Declarations of Independence

oneway

ONEWAY

I believe you are getting your Iraq news from Fox. I really am not paying much attention to the news. Thank you you make me search the latest Iraqi Civialian killed in this illegal criminal war.

How Many Dead Iraqis?
Guessing about collateral damage.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2003, at 623 PM ET

How many Iraqi civilians will die in Gulf War II? It's one of the most disturbing questions going into this battle?the question that fills doves with passion and hawks with doubt?so a few activists and analysts have tried to develop an answer. The most widely circulated one comes from a confidential report by a U.N. humanitarian-aid specialist, which was leaked to a group in Cambridge, which in turn published it on the Internet. This report estimates that civilian casualties could total 500,000. Another much-cited public study, by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, cites a figure of up to 100,000. If these calculations were even close to plausible, they would certainly strain many of the rationales for going to war, especially those that involve the liberation and welfare of the Iraqi people.

So, it's worth asking How were these numbers computed? On what assumptions?especially about U.S. strategy, tactics, weapons, and targets?are they based? There's an old phrase among those who work with computer models "GIGO," for Garbage In/Garbage Out. Feed a computer silly assumptions; it spits out ridiculous numbers. Not to paint a rosy picture on the devastation wrought by any war, especially this one, which is likely to be fought partly in densely populated cities, but these numbers are textbook cases of GIGO. They're not so much wrong as they are completely useless.

source http//www.slate.com/id/2079264/

More latter. You are way too ONEWAY.

Did you actually read the article you posted, KGB?

It does not support your position. It was written in 2003, before the war started, and lists predictions of casualties and then goes on to explain that the predictions are useless.

Not sure how you thought posting useless predictions from three years ago would bolster your argument.

Cheers,
oneway.

KGB

ONEWAY

No I did not read slate.com article before posting.

Following is the article which prove Iraqi Civialians killed by U.S. troops.

War has killed 100,000 Iraqis study
Last Updated Fri, 29 Oct 2004 062507 EDT
CBC News
LONDON - Nearly 100,000 more Iraqis have died during the American-led occupation than would have been expected otherwise, a study posted on The Lancet medical journal's website Thursday estimates.

INDEPTH Casualties in the Iraq war

A building explodes during a U.S. aerial assualt (AP Photo)
Most of the extra deaths in the first 18 months of the occupation were due to violence, the researchers said ? in particular, air strikes that claimed civilian casualties.

"Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children," they wrote.

Previous estimates of the number of Iraqis killed during the American-led air strikes and occupation have ranged from 10,000 to 30,000.

The report in the British journal is based on the work of teams from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The authors acknowledge that the data cited in the study might be of "limited precision."

However, similar methodology was used in the late 1990s to calculate the number of deaths from the war in Kosovo, put at 10,000.

The information was obtained as Iraqi interviewers surveyed 808 families, consisting of 7,868 people, in 33 different "clusters" or neighbourhoods spread across the country.

In each case, they asked how many births and deaths there had been in the home since January 2002.

That information was then compared with the death rates in each neighbourhood in the 15 months before the invasion that toppled president Saddam Hussein, adjusted for the different time frames, and extrapolated to cover the entire 24.4 million population of Iraq.

The researchers came up with the figure of 100,000 extra deaths based on the fact that the rate rose from five deaths per 1,000 people before the war to 12.3 deaths per 1,000 in the 18 months that followed its start.

Fallujah neighbourhood factored out

One neighbourhood in the besieged city of Fallujah may have boosted the numbers unnaturally, the researchers pointed out.

But even with that neighbourhood taken out, the death rate was 7.9 per 1,000 people ? 50 per cent higher during the occupation than in the months before.

"We estimate that there were 98,000 extra deaths during the post-war period in the 97 per cent of Iraq represented by all the clusters except Fallujah," the researchers said in the journal.

Nearly 1,100 American soldiers have also died in the conflict.

Before the invasion, the most common causes of death in Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and other chronic diseases, the Lancet report said.

Since early 2002, violence was by far the main cause of death, linked to coalition air strikes in about 95 per cent of cases where people died by the intentional act of others. Infant mortality also rose significantly.

Remember there is no offical Civilian Death Counts just like Vietnam war where the whole villages were blown up causing millions of deaths.

oneway