death rate in Iraq has escalated progressively from 5.5 per 1000 per year, before the invasion, to 19.8 per 1000 per year, at the present, an almost fourfold increase. The probabilistic margin of error for the estimate is wide, with a minimum being estimated at about 393,000 and a maximum at about 943,000. Even if we accept the lowest figure, this is still 13 times greater than Bush’s little whitewashed estimate. Anyone who has read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” may recall that, in Stalin’s time, deportees bound for Arctic labor camps, where they would most assuredly die, were packed in milk trucks. So if you lived in Moscow or Leningrad , you might see a white truck with a picture of a cow painted on the side pass by in the morning, assuming that this was a delivery from dairy to market. But inside there would be 50, 100, 150 prisoners being escorted to their death. Something like George W. Bush’s “nation building”! ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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