A number of Iraqi government figures, including several members of parliament publicly criticized the US military’s civilian death toll report today, insisting that it was well below the actual numbers for the nation.
“These figures and statistics have nothing to do with events in Iraq after the US occupation,” insisted former MP Dhafir al-Ani, adding that the US report likely didn’t include civilians killed by the US military.
The report claimed 77,000 Iraqis were killed between January 2004 and August of 2008. The toll was split between 63,185 civilians and 13,754 Iraqi troops. The toll was far lower than the official Iraqi government report for the period, which was itself widely criticized as an undercount.
Reports from non-government organizations have put the death toll for that period in the several hundred thousand range, with some saying the “excess death” toll, which includes people killed because of lacking services during the war, could exceed one million.
Measurements of extra deaths by scientific methods puts the number with a great certainty ABOVE 1 million extra. And this is compared to the previous period,, where the US-British blockade of Iraq killed half a million children. I will admit this is not mass murder, only mass manslaughter. Still it does not make you love the government, does it?
Is that a war crime or is it a war crime.. so where is the proscutions by the US attorney general or international court of justice of those who are and were in charged of the killings. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair, P. Wolfovitz, P. Burner and etc etc etc.
The number is well over a million. The US is covering its tracks as always- very much like Saddam, only to a greater degree thanks to their deadlier force. If we had built a 'Vietnam memorial' that included all the Vietnamese killed it would have had to be 5 miles long yet all we ever hear about are the 58,000 Americans killed. Behind the shadow of that tragedy is another hidden tragedy greater than the one we commemorate.