Precision killing in Iraq (John Hopkins U. Study) 1000 Iraqis a week

[kpete]

Precision killing in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz

A little more than a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins University researchers reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence by the US and its allies.

The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating that 1.7 million people had died in Congo in 2000. Though the Congo study had won the praise of the Bush and Blair administrations and had become the foundation for UN Security


Council and State Department actions, this study was quickly declared invalid by the US government and supporters of the war. This dismissal was hardly surprising, but after a brief flurry of protest, even the anti-war movement (with a number of notable exceptions) has largely ignored the ongoing carnage that the study identified.

One reason the Hopkins study did not generate sustained outrage is that the researchers did not explain how the occupation had managed to kill so many people so quickly - about 1,000 each week in the first 14 months of the war. This may reflect our sense that carnage at such elevated levels requires a series of barbaric acts of mass slaughter and/or huge battles that would account for staggering numbers of Iraqis killed. With the exception of the battle of Fallujah, these sorts of high-profile events have simply not occurred in Iraq.


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA13Ak01.html

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. So has Bush put more Iraqis into mass graves

then Saddam did yet? Has he killed enough people yet to earn the title of Nazi?

[madrchsod]

3. bush1,clinton,and bush 2

15 years of genocide has killed more iraqis than saddam ever did.

[PATRICK]

4. Mirroring Saddam, Adolph

An illegal, opposed occupation will degenerate into this. The limits depend on only the degree to which atrocity is dipped into(the wholesale execution or symbolic execution of civilians, routine torture, Calley style senseless slaughter, extremely overwhelming force(now a US favorite but unfortunately one the long suffering people of Iraq have seen before). Nearly everything has been delved into and likely much we are not allowed to know so I suspect all lines have been crossed at least by some of our forces. I predicted this at the beginning, also that its effect coming from naive and unbrutalized Americans would be a joke thinking it would impress like Saddam impressed. But they upped the ante more swiftly and reflexively than anyone dared guess thanks to torture Cheney and Rumsfeld purging the military leadership. So more have suffered in vain as the parity with Saddam is silently sought for, and the Shia grimly wade through the blood peacefully to achieve their goals against us.

So when you hear of military solutions and staying the course even from brighter lights in the suppressed officer corps it means nothing. The moral war was swiftly lost and going from bad to worse, And the "plan" of such things is not winning anything but making occupation sustainable by brutalization, by recycling of trapped psychopaths into the prison guard or security guard system, by playing gangs of Iraqis off against each other to diversify the burden of violence like the Bloods and Cripps in LA.

Not a day goes by where some increase in barbarity, even though amateurish and innocent by Iraqi police state standards, doesn't happen that George Bush doesn't care about. Bushco lives with that, the military with volumes of ignored history books soldiers on with that, the corporate media squeaking from their Green Zone lives with that, the Democratic leadership(the can-do-better default party of "pragmatic DC policy) is conflicted, and we back home- for now- stay alive with this going on by dint of our taxed labor and stolen government. I pay for the torture of children and slaughter of families, the brutalization of my army, for the sake of the oil and empire policy of deranged incompetents.

In order not to be a war criminal, an investor and accomplice, one must take down OUR illegal regime, admit ALL the truth and punish all the top perps, treat all the brutalized soldiers, make restitution to the victims and purge the roots of greed and oligarchy that will grow more of the same the same the same wherever decent human civilization rears its pretty head. We are all scarred whatever the comparative innocence of our consciences or efforts to stop crimes dared in our name.

[leftchick]

5. He killed more than Saddam ever hoped to

and has better rape rooms and torture chambers all over Iraq. Yeah he is a fucking Nazi...

[ovidsen]

2. Collateral damage? Not.

So much for winning the hearts and minds of Iraqs. That's hard to do when they're dead.