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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 9:16 pm Post subject: counting the cost |
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brilliant article here from the guardian ( site, not paper ) but it should be in every paper and on every news bulletin
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_horton/2007/03/counting_the_cost.html
| Quote: | Counting the cost
The figures have now been vindicated by the government's own advisers. It's time we held our leaders to account for the 650,000 Iraqi dead.
Our collective failure has been to take our political leaders at their word. This week, the BBC reported that the government's own scientists advised ministers that the Johns Hopkins study on Iraq civilian mortality was accurate and reliable. This paper was published in the Lancet last October. It estimated that 650,000 Iraqi civilians had died since the American- and British-led invasion in March 2003.
Immediately after publication, the prime minister's official spokesman said that The Lancet's study "was not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate". The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said that the Lancet figures were "extrapolated" and a "leap". President Bush said: "I don't consider it a credible report".
Scientists at the UK's Department for International Development thought differently. They concluded that the study's methods were "tried and tested". Indeed, the Hopkins approach would likely lead to an "underestimation of mortality".
The Ministry of Defence's chief scientific advisor said the research was "robust", close to "best practice", and "balanced". He recommended "caution in publicly criticising the study".
When these recommendations went to the prime minister's advisers, they were horrified. One person briefing Tony Blair wrote: "are we really sure that the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies?" A Foreign Office official was forced to conclude that the government "should not be rubbishing The Lancet".
The prime minister's adviser finally gave in. He wrote: "the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones".
How would the government respond?
Would it welcome the Hopkins study as an important contribution to understanding the military threat to Iraqi civilians? Would it ask for urgent independent verification? Would it invite the Iraqi government to upgrade civilian security?
Of course, our government did none of these things. Tony Blair was advised to say: "the overriding message is that there are no accurate or reliable figures of deaths in Iraq".
His official spokesman went further and rejected the Hopkins report entirely. It was a shameful and cowardly dissembling by a Labour - yes, by a Labour - prime minister.
Indeed, it was even contrary to the Americans' own Iraq Study Group report, which concluded last year that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq".
This Labour government, which includes Gordon Brown as much as it does Tony Blair, is party to a war crime of monstrous proportions. Yet our political consensus prevents any judicial or civil society response. Britain is paralysed by its own indifference.
At a time when we are celebrating our enlightened abolition of slavery 200 years ago, we are continuing to commit one of the worst international abuses of human rights of the past half-century. It is inexplicable how we allowed this to happen. It is inexplicable why we are not demanding this government's mass resignation.
Two hundred years from now, the Iraq war will be mourned as the moment when Britain violated its delicate democratic constitution and joined the ranks of nations that use extreme pre-emptive killing as a tactic of foreign policy. Some anniversary that will be. |
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Mandy
Joined: 07 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2007 9:26 pm Post subject: |
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| Excellent article .. Throw out the monsters -- better still, throw them in Jail. |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 12:43 pm Post subject: |
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we can only hope gg  and for those that pray, pray!
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/iraq-m28_prn.shtml
| Quote: | British government scientists vouched for validity of study estimating 655,000 war deaths in Iraq
By Naomi Spencer
28 March 2007
British government scientists endorsed the validity of a study released last October that estimated 655,000 Iraqis have been killed as the result of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, the BBC reported March 26.
Despite the advice of its own scientists, however, the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, along with US President Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard, brushed aside the study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and published in the British medical journal the Lancet, calling its methodology “flawed” and its results “suspect.” The media in both the US and Britain buried the report.
According to documents obtained by the BBC World Service’s “Newshour” program under a freedom of information request, senior officials and scientists had advised the Blair government against publicly criticizing the findings, saying that the methodology was “a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.”
The BBC report confirms the validity of the Johns Hopkins study and underscores the monumental scale of US and British war crimes in Iraq. It also highlights the dishonesty and complicity of the media in these crimes.
The Johns Hopkins study, published October 11, 2006, compared mortality rates before and after the US-led invasion by conducting thousands of interviews in Iraq. The survey was an enormous undertaking, with a sample size of over 12,800 individuals in 1,849 households in 47 randomly chosen areas throughout the country. With 95 percent statistical certainty, researchers concluded that the number of war dead was between 392,979 and 942,636, with the highest statistical likelihood around 655,000.
In 92 percent of the interviews, respondents furnished death certificates for the researchers. They concluded that, in three years, 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population had been killed in the war—an average of more than 500 a day. Most of the deaths were from gunfire. If the rate of Iraqi deaths were extrapolated to the US population, the toll of American fatalities would be 7.5 million—nearly equal to the population of New York City.
At a press conference the same day the study was published, President Bush told reporters, “I don’t consider it a credible report . . . Neither does General Casey, neither do Iraqi officials.” The Iraqi Health Ministry’s mortality estimate is one-tenth the Johns Hopkins estimate. Without providing an explanation, alternative estimate, or even demonstrating that he had read the study, Bush described the methodology as “pretty well discredited.”
Australian Prime Minister Howard declared, “I don’t believe that Johns Hopkins research. I don’t. It’s not plausible. It’s not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey.”
Likewise, a spokesman for Tony Blair told the press, “The problem is they’re using an extrapolation technique from a relatively small sample from an area of Iraq which isn’t representative of the country as a whole. We have questioned that technique right from the beginning and we continue to do so.”
The British government issued a statement following Monday’s BBC report in which it reiterated the same “uncertainty:” “The methodology has been used in other conflict situations, notably the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the Lancet figures are much higher than statistics from other sources, which only goes to show how estimates can vary enormously according to the method of collection.”
Among the documents obtained by the BBC was a memo by the chief scientific adviser at the British Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, written just two days after the Johns Hopkins study was published. The memo said, “The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to ‘best practice’ in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq.”
Responding to Anderson’s memo, a British government official wrote, “Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies.”
Another official responded to Anderson’s statement: “We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate.” Yet in the same email, the official stated, “However, the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.”
Clearly, the reason the Blair government did not accept the estimates had nothing to do with the science, and everything to do with the political and legal implications of a death toll on the scale of genocide for which the US-led coalition is responsible.
There has been virtually no US media coverage of the BBC’s damning report. A day after the story broke in Britain, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, the four major broadcast networks and other outlets failed to mention the report. Only the Washington Times online picked up the story, reposting a United Press International brief of less than two hundred words.
The mainstream press has played an integral role in suppressing politically damaging information from the build-up to the Iraq invasion up to the present. With its latest blackout, the US media yet again affirms its complicity in the mass killing and social devastation carried out by American imperialism in Iraq.
Last October, when the Johns Hopkins study was released, the New York Times and Washington Post buried the story in their back pages and made no editorial comment. When confronted by reporters for the World Socialist Web Site about his newspaper’s handling of the subject during a talk on security and press freedom at the University of Michigan in October, New York Times editor Bill Keller shrugged off the suppression of the story, saying, “We didn’t splash it on the front page.”
On October 18, 2006, the Wall Street Journal ran the despicably entitled opinion piece, “655,000 War Dead? A Bogus Study on Iraq Casualties.” It was written by Steven Moore, who had worked under Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Declaring that “the Johns Hopkins tally is wildly at odds with any numbers I have seen in that country,” Moore suggested that the study was ideologically biased.
As the blackout on Monday’s BBC report makes clear, the media continues to keep people in the dark about the scale of the carnage in Iraq and shield those who are responsible. |
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nekokate
Joined: 13 Dec 2006
Location: West Yorkshire, UK
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 2:42 pm Post subject: |
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| The thing that really pisses me off about Blair, Bush and people like John Howard who are brushing the report aside is, even if the figure wasn't near 650,000, even if it was only 100,000 or something, it would still be appauling! |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 2:53 pm Post subject: |
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all them people seem to think like that, remember madeleine albright saying the deaths of the children in iraq under sanctions 'was a price worth paying' how sick is that 
i think galloway quoted someone a while back, something like one death is a disaster, big numbers dead are just a statistic |
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Mandy
Joined: 07 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 2:59 pm Post subject: |
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| luke wrote: | | all them people seem to think like that, remember madeleine albright saying the deaths of the children in iraq under sanctions 'was a price worth paying' |
I think she was replying to "statistics" of more than half a million children's deaths. Click here for a Google search regarding her quote |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 3:17 pm Post subject: |
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yeah sorry i made that sound a bit worse than it was
| Quote: | | When asked on US television if she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying, Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it." |
so its not was a price worth paying, but we think the price was worth it
still as dark as you can get imo |
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Mandy
Joined: 07 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 3:21 pm Post subject: |
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| luke wrote: | | still as dark as you can get imo |
I agree .. especially as we are talking about over half a million THEN .. and probably millions now. |
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major.tom
Macho Business Donkey Wrestler
Joined: 21 Jan 2007
Location: BC, Canada
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| Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 12:28 am Post subject: |
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Luke] I remember that quote well and it still chills my blood. It's very easy for our governments to talk about "the price" paid by others. In fact, it's typical corporate ideology and even has a name -- externality. If we (or our friends) benefit from something we do and we (or our friends) don't suffer as a result, it must be ok, right?
Even if that means something as horrible as killing innocent people. Disgusting, really. |
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