Posted on 12/02/2004 9:52:17 AM PST by dukeman
My hometown newspaper today included one of those letters to the editor re "Bush administration has no 'moral values' because it's killing 100,000 Iraqi civilians in an unncecessary war!" I'm working on a rebuttal letter and wonder whether anyone has run down the facts behind the claim of 100,000 civilian deaths because of U.S action. Does anyone know where this figure came from and whether or not it has been debunked (or authenticated)? My sense is that the figure is high for propaganda purposes.
it comes from a reports by a self proclaimed human rights group and a british newspaper (if i recall correctly). given the sources, you can draw your own conclusions about the bias.
But for the sake of argument, lets say 100,000 have been killed. Using organizations like Amnesty Internationals numbers when they were fighting to get sanctions lifted, more people died per year under Saddam than have been killed during the war. So in reality, LESS people have died in the war than if there had been no war.
I can't provide a link off the top of my head, but the study had a margin of error of plus or minus 92,000. That means the number could have been as low as 8,000.
The body count of "civilians" (meaning attackers who don't wear an Iraqi military uniform) is around 10,000. Even the Leftist "Iraqi Body Count" site only puts the number between 14,000 and 16,000.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1275434/posts
Got the whole mess!~
It was an obvious October surprise timed to influence the election as well.
I've got that same feeling. I think if the casualties were that high that even Karzai would be outspoken about it. I would be surprised if it was even a tenth of that figure.
Any thing a liberal pulls out of his rear is FACT until proven otherwise. Then the allegation is true. Just ask Rather.
SWAG by the MSM. There are no supporting data.
Remember, terrorists are not in uniform. These left-wing psycho groups probably count all the dead terrorists as civilian dead.
Freepmail me tonight and I'll give you two articles that debunk it neatly. One was by Michael Fumento in the NY Post (don't know if it's still available online, and it was mighty hard to find on their website even the day after it was published). Can't recall the source of the other article, but it was good too. I have both of them on my home computer.
And how many of them were killed by the so-called "freedom fighters".
I would definitely ask THEM to provide the source stating that there were 100,000 deaths. They should have cited the source when posting the article (although libs never do). Since they didn't, I would challenge them and ask them to provide proof or a source.
The leftist body count site has the number at 14,000 to 16,000. On their site, they say this about the 100K number
"IBC response to the Lancet study estimating "100,000" Iraqi deaths
Some people have asked us why we have not increased our count to 100,000 in the light of the multiple media reports of the recent Lancet study [link] which claims this as a probable and conservative estimate of Iraqi casualties.
Iraq Body Count does not include casualty estimates or projections in its database. It only includes individual or cumulative deaths as directly reported by the media or tallied by official bodies (for instance, by hospitals, morgues and, in a few cases so far, NGOs), and subsequently reported in the media. In other words, each entry in the Iraq Body Count data base represents deaths which have actually been recorded by appropriate witnesses - not "possible" or even "probable" deaths."
Goggle "100,000 Iraqi deaths" and "Johns Hopkins" and you should get the original report. Just from the huge range of the "results" you can conclude that this is an example of junk science.
Congressman Billybob
Click for latest, "Jennings on Jeopardy! -- Nice Guys Do Finish First"
It was in the British medical journal Lancet, IIRC.
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