650,000 Iraqis have been killed in the war

[Virginia Dare]

I just heard this in passing on my local news this morning. The story was about how Americans are keenly aware of how many U.S. soldiers have died, but not about the number of Iraqis. What an atrocity! :cry:

[walldude]

1. I also heard this morning that the number of injured U.S. troops

is closer to 200,000 than the 23,000 they have been reporting.

[BOSSHOG]

2. That would be the good news conservatives are always

bitching about. "Conservatives" don't care that our kids are getting killed and maimed. The large death count of Iraqis can only bring joy to the sick, disgusting hearts of "conservatives."

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. What do you expect? They're not celebrities and their sex-lives are uninteresting.

They're just pretty ordinary teachers, doctors, laborers, wives, children, grandparents, brothers, sisters. They only get noticed if they're killed or raped, or both, by American soldiers who are caught in the act.

Faceless, nameless, sacrifices on the alter of American greed and hubris.

[butterfly77]

4. I believe there are more than that...

I heard some General and some an Iraqi who works at the morgue say, they really don't know.

[babylonsister]

5. There are more than that; the Lancet study confirmed that number,

maybe a bit higher, months ago. That's the study the dim one claimed he didn't believe.

[Snot Hannity]

6. The number of replies

to this thread is a clear indicator of the worth of Iraqi lives.

[KharmaTrain]

9. It Would If There Was A Source

Welcome to DU

If there's verification of this number, you'd see lots of posts. 500,000-600,000 death were bantered around a year ago with that also couldn't be verified.

AFAIC, one death was too many and I stick with the number provided by sites such as this one:

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

Casualties in Iraq
The Human Cost of Occupation
Edited by Margaret Griffis :: Contact American Military Casualties in Iraq

Date Total In Combat

American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 3164 2571
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03) (the list) 3025 2463
Since Capture of Saddam (12/13/03): 2703 2267
Since Handover (6/29/04): 2305 1938
Since Election (1/31/05): 1727 1475
American Wounded Official Estimated
Total Wounded: 23677 23000 - 100000
Latest Fatality Feb. 28th, 2007
Page last updated 03/1/07 5:25 pm EDT
Iraqi Casualties
US Military Deaths by Month
Put a Casualty Counter on Your Website
Others
Other Coalition Troops 256
US Military Deaths - Afghanistan 370
Iraqi Body Count IBC
American Civilian Casualties


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

According to Iraq Body Count...


http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq
Min Max
57561 63324

I have no doubt this regime is downplaying the numbers...and the figures the corporate media quotes rarely includes those who died of their war experience (injuries, suicides). I've been to the local VA hopsital several times...first in 2004 and half the beds in the facility were filled with Iraq vets...in my last visit, they had to open an off-base facility (similar to Building 18...and hopefully in far better shape...we're investigating) to handle the overflow.

Cheers...

[Snot Hannity]

10. Thank you!

n/t

[slipslidingaway]

14. IBC only counts deaths reported in the media.

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/background.php


"Casualty figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of online media reports from recognized sources."

[Parisle]

7. American exceptionalism be damned,...

... The rest of the world knows,.... and there are millions more Iraqis in the extended families of the dead. The degree and extent of hatred for America that this president has engendered is imponderable.

[dogday]

8. But but Saddam murdered 80,000 of his people

Isn't that why he was hanged? What does this say and who will pay for these deaths???

[GreenTea]

11. And that's an old and very conservative count.

Still, BushCo would debate it...but what would one expect the lying imperialist to say, anything to keep the war for profits prolonged and continuing, still so many billions more to be made from our tax dollars!

[The Straight Story]

12. Killed by whom?

Not trying to minimize it - just wondering who is doing most of this killing.

[slipslidingaway]

15. A few snips from the Kucinich/Paul study which measured

excess deaths from the pre-invasion period.

DR. BURNHAM:

"So what we came up with is what we considered to be a(n) excess mortality or number of extra deaths that would not have occurred if the conflict had not happened. And from this, we came up with an estimate of 650,000 excess deaths over the 40 months post-invasion. Now, around that, we have what the statisticians call a confidence interval, and that is an interval in which we are 95 percent sure that the correct or true answer lies.


...So if we could summarize what the numbers are saying that we collected, we're saying that the vast majority of deaths are due to violent causes, and we could say this -- these violent deaths are spread across the country.

....And finally, I'd like to say, like any kind of research study, this has limitations. There are potentials for bias and there are potentials for sampling problems. We spent months and months and months thinking about these potential biases and limitations before hand and designed a study to minimize these limitations in every way possible, and now looking at the data afterwards, I think we've done a good job at minimizing those kinds of limitations. It's possible that households concealed deaths, and if they concealed deaths, that would have been -- underestimated the number of deaths. So perhaps the number might even be higher if there were concealed deaths.

And finally, there's migration going on in the country that upsets the estimate on the number of people in the country, although we use the 2004 U.N. and Ministry of Planning estimate. Now with mass migration that is changing a bit. That could have some affect on things as well.

However, Congressman Kucinich, I believe that these data represent, as you say, the best estimate that is possible under the circumstances. After the study had been published, we spent a lot of time reviewing the results and the scrutiny that this got both in the scientific literature and in the popular press, and I think we are as confident as we ever were on the results, and we're willing to stand firmly behind the results that we published in October."

[slipslidingaway]

13. Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties

in Iraq

"Here is the transcript of Monday's hearing on Capitol Hill on the Lancet study, at which I spoke along with two co-authors of the study. The video can be seen at the C-Span archive page (scroll down to the bottom). Thanks to Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul for the kind invitation to speak at the hearing.."

http://www.juancole.com/2006/12/kucinich-paul-congressional-hearing-on.html