Why is the American press silent on the report of 655,000 Iraqi deaths?

[oblivious]

By Joe Kay and Barry Grey
13 October 2006

The US media is virtually silent on a new scientific study that estimates the Iraqi death toll from the US war at 655,000. The study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and funded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was posted Wednesday on the web site of the British medical journal, the Lancet.

...The corporate-owned-and-controlled media have buried this story because they do not want the American people to know the truth of what is happening in Iraq.

They want to conceal this truth—as they have done consistently since the war began—because they are complicit in a massive war crime in Iraq, and continue to support the bloodletting by the US military.

...The scale of mass killing revealed in the Johns Hopkins study published by the Lancet stands as an indictment of the entire American ruling elite, both of its political parties—Democratic no less than Republican—and all of its official institutions, among which the media has played a particularly sordid role.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/oct2006/iraq-o13.shtml
edit: add URL

[Freedom_from_Chains]

1. What, you mean you expect them to play politics with this fact?

I get so damn tired of hearing politicians saying "well, there just politicizing this Issue, event, fact, whatever. Your goddamn right, that's what we send them to Washington to do, is politics you dumb ass. Hence we wouldn't call them politician's if we expected them to clean the street or something.

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. 'Cause the American press murdered 'em.

>>>They want to conceal this truth—as they have done consistently since the war began—because they are complicit in a massive war crime in Iraq, and continue to support the bloodletting by the US military.>>>>

That's the short answer. The more complete answer is above; no less horrifying , no less true.

[acmavm]

3. Exactly, the American press, the compassionate Christians, the

warmongering administration and the complicit dems.

They all have blood on their hands.

[OneBlueSky]

4. major American media is, collectively, a BushCo house organ . . .

they report the official BushCo position, not the lunatic ravings of some foreign rag that most Americans have never heard of . . .

wish I could use the sarcasm smiley, but this is pretty close to the truth . . .

[stevenleser]

5. I'm obviously a minor player at best, but...

... taking a chance by tying yourself to this report and number (655,000) is a massive risk. All you have as a journalist is your credibility. I've been meaning to thoroughly examine the details of the report and see if it is supportable.

I believe that the official (Bushco) numbers of casualties are too low, but leaping to support items of questionable fact is not going to end up benefiting us in the long run.

[greenman3610]

8. these numbers come from MIT and Johns Hopkins

derived by experienced professionals who used the
same methodology to estimate deaths in Kosovo, Rwanda,
and the Tsunami.

[iamahaingttta]

6. You're kidding, right?

I thought so...

[pampango]

7. ABC news had a segment on it on Wednesday. n/t

[rodeodance]

10. yes. But no follow up after Bush dismissed the numbers.

[pampango]

22. True, but the RW probably thinks that even seriously discussing the

number was another example of the "LW media" at work.

[Uncle Joe]

34. And not discussing the actual news and events as they take place

only reinforces the LW thinking it's just another example of the mass corporate media, enabling the corrupt incompetent RW to stay in power without accountability.

[Briar]

9. Because

in the scale of their thinking, the deaths of four New Yorkers (including a baseball star) are far, far more important than the deaths of towel heads.

[Demeter]

11. Because THEY Didn't Get To Break the Story?

Because everybody down to 14 year-old bloggers is making them look bad? Because nobody paid them to?
Lots of reasons. Guess they'll just have to stop running news and do full-time advertising and press releases....oh, they did that already? And readership is down? So ad revenues are declining? Tsk-tsk!

[MISSDem]

12. Well after all President Bush said the the report is not reliable.

And who you gonna believe him or Johns Hopkins, et al?

[jbfam4]

13. SEATTLE POST- ...chaeck below

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Iraq War: Body count ...

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/288322_iraqdeaded.html

A controversial new study estimates the number of civilian casualties in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003 to be as high as 600,000. Other estimates put the civilian body count at less than 50,000.

But, like debating how many angels might dance on the point of a pit, debating death counts obscures the fundamental issue. It wasn't necessary for any Iraqis to die -- be it one or 100,000 -- as the result of a U.S. invasion and occupation of their country.

The primary rationale given for the war -- that Iraq's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction combined with its connections to terrorist organizations to pose a clear and present danger to America -- was false. Had the Bush administration continued to rely on U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, instead of rushing to war, the same realization would have been reached, but without tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths or the deaths of nearly 3,000 American soldiers.

It's of little use to debate just how many tens of thousands of Iraqis have perished as a result of the U.S. invasion, occupation and ensuing sectarian violence and civil war when none need have died.

[oblivious]

14. "A controversial new study...of little use to debate how many..."

Nothing about the quality of the study.

Contrasted with the 50,000 number to show that it's just so many numbers to throw around.

Exactly the authors' complaint about the treatment of this study by the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times.

[Jcrowley]

15. It's what they do

Silence is the most effective tool for the propagandist.

[Inquirer]

16. coverage?

Funny, I'm outside of the states,and I saw it on CNN international and BBC over and over and over and over. It has been covered. My only wonderment was why wasn't the number 666,000? It's made up, various people are crafting polls and numbers for weirdly illogical reasons, all to 'change things', everything is working at cross purposes.

Only thing I have been trying to find out, is what DO the Democrats want to do about muslim infiltration and terrorism? This is the weak point in the platform, so where are we?

v

[oblivious]

18. Muslim infiltration of what? What does that mean?

I would hope the Democrats would get back to the business of making friends in contrast to the Republicans, who appear to spend all their trying to think of new ways to make enemies and encourage more terrorism.

[Name removed]

19. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[oblivious]

20. That's some messed up shit you're spouting.

You have an extrordinary wit, playing on my name like that. Only the very cleverest of right-wing hacks have come up with that childish little insult, so far four of them. They never seem to last long here.

You have my sympathies.

[Judi Lynn]

21. Using a term like "dangerous ignorance" in your post is unpleasant

and unwelcome.

I support "oblivious" wholly and wonder why you chose to launch such an odd attack. We've seen it all before, and you should have the sense enough to recognize how dull and absurd it is.

Coming in with guns blazing, trying to blow away DU'ers is peculiar.

[Name removed]

24. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[ninkasi]

17. Try to imagine

how * would have responded if in 2001, bin Laden had managed to send enough operatives to kill 655,000 of us, rather than the almost 3000 who died in the attacks on 9-11. Does he not realize that people in other parts of the world love their own, as much as we love ours? Doesn't he realize that's why we're losing in Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Uncle Joe]

23. Because they are waiting for it to hit 656,000 before they report it,

isn't that right mass corporate media? Hellooo anybody there? Mass corporate media where are you? .....chirp chirp chirp:shrug: They must be busy doing something really important? Did somebody get kidnapped, divorced, drunk or run away from their wedding? I know there must be a good reason, our fourth estate watchdogs for democracy:patriot: have not reported on this! Maybe they don't want the American People to be burdened with too much information on our "leaders" decision making results prior to an election?:think: That would only make us emotional :cry: and stuff, isn't that considerate of them?:loveya:

[jbfam4]

25. Counting The Iraqi Dead By Eugene Robinson

Counting The Iraqi Dead

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, October 13, 2006; Page A29

"Not credible" was President Bush's quick verdict on the new study, published this week in the British medical journal the Lancet, calculating that more than 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion and its ensuing chaos. It is understandable that the president would be quick to dismiss such an explosive claim, but the rest of us should take the time to look a bit more closely.

The number of estimated deaths claimed by the study is inconceivably huge and wildly out of scale with any previous figures we've heard. But it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the human suffering in Iraq has been far beyond our imagining.

Does this prove, as the study asserts, that precisely 654,965 Iraqis have died "as a consequence of the war," and that exactly 601,027 of those deaths were due to violence? No, it doesn't. The Johns Hopkins team reports being 95 percent certain that the true figure lies between about 400,000 and about 900,000 -- a large range of uncertainty that some critics have seized upon as discrediting the whole project.


But quite a lot of science went into the Johns Hopkins study. Even if you assume that the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the war began is at the very low end of the study's range, that's still a quantum leap from earlier estimates. We now have reputable evidence -- not proof, I'll allow, but science-based evidence from respected scholars, published in one of the world's most prestigious medical journals -- that the humanitarian tragedy in Iraq is much, much worse than anyone had suspected.

If the study's findings are flawed, then its critics should demonstrate how and why. But no one should dismiss these shocking numbers without fully examining them. No one should want to.

[stevenleser]

26. OK, I really missed the boat on this...

look for something very soon (within 24 hrs) which will include why I was caught snoozing on this one...

[IndianaGreen]

27. Hard for Americans to accept that our troops are no different from German

and Japanese troops during World War II, or for that matter no different from the French Foreign Legion during the Algerian war of independence.

[rayofreason]

28. The media are not saying much about this...

...because the Lancet study is FUBAR.

See http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ and click on "press release". Tie yourself to a poorly done study that would never pass rigorous peer-review, get hung for it later. Sheesh, even elementary order of magnitude estimates raise serious questions, as the press release shows. Didn't the authors ever do a Fermi problem? What's next, an estimate showing that more than the entire population has died? Badly done studies just distract attention from a rational assessment of the situation.

So do hysterical claims like "our troops are no different from German and Japanese troops during World War II" as one poster here wrote. Only overwhelming historical ignorance would cheapen horrors like the rape of Nanking and Baba Yar by comparison to anything today. Fortunately the events of the 20th century have not gone completely down the memory hole, particularly the knowledge of the ten's of millions who perished at the hands of self-proclaimed Marxist regimes. On the other hand, there are plenty of moral idiots who claim that the headchopping, mysogynistic jihadis are on the side of justice and peace, so I guess anything is to be expected. But it certainly is not the way to win over those who can be reasoned with.

[Briar]

29. Hysterical?

Or is it just that most Americans are in a state of permanent denial - like the former British squaddy on the BBC last night who remarked that he had always seen the British Empire as a good thing and felt hurt when the Egyptians campaigned to get us out of their country?

Good article here:

More Deadly Than Saddam
by Gwynne Dyer


...

The most striking thing in the study, in terms of credibility, is that the prewar death rate in Iraq for the period January 2002-March 2003, as calculated from their evidence, was 5.5 per thousand per year. That is virtually identical to the U.S. government estimate of the death rate in Iraq for the same period. Then, from the same evidence, they calculate that the death rate since the invasion has been 13.3 per thousand per year. The difference between the prewar and postwar death rates over a period of 40 months is 655,000 deaths.

More precisely, the deaths reported by the 12,801 people surveyed, when extrapolated to the entire country, indicates a range of between 426,369 and 793,663 excess deaths -- but the sample is big enough that there is a 95 percent certainty that the true figure is within that range. What the Johns Hopkins team have done in Iraq is more rigorous version of the technique that is used to calculate deaths in southern Sudan and the eastern Congo. To reject it, you must either reject the whole discipline of statistics, or you must question the professional integrity of those doing the survey.

The study, which was largely financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies, has been reviewed by four independent experts. One of them, Paul Bolton of Boston University, called the methodology "excellent" and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on: "You can't be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark."

This is not a political smear job. Johns Hopkins University, Boston University and MIT are not fly-by-night institutions, and people who work there have academic reputations to protect. The Lancet, founded 182 years ago, is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. These numbers are real. So what do they mean?

...

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1016-20.htm


(They mean, among other things, that Coalition air strikes have killed some 75,000 Iraqis since the start of the illegal invasion and occupation.)

[rayofreason]

30. Yes, hysterical.

It takes real hysteria to say things like "American soldiers are as bad as WWII Japanese". Read about the rape of Nanking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_nanking

300,000 dead in 6 weeks. In one city. Mass rapes. Impaling babies on bayonets. Officers conducting mass decapitation practice on Chinese civilians (who is doing headchopping today?). And all thoroughly documented. Not even Darfur reaches such barabarity (though it gets close). To make an equivalence between Nanking and Bagdhad is to put on such moral blinders, to cheapen human suffering to the point were no rational comparison is possible. If somethinks already that today's Iraq is like Nanking in December-January 1937, then their outrage could not grow if we had photos of US officers lining up bound Iraqis by the thousand for target and bayonet practice. In fact, that point of view would hold that it could never get worse, since there is no depth of depravity that was not visited upon the citizens of Nanking. Yet many, mayself included, would hold that indeed things could be FAR worse. Like Chenya, or Darfur.

Yes, hysteria. Like when people say "Bush is the same as Hitler!" - what stupidity. Where are the mass internment/death camps of US citizens? If this were Hitler's Reich, how long before the Gestapo would track down the managers of the DU, get the database of all posters, round them up and send them to camps? In Stalin's Russia of the 30's if you were just connected to someone arrested, you were in danger. A close Georgian friend told me a story of how when one of his grandmother's colleagues was arrested (never seen again), she nervously destroyed all evidence of him in her house, even cutting him out of photos. I, on the other hand, have no fear of a knock in the night. I can write, say, post anything I damn well please and not fear for my safety. I suspect that you do not tremble in bed either.

So what about some perspective? Hyperventilation will only sway the weakminded, not the serious, thoughtful observer. To quote the Iraqbodycount press release "...if a change in policy is needed, the catastrophic roll-call of the already known dead is more than ample justification for that change."

[fedsron2us]

31. War crimes are not just a matter of body counts

Try reading the Nuremberg Principles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles

[stevenleser]

32. Hopefully this makes up for my initial inaction and disbelief

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x240863

[oblivious]

35. Great work. Sorry I was too late to recommend.

[depakid]

33. Because they're complicit

and people will remember that.