100,000 Iraqis have died. Where’s the press?
From The Lancet Medical Journal
“The enemy is ignorance and arrogance…” -Sami Rasouli
A recent study entitled, “Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey,” was published in The Lancet, a highly regarded British medical journal, on November 20, 2004. Medical researchers from the U.S. and from Iraq teamed up to find out how the invasion of Iraq was affecting mortality rates in Iraq. The study was widely discredited because, among other things, the estimated number of Iraqi dead since the invasion of Iraq was so much higher than any other report had suggested, but the work of research leader Dr. Les Roberts had been used by the U.S. government prior to this. Are the government, media and public ignoring and discrediting his work now because they don’t want to face the facts? Some studies that have attempted to produce an accurate count of civilian casualties have relied mostly on hospital counts of the dead. Sami Rasouli, a Iraqi-American peace activist, points out that the “U.S., when it acts, occupies the hospitals right away so there is no way to count [through contact with hospitals]” the civilian deaths.
Roberts and his team of researchers from Johns Hopkins, Al-Mustansiriya University (in Baghdad) and Columbia University found the following: “The risk of death was estimated to be 2.5 fold (95% CI 1.6-4.2)1 higher after the invasion when compared with the preinvasion period. Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja. If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1.5 fold (1.1-2.3) higher after the invasion. We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8 000-194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included… Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher (95% CI 8.1-41900[1] 2 than in the period before the war. Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100 000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.” [emphasis added] (The Lancet Vol 364 Pg 1857).
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1. Researchers are 95% sure that the risk of death after the invasion is between 1.6- and 4.2-fold.
2. Researchers are 95% sure that the risk of death from violence is between 8.1 and 419 times higher after the invasion than before it.
*Footnotes supplied by WAMM editor
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