Re: …they are killing anyone
This has been discussed adnauseum in WA:
http://www.paklinks.com/gs/showthread.php?t=188722
The fllowing is from a Newsweek analysis of Iraq Body Count.
For those of you who actually passed College Stats, read on:
The most recent entry in this campaign is a report released on July 19 by Iraq Body Count. This Web-based group (www.iraqbodycount.org) compiles news accounts of casualties in Iraq and tabulates them. “If journalism is the first draft of history, then this dossier may claim to be an early historical analysis of the military intervention’s known human costs,” the report’s authors write. They tally 24,865 civilians reported killed between the invasion on March 20, 2003 and March 19, 2005. News reports of casualties in Iraq are often notoriously unreliable; Iraqi officials have no systematic means of disseminating and verifying casualty information, which is typically gleaned by the press from policemen and witnesses at the scene. The U.S. military generally refuses to give any civilian casualty information. Reported death tolls vary widely for the same incident. But leaving aside the reliability of this data, it’s highly dubious to suggest, as this report clearly intends to do, that these deaths were the fault of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. The text of the report is decorated with pull quotes from news accounts of checkpoint killings and aerial bombardments. Even if U.S. troops didn’t kill all these people, they’re telling us, these civilians would not have died were it not for the U.S. presence. Is it the policeman’s fault when the hostage taker kills his hostage?
In fact, a fair reading of the report’s own data could support a completely contrary conclusion. Were it not for the insurgents, there would scarcely be much of a civilian death toll in Iraq now. A few isolated cases, yes, but nothing like the 8,000 civilians the Iraqi government says have died so far in 2005 from insurgent attacks. Fully 30 percent of the civilian fatalities Iraq Body Count records took place prior to May 1, 2003, when U.S. troops were actively engaged in the invasion and in subduing remnants of Saddam’s army. During that military campaign, large numbers of Saddam Fedayeen and other irregular forces foght back from the cover of civilian dress, a violation of the laws and customs of warfare. Those who died were inevitably declared civilians by their loved ones. And such forces in most places represented the bulk of the resistance against the invasion; the uniformed Iraqi military for the most part deserted and fled. And Saddam’s forces, both uniformed and not, systematically took refuge in schools, mosques, hospitals, and civilian neighborhoods, using those places as firebases–a guarantee that civilians would be killed in the process. In many places, coalition troops held their fire and slowed their advance for fear of causing greater civilian loss of life. In all, 6,616 civilian fatalities are listed by the report. Even if you make the dubious assumption that all of them were truly civilians, it is not surprising that so many died. Given the tactics of the enemy, it’s surprising that so few did.
Another big chunk of the fatalities recorded in the report took place in April and November of 2004, mostly in Fallujah during the two U.S. military operations to subdue that community. No journalists were permitted in Fallujah, except where embedded with military forces, so all news accounts of fatalities were based on contacts made with Iraqi stringers in Fallujah, or on telephone contacts to the hospital there. Even Iraqi stringers were mostly locals; outsiders were forbidden entry by the insurgents. The hospital was an insurgent stronghold, even at one point used as a fire base, and its officials were insurgent propagandists; they insisted, for instance, that every single casualty they treated had been a civilian victim, a claim so implausible as to remind one of the hilarious pronouncements of Saddam’s henchmen before and during the invasion. Iraqi stringers in Fallujah were nearly all local residents of the community, whose sympathies were entirely with the insurgents; their reports were next to worthless when it came to death tolls. At one point in April 2004, when Fallujah hospital officials were claiming more than 900 dead (a figure too incredible even to make it into the Iraq Body Count report), NEWSWEEK arranged for intermediaries to photograph the freshly dug graves in the cemetery, and we counted the headstones. There were 40 we could see, and Muslims do not normally wait around to bury their dead. Certainly there were probably other gravesites; but not 900 or even IBC’s 600 for April 2004.
Consider the graph in the report detailing monthly deaths. It shows deaths attributed to US-led forces (again, using news report-compiled data of dubious validity) as dropping into the low two-figures for most of the war, excepting the Fallujah periods (and other less dramatic upticks for operations in Samarra and elsewhere). Again, even if you assume that all of these civilians were really civilians–which is difficult considering the insurgents are never uniformed except when masked in beheading videos–those are not huge numbers, especially considering the size of the undertaking, the number of soldiers, and the level of attacks. In December 2004, for instance, 15 civilians are listed killed by U.S.-led forces; during that same month there were 70-80 attacks per day on U.S. and Iraqi forces, according to confidential security reports compiled by coalition military sources that if anything underestimate the level of attacks. And in that same month, “anti-occupation forces, unknown agents and crime,” as the report puts it, took the lives of 848 civilians.
The Iraq Body Count report goes through some interesting contortions to downplay the degree to which violence against civilians is predominantly caused by insurgent activity. U.S.-led forces alone, it says, killed 9,270 civilians, or 37.3 percent of the total (although it does not note at that pointthat 30 percent of that 37.3 percent was in the first six weeks of the war). Anti-occupation forces it blames for only 9.5 percent of the total, 2,353 civilians. Crossfires between insurgents and U.S. forces claim another 2.5 percent. And then most of the other deaths it attributes to “predominantly criminal killings” (35.9 percent) and “unknown agents” (11 percent). But it turns out that unknown agents are defined in the report as “those who appear to attack civilian targets lacking a clear or unambiguous link to the foreign military presence in Iraq. This may include some overlap with the groups above as well as with criminal murders.” In other words, terrorists and insurgents. And the “predominantly criminal killings” are all those recorded in mortuaries, subtracting the normal pre-war murder rate from the totals.
Talk about lies, damn lies and statistics. It’s abundantly clear to anyone who has been in Iraq that the great majority of those murders are political assassinations, and most of those are by anti-occupation insurgents against any and everyone connected no matter how remotely to the U.S. occupation or the Iraqi authorities, from ministers to off-duty policemen to cleaning ladies. The “unknown agent” behind a roadside bomb that kills everyone within blast range is hardly Joe Hood, and certainly not Joe GI. No where in this report do we see any mention of the astounding atrocities committed by the insurgents–the triple suicide car bombing at a sewage treatment facility that killed 40 children in 2004, or another suicide bombing last week that killed 28 children, lining up in both cases to receive treats from U.S. soldiers (only one of whom was killed, in the second instance).** In fact, a much fairer rendering of IBC’s own statistics would suggest that at worst 9.8 percent of these fatalities could be attributed to U.S.-led forces, another 32.5 percent to the fog of war, crossfires and the like, and the remaining 42.3 percent to insurgents and terrorists. And even that assumes, falsely, that all of these civilians were really civilians.**
the point is, you cant blame the allied forces solely for the deaths of these people…there are a lot of seperatist groups creating havoc in Iraq.
