They are counting every terrorist as "civilian casualty".
What was the body count of those murdered or died of malnutrition or sickness under the Hussein regime?
this is sad for two reasons:
First, someone is keeping track of civilian casualities to blame American Troops for the deaths
and Secondly, people are using the deaths of the innocent to further their liberal/socialist agendas.
Civilian casualties happen. Americans Soldiers do not target civilians for no good reason. If we did, there wouldnt be any Iraqis in Iraq anymore. Pretty simple if you ask me....
To the press anyone not wearing full combat gear is an innocent civilian. Of course if they are captured with weapons etc then to the media they become EPWs with full GC rights.
It doesn't take into account how the people died. For instance, how many were killed by Terrorists as they took over homes? How many were terrorists hiding as civilians? How many were killed because they didn't get out of town. If you are a "civilian" with no horse in this race, why on Earth are you staying in the city?
I don't doubt these numbers. If they are true, it means our kill to casuality rate is around 3 to 1. Very doubtful.
Civilian deaths, while tragic are an inevitable part of modern war. Never in the history of war has a power gone to such great lengths and risk of its own troops to protect civilians.
It is sad and unfortunate that any civilians, especially women and children, are killed as a result of the hideous and criminal actions of their countrymen who claim to be freedom fighters - but offer only a vision of death and oppression.
The United States cares deeply about their lives and future of the Iraqi people and is doing everything possible to restore security and make possible a nation where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can be fundamental parts of the basic social fabric. It is for this world that individuals on both sides will be called to makethe ultimate sacrifice.
Anyone who takes this seriously is out of his/her mind.
How would the press have an accurate count?
I remember similar claims in Afghanistan, when the Taliban took the journalists on some tour, claiming so many killed by the US troops, and the journalists reported those as facts, later they turned out to be total fabrication.
I am quite certain this is the same thing.
"the group released a report estimating that, of the 800 Iraqis killed in last April's siege of Fallujah, 572 to 616 of them were civilians, at least 308 of them women and children)."
Another ludicrous claim. The civilians were urged to leave and they did. When we took over Fallujah, the only ones left were the terrorists.
The US troops knew which were the terrorist safe houses, and those were the ones they attacked.
To claim that 600 out of the 800 killed were "innocent civilians" shows what lying bunch this group is.
The thread doesn't have the actual title of the article.
If the US had fallen into absolute tyranny, and a foreign military brought the hope for restoring a life without fear to my family and countrymen, I would accept if I were to die.
....but only if my countrymen picked up the torch.
If I knew I were going to die and my countrymen weren't going to do anything to further themselves, I'd be pretty pissed.
The bottom line is, the deaths of civilians in Iraq is truly lamentable, but no one can honestly state they are being targeted so, as callus as it sounds, these numbers are right now only worth a shaking of the head.
All life is root in warfare. People are killed for every reason. The final judgment of the Iraq campaign will be in 5 or 10 years. For now, we can only hope.
So, if such claims are accurate (and they aren't), and 75% of our kills are civilians, and we killed about 3-6K terrorists, that means there must be 12-24K civilians dead in Fallujah...right?
I'm sure *evidence* of this will be immediately forthcoming...yeah...right...
1. How many of these civilians were killed by the terrorists?
2. How does this compared to those killed by Saddam while Kofi's cronies skimmed the Oil-for-Food program.
You didn't bother to post the most important part of the article:
"Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board."
Unquote.
1) The lie used to advance abortion was a million back-alley abortions were happening every year. This false 100,000 figure is the latest lie of the left.
2) Our US constitution requires an actual head count for the official purposes of a census. Keeping with this high standard, show me a stack of photocopied death certificates for this 100,000.
Jeez, where was all this concern when Saddamn was slaughtering people by the thousands?!
The best response is to stand up and cheer this article. It exposes the fraudulent claims of the original researchers who made up the numbers so as to attack America's liberation of Iraq.
Even more interesting, is they count every civilian killed by a terrorist and insurgeant.
Hmmm, when a car bomb goes off in some town in Iraq, and 15 little kids are blown to smitherians...is that somehow the US military's fault?
Actually, this Slate article rips the original study apart and, for all intents and purposes, calls it junk science.
I summarized the Slate article's findings on Post 11 of another FR thread.
*******************************
The 100,000 number came from a Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health study.
The Hopkins researchers did not see a single dead Iraqi. Instead, they interviewed 30 Iraqi households in 33 “clusters” in Iraq and asked about deaths in each household before and after the Iraq War. They then estimated a pre and post Iraq War death rate based on the answers, be they true or false, that they were given. The difference in the death rates, the Hopkins researchers claimed, was the number of so-called “excess deaths caused by the Iraq War”.
Two-thirds of all the violent deaths reported in the study took place in a single cluster: the Fallujah cluster that was the hotbed of Baathist Party. Yet, every so-called “excess death”, reported as caused by anything whatsoever from a lung cancer to getting struck by lightning , was automatically classified as an “excess death caused by the Iraq War” by the Hopkins researchers.
. Even worse, the “excess death” number was grossly inflated by using a falsely low pre-war death rate in the calculations. The pre 1991 Gulf War Iraqi death rate, according to the United Nations, was 6.8 per 1,000. The post 1991 Gulf War Iraqi death rate claimed by the Hopkins researchers was only 5.0 per 1,000. The same people who once claimed that one million Iraqis, including half a million children, were killed by U.N sanctions after the 1991 Gulf War now want us to believe that the death rate in Iraq actually DECREASED after the 1991 Gulf War in order to validate the Hopkins study numbers.
It’s a classic case of the GIGO (Garbage In – Garbage Out) Effect: “If invalid data is entered in a computer program, the resulting output will also be invalid.”
The most damning critique of the Hopkins study, however, is the study’s own “Confidence Interval” number. The Hopkins study stated, “We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.” What does that mean in plain English? (95% CI 8000-194 000) means that the Hopkins researchers were 95% confident that their “excess deaths caused by the Iraq War” came out to anywhere from 8,000 deaths to 194,000 deaths.
What’s the average American household income? Well, there is a 95% chance that it is somewhere between $8,000 and $194,000.
As a Slate.com critic of the Hopkins study wrote, “This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.”
A detailed critique of the flaws of the Hopkins study can be found at Democrat-friendly MSNBC Slate.com:
100,000 Dead—or 8,000 How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war?
I'd been wondering where the DUmmies got the "100,000 Iraqi civilians killed by the United States" that they love to throw around recklessly, accusing President Bush of genocide.
Now I know it's as far out in left field as all their other "facts."