Reply #12: Much Closer to 300,000 Dead! [View All]

and how bad was that saddam guy again?

http://www.irishantiwar.org/news/item.tcl?news_item_id=102238

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The lead author of the Lancet report, Les Roberts, reported more recently on February 8, 2006, that there may be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. One of the world's top epidemiologists who lectures at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Roberts has also worked for the World Health Organization and the International Rescue Committee.

Further underscoring these results from the Lancet report were comments made by Bradley Woodruff, a medical epidemiologist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education on January 27, 2005: "Les has used, and consistently uses, the best possible methodology." The article continues, "Indeed, the United Nations and the State Department have cited mortality numbers compiled by Mr. Roberts on previous conflicts as fact - and have acted on those results. (He) has studied mortality caused by war since 1992, having done surveys in locations including Bosnia, Congo, and Rwanda. His three surveys in Congo for the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental humanitarian organization, in which he used methods akin to those of his Iraq study, received a great deal of attention. 'Tony Blair and Colin Powell have quoted those results time and time again without any question as to the precision or validity,' he says."

In an interview on Democracy Now! on December 14, 2005, Roberts, when discussing why the figure from his report was too low stated that it excluded Fallujah so as not to skew the survey, and said, "And so, those who attacked us did not attack us for our methods. In fact, I think, if you read the reviews in the Wall Street Journal or The Economist, of what we did, the scientific community is quite soundly behind our approach. The criticism is of the imprecision. But realize the imprecision is: Was it 100,000 or was it 200,000? The question wasn't: Was it only 30 or 40 ? There's no chance it could have been only 30 or 40 ."

The staggering level of violence and death one of these authors has seen on the ground in Iraq certainly backs Roberts's statements and those of other journalists, like veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, who writes for the Independent. In an article on December 30, 2005, Fisk wrote: "We do not even know - are not allowed to know - how many of them have died. We know that 1,100 Iraqis died by violence in Baghdad in July alone ... But how many died in the other cities of Iraq, in Mosul and Kirkuk and Irbil, and in Amara and Fallujah and Ramadi and Najaf and Kerbala and Basra? Three thousand in July? Or four thousand? And if those projections are accurate, we are talking about 36,000 or 48,000 over the year - which makes that projected post-April 2003 figure of 100,000 dead, which Blair ridiculed, rather conservative, doesn't it?"