Unworthy victims: Western wars have killed four million Muslims since 1990

Landmark research proves that the US-led ‘war on terror’ has killed as many as 2 million people, but this is a fraction of Western responsibility for deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two decades

Last month, the Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PRS) released a landmark study concluding that the death toll from 10 years of the “War on Terror” since the 9/11 attacks is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.

The 97-page report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning doctors’ group is the first to tally up the total number of civilian casualties from US-led counter-terrorism interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The PSR report is authored by an interdisciplinary team of leading public health experts, including Dr. Robert Gould, director of health professional outreach and education at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, and Professor Tim Takaro of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.

Yet it has been almost completely blacked out by the English-language media, despite being the first effort by a world-leading public health organisation to produce a scientifically robust calculation of the number of people killed by the US-UK-led “war on terror”.

Mind the gaps

The PSR report is described by Dr Hans von Sponeck, former UN assistant secretary-general, as “a significant contribution to narrowing the gap between reliable estimates of victims of war, especially civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and tendentious, manipulated or even fraudulent accounts”.

The report conducts a critical review of previous death toll estimates of “war on terror” casualties. It is heavily critical of the figure most widely cited by mainstream media as authoritative, namely, the Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate of 110,000 dead. That figure is derived from collating media reports of civilian killings, but the PSR report identifies serious gaps and methodological problems in this approach.

For instance, although 40,000 corpses had been buried in Najaf since the launch of the war, IBC recorded only 1,354 deaths in Najaf for the same period. That example shows how wide the gap is between IBC’s Najaf figure and the actual death toll – in this case, by a factor of over 30.

Such gaps are replete throughout IBC’s database. In another instance, IBC recorded just three airstrikes in a period in 2005, when the number of air attacks had in fact increased from 25 to 120 that year. Again, the gap here is by a factor of 40.

According to the PSR study, the much-disputed Lancet study that estimated 655,000 Iraq deaths up to 2006 (and over a million until today by extrapolation) was likely to be far more accurate than IBC’s figures. In fact, the report confirms a virtual consensus among epidemiologists on the reliability of the Lancet study.

Despite some legitimate criticisms, the statistical methodology it applied is the universally recognised standard to determine deaths from conflict zones, used by international agencies and governments.
Politicised denial

PSR also reviewed the methodology and design of other studies showing a lower death toll, such as a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, which had a range of serious limitations.

That paper ignored the areas subject to the heaviest violence, namely Baghdad, Anbar and Nineveh, relying on flawed IBC data to extrapolate for those regions. It also imposed “politically-motivated restrictions” on collection and analysis of the data - interviews were conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which was “totally dependent on the occupying power” and had refused to release data on Iraqi registered deaths under US pressure.

In particular, PSR assessed the claims of Michael Spaget, John Sloboda and others who questioned the Lancet study data collection methods as potentially fraudulent. All such claims, PSR found, were spurious.

The few “justified criticisms,” PSR concludes, “do not call into question the results of the Lancet studies as a whole. These figures still represent the best estimates that are currently available”. The Lancet findings are also corroborated by the data from a new study in PLOS Medicine, finding 500,000 Iraqi deaths from the war. Overall, PSR concludes that the most likely number for the civilian death toll in Iraq since 2003 to date is about 1 million.

To this, the PSR study adds at least 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, killed as the direct or indirect consequence of US-led war: a “conservative” total of 1.3 million. The real figure could easily be “in excess of 2 million”.

Yet even the PSR study suffers from limitations. Firstly, the post-9/11 “war on terror” was not new, but merely extended previous interventionist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Secondly, the huge paucity of data on Afghanistan meant the PSR study probably underestimated the Afghan death toll.

Iraq

The war on Iraq did not begin in 2003, but in 1991 with the first Gulf War, which was followed by the UN sanctions regime.

An early PSR study by Beth Daponte, then a US government Census Bureau demographer, found that Iraq deaths caused by the direct and indirect impact of the first Gulf War amounted to around 200,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians. Meanwhile, her internal government study was suppressed.

After US-led forces pulled out, the war on Iraq continued in economic form through the US-UK imposed UN sanctions regime, on the pretext of denying Saddam Hussein the materials necessary to make weapons of mass destruction. Items banned from Iraq under this rationale included a vast number of items needed for everyday life.

Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children.

The mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the UN sanctions were chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national water treatment system. A secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted, he said, to “an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq”.

In his paper for the Association of Genocide Scholars at the University of Manitoba, Professor Nagi explained that the DIA document revealed “minute details of a fully workable method to ‘fully degrade the water treatment system’ of an entire nation” over a period of a decade. The sanctions policy would create “the conditions for widespread disease, including full scale epidemics,” thus “liquidating a significant portion of the population of Iraq”.

This means that in Iraq alone, the US-led war from 1991 to 2003 killed 1.9 million Iraqis; then from 2003 onwards around 1 million: totalling just under 3 million Iraqis dead over two decades.

Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, PSR’s estimate of overall casualties could also be very conservative. Six months after the 2001 bombing campaign, The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele revealed that anywhere between 1,300 and 8,000 Afghans were killed directly, and as many as a further 50,000 people died avoidably as an indirect result of the war.

In his book, Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950 (2007), Professor Gideon Polya applied the same methodology used by The Guardian to UN Population Division annual mortality data to calculate plausible figures for excess deaths. A retired biochemist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Polya concludes that total avoidable Afghan deaths since 2001 under ongoing war and occupation-imposed deprivation amount to around 3 million people, about 900,000 of whom are infants under five.

Although Professor Polya’s findings are not published in an academic journal, his 2007 Body Count study has been recommended by California State University sociologist Professor Jacqueline Carrigan as “a data-rich profile of the global mortality situation” in a review published by the Routledge journal, Socialism and Democracy.

As with Iraq, US intervention in Afghanistan began long before 9/11 in the form of covert military, logistical and financial aid to the Taliban from around 1992 onwards. This US assistance propelled the Taliban’s violent conquest of nearly 90 percent of Afghan territory.

In a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report, Forced Migration and Mortality, leading epidemiologist Steven Hansch, a director of Relief International, noted that total excess mortality in Afghanistan due to the indirect impacts of war through the 1990s could be anywhere between 200,000 and 2 million. The Soviet Union, of course, also bore responsibility for its role in devastating civilian infrastructure, thus paving the way for these deaths.

Altogether, this suggests that the total Afghan death toll due to the direct and indirect impacts of US-led intervention since the early nineties until now could be as high 3-5 million.
Denial

According to the figures explored here, total deaths from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s - from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation - likely constitute around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the “war on terror”), and could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.

Such figures could well be too high, but will never know for sure. US and UK armed forces, as a matter of policy, refuse to keep track of the civilian death toll of military operations - they are an irrelevant inconvenience.

Due to the severe lack of data in Iraq, almost complete non-existence of records in Afghanistan, and the indifference of Western governments to civilian deaths, it is literally impossible to determine the true extent of loss of life.

In the absence of even the possibility of corroboration, these figures provide plausible estimates based on applying standard statistical methodology to the best, if scarce, evidence available. They give an indication of the scale of the destruction, if not the precise detail.

Much of this death has been justified in the context of fighting tyranny and terrorism. Yet thanks to the silence of the wider media, most people have no idea of the true scale of protracted terror wrought in their name by US and UK tyranny in Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/unworthy-victims-western-wars-have-killed-four-million-Muslims-1990-39149394

The West very carefully suppresses what they do in this world and tries to pretend there are no consequences to their actions. If the actual truth was reported, so that people could actually see the damage we do to the rest of the world, perhaps a different picture would immerge.

BTW, if anyone thinks they can paraphrase the above without leaving out anything important, feel free.

That's a hell of a lot of lives and we can't even be sure if the numbers quoted are even high enough. Just the other day a mass grave of Iraqi soldiers was discovered so there could still be more to add on.

Can't the West see why Muslim countries hate the West, wouldn't we hate if we had been invaded and that many of our people died!

Have killed or even responsible?

That is a blatant lie on every factor

Most of the victims here have been by Muslim insurgents themselves and then they use the aggressors as being the responsibility due to the conflict.

That is the worst kind of methodology. For a start the mass of civilian murders in Iraq have been due to sectarian violence.

So nothing is being suppressed, that is nothing but blaming deaths on extremists to the west and is the worst kind of propaganda bullshit  you will ever find on the web. It is basically saying that centuries of Sunni and Shia violence only just started because of western intervention.. The Iraq war very much finished very shortly after it started, after this then sectarian violence occurred funded by both the Saudi's and Iran, so I can easily take apart the claims here and who is responsible for the violence.

If you go down this poor methodology, then Japan would be to blame for the millions of deaths caused by Mao for example. It is the worst kind of methodology and is actually taking away responsibility from those committing atrocities in places like Iraq and from those who created and funded such terrorist groups

Brasidas wrote:Have killed or even responsible?

That is a blatant lie on every factor

Most of the victims here have been by Muslim insurgents themselves and then they use the aggressors as being the responsibility due to the conflict.

That is the worst kind of methodology. For a start the mass of civilian murders in Iraq have been due to sectarian violence.

So nothing is being suppressed, that is nothing but blaming deaths on extremists to the west and is the worst kind of propaganda bullshit  you will ever find on the web. It is basically saying that centuries of Sunni and Shia violence only just started because of western intervention.. The Iraq war very much finished very shortly after it started, after this then sectarian violence occurred funded by both the Saudi's and Iran, so I can easily take apart the claims here and who is responsible for the violence.

If you go down this poor methodology, then Japan would be to blame for the millions of deaths caused by Mao for example. It is the worst kind of methodology and is actually taking away responsibility from those committing atrocities in places like Iraq and from those who created and funded such terrorist groups

Well here is the website for the people that produced the report and if you haven't already done so you can download their full report from it.

http://www.psr.org/

So if this is all a lie and nonsense by these eminent people Didge perhaps you would care to issue your own report detailing the numbers and the methodology you used to arrive at your stats. I've got an open mind on it myself but I'm here to be convinced.

Got the link to the actual report here: http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf

101 pages long, downloaded it to read when I have time.

Irn Bru wrote:

Brasidas wrote:Have killed or even responsible?

That is a blatant lie on every factor

Most of the victims here have been by Muslim insurgents themselves and then they use the aggressors as being the responsibility due to the conflict.

That is the worst kind of methodology. For a start the mass of civilian murders in Iraq have been due to sectarian violence.

So nothing is being suppressed, that is nothing but blaming deaths on extremists to the west and is the worst kind of propaganda bullshit  you will ever find on the web. It is basically saying that centuries of Sunni and Shia violence only just started because of western intervention.. The Iraq war very much finished very shortly after it started, after this then sectarian violence occurred funded by both the Saudi's and Iran, so I can easily take apart the claims here and who is responsible for the violence.

If you go down this poor methodology, then Japan would be to blame for the millions of deaths caused by Mao for example. It is the worst kind of methodology and is actually taking away responsibility from those committing atrocities in places like Iraq and from those who created and funded such terrorist groups

Well here is the website for the people that produced the report and if you haven't already done so you can download their full report from it.

http://www.psr.org/

So if this is all a lie and nonsense by these eminent people Didge perhaps you would care to issue your own report detailing the numbers and the methodology you used to arrive at your stats. I've got an open mind on it myself but I'm here to be convinced.

So what does that prove?
Nothing, what they are doing is poor beyond belief and again you need to counter my poinmts instead of avoiding them like the pathetic coward that you are. Most are medical doctors which did make me PMSL, as where are they getting their data from for a start. This is not the first time where for example the Lancet report by anti-war protestors was completely debunked for the bullshit and lies it promoted. Again many of these deaths have been by insurgents, are they claiming now the Coalition is responsible for sectarian violence? If they are counting the mass suicide bombings and shootings then this report is nothing more than a complete pile of shit, no doubt compiled by a bunch of pathetic lefties
The fact is if you are claiming that most of the deaths are down to the western allies, then you are a completely bonkers
That is absurd, like I said that is like blaming Japan for the murders of Mao


I mean lets take a look at their claim:

PSR estimates the war “directly or indirectly, killed around one million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, ie a total of around 1.3 million.”

Sassy claims 4 million showing what an idiot she is, I mean for starters now the US has killed 80,000 Paksitani's? I would love to see the evidence for that? It is clear what they are doing is claiming the war has "indirectly" lewd to many deaths, well sorry that is very debateable and in my view a complete load of bollocks and not even understanding the Sunni and Shia hatred that has gone on for centuries or the ideology of Wahhabism and taking away any responsibility of this ideology. So basically now any Taliban atrocities are being blamed on the Coalition that have happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is again absurd, because as seen the Taliban is still engaging in a war. That is like saying we should have left the people of Afdghanistan to suffer under the Taliban. Did they take the numbers of death under the Taliban and then work out then how many thousands more would have died if they remained in power? Of course not, this is why the whole report is a load of bollocks, it fails to factor in many things. I mean for a start, does it factor in how many Iraqi's would have died if Saddam had of stayed in power, being as it is estimated he is responsible for 2 million deaths through war and genocide? Let alone the fact the Arab springs would have still occured or at some point civil war would have occured in Iraq if he remained in power, it was only a matter of time. Would then the fall out of sectarian violence still be blamed on the Coalition? You see this is why the report is so absurd, it is beyond belief and it is this kind of stupidity that actually gives ammunition to the extremists, what a great recruitment poster this will be for them.

What is even worse here is it is taking away any responsibility from these extremists groups and blaming the Coalition completely. If we want to look at this honestly then where did this cause start in the first place? So you may take their view on who is resposnible, I do not and I doubt many others will either because it is bascially given many of these murderers a clean slate, but I expect nothing more than a pathetic lefty like yourself Irn. So are you going to debate this or do your usual merry little dance and just do a sassy and copy and paste. Try using your brain, I know that may seem difficult for you, but I get bored having to educate such a dumb lefty.

So try again.

risingsun wrote:Landmark research proves that the US-led ‘war on terror’ has killed as many as 2 million people, but this is a fraction of Western responsibility for deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two decades

Last month, the Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PRS) released a landmark study concluding that the death toll from 10 years of the “War on Terror” since the 9/11 attacks is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.

The 97-page report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning doctors’ group is the first to tally up the total number of civilian casualties from US-led counter-terrorism interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The PSR report is authored by an interdisciplinary team of leading public health experts, including Dr. Robert Gould, director of health professional outreach and education at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, and Professor Tim Takaro of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.

Yet it has been almost completely blacked out by the English-language media, despite being the first effort by a world-leading public health organisation to produce a scientifically robust calculation of the number of people killed by the US-UK-led “war on terror”.

Mind the gaps

The PSR report is described by Dr Hans von Sponeck, former UN assistant secretary-general, as “a significant contribution to narrowing the gap between reliable estimates of victims of war, especially civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and tendentious, manipulated or even fraudulent accounts”.

The report conducts a critical review of previous death toll estimates of “war on terror” casualties. It is heavily critical of the figure most widely cited by mainstream media as authoritative, namely, the Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate of 110,000 dead. That figure is derived from collating media reports of civilian killings, but the PSR report identifies serious gaps and methodological problems in this approach.

For instance, although 40,000 corpses had been buried in Najaf since the launch of the war, IBC recorded only 1,354 deaths in Najaf for the same period. That example shows how wide the gap is between IBC’s Najaf figure and the actual death toll – in this case, by a factor of over 30.

Such gaps are replete throughout IBC’s database. In another instance, IBC recorded just three airstrikes in a period in 2005, when the number of air attacks had in fact increased from 25 to 120 that year. Again, the gap here is by a factor of 40.

According to the PSR study, the much-disputed Lancet study that estimated 655,000 Iraq deaths up to 2006 (and over a million until today by extrapolation) was likely to be far more accurate than IBC’s figures. In fact, the report confirms a virtual consensus among epidemiologists on the reliability of the Lancet study.

Despite some legitimate criticisms, the statistical methodology it applied is the universally recognised standard to determine deaths from conflict zones, used by international agencies and governments.
Politicised denial

PSR also reviewed the methodology and design of other studies showing a lower death toll, such as a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, which had a range of serious limitations.

That paper ignored the areas subject to the heaviest violence, namely Baghdad, Anbar and Nineveh, relying on flawed IBC data to extrapolate for those regions. It also imposed “politically-motivated restrictions” on collection and analysis of the data - interviews were conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which was “totally dependent on the occupying power” and had refused to release data on Iraqi registered deaths under US pressure.

In particular, PSR assessed the claims of Michael Spaget, John Sloboda and others who questioned the Lancet study data collection methods as potentially fraudulent. All such claims, PSR found, were spurious.

The few “justified criticisms,” PSR concludes, “do not call into question the results of the Lancet studies as a whole. These figures still represent the best estimates that are currently available”. The Lancet findings are also corroborated by the data from a new study in PLOS Medicine, finding 500,000 Iraqi deaths from the war. Overall, PSR concludes that the most likely number for the civilian death toll in Iraq since 2003 to date is about 1 million.

To this, the PSR study adds at least 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, killed as the direct or indirect consequence of US-led war: a “conservative” total of 1.3 million. The real figure could easily be “in excess of 2 million”.

Yet even the PSR study suffers from limitations. Firstly, the post-9/11 “war on terror” was not new, but merely extended previous interventionist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Secondly, the huge paucity of data on Afghanistan meant the PSR study probably underestimated the Afghan death toll.

Iraq

The war on Iraq did not begin in 2003, but in 1991 with the first Gulf War, which was followed by the UN sanctions regime.

An early PSR study by Beth Daponte, then a US government Census Bureau demographer, found that Iraq deaths caused by the direct and indirect impact of the first Gulf War amounted to around 200,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians. Meanwhile, her internal government study was suppressed.

After US-led forces pulled out, the war on Iraq continued in economic form through the US-UK imposed UN sanctions regime, on the pretext of denying Saddam Hussein the materials necessary to make weapons of mass destruction. Items banned from Iraq under this rationale included a vast number of items needed for everyday life.

Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children.

The mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the UN sanctions were chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national water treatment system. A secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted, he said, to “an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq”.

In his paper for the Association of Genocide Scholars at the University of Manitoba, Professor Nagi explained that the DIA document revealed “minute details of a fully workable method to ‘fully degrade the water treatment system’ of an entire nation” over a period of a decade. The sanctions policy would create “the conditions for widespread disease, including full scale epidemics,” thus “liquidating a significant portion of the population of Iraq”.

This means that in Iraq alone, the US-led war from 1991 to 2003 killed 1.9 million Iraqis; then from 2003 onwards around 1 million: totalling just under 3 million Iraqis dead over two decades.

Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, PSR’s estimate of overall casualties could also be very conservative. Six months after the 2001 bombing campaign, The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele revealed that anywhere between 1,300 and 8,000 Afghans were killed directly, and as many as a further 50,000 people died avoidably as an indirect result of the war.

In his book, Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950 (2007), Professor Gideon Polya applied the same methodology used by The Guardian to UN Population Division annual mortality data to calculate plausible figures for excess deaths. A retired biochemist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Polya concludes that total avoidable Afghan deaths since 2001 under ongoing war and occupation-imposed deprivation amount to around 3 million people, about 900,000 of whom are infants under five.

Although Professor Polya’s findings are not published in an academic journal, his 2007 Body Count study has been recommended by California State University sociologist Professor Jacqueline Carrigan as “a data-rich profile of the global mortality situation” in a review published by the Routledge journal, Socialism and Democracy.

As with Iraq, US intervention in Afghanistan began long before 9/11 in the form of covert military, logistical and financial aid to the Taliban from around 1992 onwards. This US assistance propelled the Taliban’s violent conquest of nearly 90 percent of Afghan territory.

In a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report, Forced Migration and Mortality, leading epidemiologist Steven Hansch, a director of Relief International, noted that total excess mortality in Afghanistan due to the indirect impacts of war through the 1990s could be anywhere between 200,000 and 2 million. The Soviet Union, of course, also bore responsibility for its role in devastating civilian infrastructure, thus paving the way for these deaths.

Altogether, this suggests that the total Afghan death toll due to the direct and indirect impacts of US-led intervention since the early nineties until now could be as high 3-5 million.
Denial

According to the figures explored here, total deaths from Western interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan since the 1990s - from direct killings and the longer-term impact of war-imposed deprivation - likely constitute around 4 million (2 million in Iraq from 1991-2003, plus 2 million from the “war on terror”), and could be as high as 6-8 million people when accounting for higher avoidable death estimates in Afghanistan.

Such figures could well be too high, but will never know for sure. US and UK armed forces, as a matter of policy, refuse to keep track of the civilian death toll of military operations - they are an irrelevant inconvenience.

Due to the severe lack of data in Iraq, almost complete non-existence of records in Afghanistan, and the indifference of Western governments to civilian deaths, it is literally impossible to determine the true extent of loss of life.

In the absence of even the possibility of corroboration, these figures provide plausible estimates based on applying standard statistical methodology to the best, if scarce, evidence available. They give an indication of the scale of the destruction, if not the precise detail.

Much of this death has been justified in the context of fighting tyranny and terrorism. Yet thanks to the silence of the wider media, most people have no idea of the true scale of protracted terror wrought in their name by US and UK tyranny in Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/unworthy-victims-western-wars-have-killed-four-million-Muslims-1990-39149394

The West very carefully suppresses what they do in this world and tries to pretend there are no consequences to their actions.  If the actual truth was reported, so that people could actually see the damage we do to the rest of the world, perhaps a different picture would immerge.

BTW, if anyone thinks they can paraphrase the above without leaving out anything important, feel free.

Okay I will.You could have summarized the post by saying.......Here's a load of left wing anti-western propaganda.

Succinct enough?

Muslims, over the years have killed more of their own people than all other countries put together!

Racists out in force again. Nobel prizewinning doctors producing bollocks. Only in the mind of a ignorant racist fuckwit.

Brasidas wrote:

Irn Bru wrote:

Well here is the website for the people that produced the report and if you haven't already done so you can download their full report from it.

http://www.psr.org/

So if this is all a lie and nonsense by these eminent people Didge perhaps you would care to issue your own report detailing the numbers and the methodology you used to arrive at your stats. I've got an open mind on it myself but I'm here to be convinced.

So what does that prove?
Nothing, what they are doing is poor beyond belief and again you need to counter my poinmts instead of avoiding them like the pathetic coward that you are. Most are medical doctors which did make me PMSL, as where are they getting their data from for a start. This is not the first time where for example the Lancet report by anti-war protestors was completely debunked for the bullshit and lies it promoted. Again many of these deaths have been by insurgents, are they claiming now the Coalition is responsible for sectarian violence? If they are counting the mass suicide bombings and shootings then this report is nothing more than a complete pile of shit, no doubt compiled by a bunch of pathetic lefties
The fact is if you are claiming that most of the deaths are down to the western allies, then you are a completely bonkers
That is absurd, like I said that is like blaming Japan for the murders of Mao


I mean lets take a look at their claim:

PSR estimates the war “directly or indirectly, killed around one million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, ie a total of around 1.3 million.”

Sassy claims 4 million showing what an idiot she is, I mean for starters now the US has killed 80,000 Paksitani's? I would love to see the evidence for that? It is clear what they are doing is claiming the war has "indirectly" lewd to many deaths, well sorry that is very debateable and in my view a complete load of bollocks and not even understanding the Sunni and Shia hatred that has gone on for centuries or the ideology of Wahhabism and taking away any responsibility of this ideology. So basically now any Taliban atrocities are being blamed on the Coalition that have happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is again absurd, because as seen the Taliban is still engaging in a war. That is like saying we should have left the people of Afdghanistan to suffer under the Taliban. Did they take the numbers of death under the Taliban and then work out then how many thousands more would have died if they remained in power? Of course not, this is why the whole report is a load of bollocks, it fails to factor in many things. I mean for a start, does it factor in how many Iraqi's would have died if Saddam had of stayed in power, being as it is estimated he is responsible for 2 million deaths through war and genocide? Let alone the fact the Arab springs would have still occured or at some point civil war would have occured in Iraq if he remained in power, it was only a matter of time. Would then the fall out of sectarian violence still be blamed on the Coalition? You see this is why the report is so absurd, it is beyond belief and it is this kind of stupidity that actually gives ammunition to the extremists, what a great recruitment poster this will be for them.

What is even worse here is it is taking away any responsibility from these extremists groups and blaming the Coalition completely. If we want to look at this honestly then where did this cause start in the first place? So you may take their view on who is resposnible, I do not and I doubt many others will either because it is bascially given many of these murderers a clean slate, but I expect nothing more than a pathetic lefty like yourself Irn. So are you going to debate this or do your usual merry little dance and just do a sassy and copy and paste. Try using your brain, I know that may seem difficult for you, but I get bored having to educate such a dumb lefty.

So try again.

Bumped up for the two clown lefties to respond, instead of poor pathetic claims of racism.

nicko wrote:Muslims, over the years have killed more of their own people than all other countries put together!

That was so obvious that it kinda needed saying lol

FURTHER to my post, they are still doing it.

Love the way Didge dimisses the report without even reading it. HA HA!

And Eddie and Nicko - that still doesn't justify the West killing Muslims for the resources you use for your comfortable life.

Just been reading the report, not one is a military expert, not one an expert on religions and ideology.
It is an utter joke, beyond belief and the more you read this the more it is not a Noble Prize he should receive again but a Noble slap in the face. Now I wonder if he will factor in these countless reports that have made similar claims that have been prize propaganda for the extremists?
Did they factor in how many more Muslims were driven to extremism and then to commit acts of murder based off previous reports and now this one? The fact is this is the worst kind of methodology I have seen to date.
Of course who loves it, the lefties and many extremists Muslims, they can now attempt to blame any acts of terrorism as down to the war on terror. Even when there are suicide attacks onto civilians and not an occupying force, they will be free from blame by this stupidity.
Like I say if it fails as it certainly does to factor in the points I have made already, then the report is fundamentally flawed, let alone lacking key people for the research

My comfortable life, I'd swop with you any time. you take your share of the "comfortable life don't you?

Fuzzy Zack wrote:Love the way Didge dimisses the report without even reading it. HA HA!

And Eddie and Nicko - that still doesn't justify the West killing Muslims for the resources you use for your comfortable life.

Just been reading it thanks and if you want to counter my points, then please be my guest.
oh and

Ha ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

Grow up idiot

Brasidas wrote:

Fuzzy Zack wrote:Love the way Didge dimisses the report without even reading it. HA HA!

And Eddie and Nicko - that still doesn't justify the West killing Muslims for the resources you use for your comfortable life.

Just been reading it thanks and if you want to counter my points, then please be my guest.
oh and

Ha ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

Grow up idiot

lol! You haven't had the guts to cite a single reference in the report and are still providing a critique. You do know how this works, right? Or do you want me to explain?

Instead you lose your temper yet again. Tut tut.

nicko wrote:My comfortable life, I'd swop with you any time. you take your share of the "comfortable life don't you?

The difference is that I'm not hypocritical about it.

Fuzzy Zack wrote:

Brasidas wrote:


Just been reading it thanks and if you want to counter my points, then please be my guest.
oh and

Ha ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

Grow up idiot

lol! You haven't had the guts to cite a single reference in the report and are still providing a critique. You do know how this works, right? Or do you want me to explain?

Instead you lose your temper yet again. Tut tut.

Oh do run along little boy if you cannot counter my points and I am just bored with your infantile pathetic games as if you understand psychology on emotions which is hilarious.
For a start it claims the Lancet report is accurate, well that is a load of bollocks for a number of reasons and shows how poor the article it is itself:


Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center and a past president of the American Statistical Association, said, “They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication.” The weakest part of the Lancet surveys is their reliance on an unsupervised Iraqi survey team, contended Scheuren, who has recently trained survey workers in Iraq.

http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/01/04/another-debunking-of-the-lance/


Now I suggest you put up or shut up, either way I am happy mate

Lol! One glance at the report and I can tell Didge either has no counter point or has lied about reading the report

Didge: the methodology is clearly stated per country. So please direct this portion of the report and let us know your objections.

Brasidas wrote:

Fuzzy Zack wrote:

lol! You haven't had the guts to cite a single reference in the report and are still providing a critique. You do know how this works, right? Or do you want me to explain?

Instead you lose your temper yet again. Tut tut.

Oh do run along little boy if you cannot counter my points and I am just bored with your infantile pathetic games as if you understand psychology on emotions which is hilarious.
For a start it claims the Lancet report is accurate, well that is a load of bollocks for a number of reasons and shows how poor the article it is itself:


Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center and a past president of the American Statistical Association, said, “They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication.” The weakest part of the Lancet surveys is their reliance on an unsupervised Iraqi survey team, contended Scheuren, who has recently trained survey workers in Iraq.

http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/01/04/another-debunking-of-the-lance/


Now I suggest you put up or shut up, either way I am happy mate

Exactly - they have given caveats. Like any credible study does.

But really, is that is?

Try harder buddy. You're not talking to uneducated numpties.

Fuzzy Zack wrote:Lol! One glance at the report and I can tell Didge either has no counter point or has lied about reading the report  

Didge: the methodology is clearly stated per country. So please direct this portion of the report and let us know your objections.

I have been reading this all afternoon and now you are just coming out with poor deflections, so again:

Put up or shut up son.

Fuzzy Zack wrote:

Brasidas wrote:


Oh do run along little boy if you cannot counter my points and I am just bored with your infantile pathetic games as if you understand psychology on emotions which is hilarious.
For a start it claims the Lancet report is accurate, well that is a load of bollocks for a number of reasons and shows how poor the article it is itself:


Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center and a past president of the American Statistical Association, said, “They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication.” The weakest part of the Lancet surveys is their reliance on an unsupervised Iraqi survey team, contended Scheuren, who has recently trained survey workers in Iraq.

http://www.floppingaces.net/2008/01/04/another-debunking-of-the-lance/


Now I suggest you put up or shut up, either way I am happy mate

Exactly - they have given caveats. Like any credible study does.

But really, is that is?

Try harder buddy. You're not talking to uneducated numpties.

I have given my reasons already and you are just avoiding responding to my points and as seen they are going off fundamentally flawed previous reports and claiming they are good and as seen they are not testable.
That is Flaw number 1
Whoops

Fuzzy Zack wrote:

nicko wrote:My comfortable life, I'd swop with you any time. you take your share of the "comfortable life don't you?

The difference is that I'm not hypocritical about it.

How am I hypercritcal exacty?
You live here, in comfort, as well,as I do.

risingsun wrote:Racists out in force again.   Nobel prizewinning doctors producing bollocks.  Only in the mind of a ignorant racist fuckwit.

Another well thought out statement.

And you think well thought out statements are necessary for the rubbish above?

Since creation,thousands of species have gone extinct & the world keeps rolling on.

So what if the Muslims go extinct.They've had their chance on Earth & they failed to adapt so it stands to reason that they must become extinct.

The planet will not miss them.

Brasidas wrote:

Brasidas wrote:

Irn Bru wrote:

Well here is the website for the people that produced the report and if you haven't already done so you can download their full report from it.

http://www.psr.org/

So if this is all a lie and nonsense by these eminent people Didge perhaps you would care to issue your own report detailing the numbers and the methodology you used to arrive at your stats. I've got an open mind on it myself but I'm here to be convinced.

So what does that prove?
Nothing, what they are doing is poor beyond belief and again you need to counter my poinmts instead of avoiding them like the pathetic coward that you are. Most are medical doctors which did make me PMSL, as where are they getting their data from for a start. This is not the first time where for example the Lancet report by anti-war protestors was completely debunked for the bullshit and lies it promoted. Again many of these deaths have been by insurgents, are they claiming now the Coalition is responsible for sectarian violence? If they are counting the mass suicide bombings and shootings then this report is nothing more than a complete pile of shit, no doubt compiled by a bunch of pathetic lefties
The fact is if you are claiming that most of the deaths are down to the western allies, then you are a completely bonkers
That is absurd, like I said that is like blaming Japan for the murders of Mao


I mean lets take a look at their claim:

PSR estimates the war “directly or indirectly, killed around one million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, ie a total of around 1.3 million.”

Sassy claims 4 million showing what an idiot she is, I mean for starters now the US has killed 80,000 Paksitani's? I would love to see the evidence for that? It is clear what they are doing is claiming the war has "indirectly" lewd to many deaths, well sorry that is very debateable and in my view a complete load of bollocks and not even understanding the Sunni and Shia hatred that has gone on for centuries or the ideology of Wahhabism and taking away any responsibility of this ideology. So basically now any Taliban atrocities are being blamed on the Coalition that have happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is again absurd, because as seen the Taliban is still engaging in a war. That is like saying we should have left the people of Afdghanistan to suffer under the Taliban. Did they take the numbers of death under the Taliban and then work out then how many thousands more would have died if they remained in power? Of course not, this is why the whole report is a load of bollocks, it fails to factor in many things. I mean for a start, does it factor in how many Iraqi's would have died if Saddam had of stayed in power, being as it is estimated he is responsible for 2 million deaths through war and genocide? Let alone the fact the Arab springs would have still occured or at some point civil war would have occured in Iraq if he remained in power, it was only a matter of time. Would then the fall out of sectarian violence still be blamed on the Coalition? You see this is why the report is so absurd, it is beyond belief and it is this kind of stupidity that actually gives ammunition to the extremists, what a great recruitment poster this will be for them.

What is even worse here is it is taking away any responsibility from these extremists groups and blaming the Coalition completely. If we want to look at this honestly then where did this cause start in the first place? So you may take their view on who is resposnible, I do not and I doubt many others will either because it is bascially given many of these murderers a clean slate, but I expect nothing more than a pathetic lefty like yourself Irn. So are you going to debate this or do your usual merry little dance and just do a sassy and copy and paste. Try using your brain, I know that may seem difficult for you, but I get bored having to educate such a dumb lefty.

So try again.

Bumped up for the two clown lefties to respond, instead of poor pathetic claims of racism.

There really was no need to bump it up on my behalf Didge because it just so happens that you finished your shift and got home before I was able to respond. You see, I have priorities in my life other than spending most of my day on the site as you do, like working, family, friends and a social life sort of stuff etc.  Mind you, I’m not complaining that you do that because it’s all about choices and it does help with the post count.

Never mind though because I’m here now and quite honestly I’m disappointed in your response which is more or less just a rant peppered with petty insults and name-calling. All I asked was for you to put your own numbers down and explain what methodology that you used to arrive at them. And I did say I had an open mind on this and that I was here to be convinced but you just ignored it in your haste to be as insulting as possible.  I did read that you would love to see the figures for Pakistan at a time when that information was already made available to you in the report which just proved that you obviously had not even read it.

I also see that you are  claiming that you have read it and having done so you are now countering what the report says  by using a  blog post from about 7 years ago by an LAPD cop. In his blog he does say that the United Nations were a better source of information than Lancet which actually enhances this report as it has been seen and welcomed  by Dr Hans von Sponeck who was assistant secretary general to the United Nations.

And the blogger that you are using as a counter hasn’t come up with any figures of his own and neither have you and I’m afraid that’s just not good enough to dismiss this report as a load of nonsense and a pack of lies imo.  I agree that the coalition forces didn’t kill or harm all these people  and the report doesn’t even say that they did

Like I said, I have an open mind on this and I’m here to be convinced one way or the other with your figures and methodology so if you can come up with that I’ll let you know what I think,,,,,,,fair enough?

Irn Bru wrote:

Brasidas wrote:


Bumped up for the two clown lefties to respond, instead of poor pathetic claims of racism.

There really was no need to bump it up on my behalf Didge because it just so happens that you finished your shift and got home before I was able to respond. You see, I have priorities in my life other than spending most of my day on the site as you do, like working, family, friends and a social life sort of stuff etc.  Mind you, I’m not complaining that you do that because it’s all about choices and it does help with the post count.
No relevance to my points

Never mind though because I’m here now and quite honestly I’m disappointed in your response which is more or less just a rant peppered with petty insults and name-calling. All I asked was for you to put your own numbers down and explain what methodology that you used to arrive at them. And I did say I had an open mind on this and that I was here to be convinced but you just ignored it in your haste to be as insulting as possible.  I did read that you would love to see the figures for Pakistan at a time when that information was already made available to you in the report which just proved that you obviously had not even read it.
No relevance to my points

I also see that you are  claiming that you have read it and having done so you are now countering what the report says  by using a  blog post from about 7 years ago by an LAPD cop. In his blog he does say that the United Nations were a better source of information than Lancet which actually enhances this report as it has been seen and welcomed  by Dr Hans von Sponeck who was assistant secretary general to the United Nations.
No the report claims that Lancet is accurate, even argues this badly, as seen I can post many articles to show this is incorrect and the biggest problem with the is that the Lancet report is not testable
And the blogger that you are using as a counter hasn’t come up with any figures of his own and neither have you and I’m afraid that’s just not good enough to dismiss this report as a load of nonsense and a pack of lies imo.  I agree that the coalition forces didn’t kill or harm all these people  and the report doesn’t even say that they did

Like I said, I have an open mind on this and I’m here to be convinced one way or the other with your figures and methodology so if you can come up with that I’ll let you know what I think,,,,,,,fair enough?

So basically you did not address a single point I made.
What a surprise
Good you have an open mind. I though see them trying to pin blame on things like known suicide attacks not against the coalition but against civilians, that is not a war on terror. It fails to factor why like without nations where they have been liberated from a tyrant, they do not attack those who have liberated them, like Germany. Here clearly Saudi and Iran instigated sectarian violence between the to factions, which had nothing to do with the war on terror. At first insurgents attacks Coalition troops, then they went onto their main plan, to wipe out each other. None of these sectarian conflicts can be contributed to the war on terror. It ignores there was already a conflict going on in Afghanistan with the Northern alliance and the Taliban had been committing atrocities for years. I go on more into this as I have above, but you have bailed out of taking on any points, where the report clearly failed to factor many things, including said reports themselves as prime recruiting propaganda.
Hey ho, the report needs to be testable, or its worthless.

No Didge. You can't bring yourself to even look at the the report and come up with any numbers of your own or the methodology. You have failed to counter any points in this report and instead try to rubbish it with a load of nonsense without even trying to address anything in detail in any way.

I'm here to be convinced and so far you haven't managed it.

That's the truth of it and it shows.

Seems Lancet have a habit of making fabricated reports:

The medical journal which originally published the discredited research linking autism and MMR has now issued a full retraction of the paper
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8493753.stm


A study which found that more than 650,000 Iraqi people have died since the US-led invasion was attacked yesterday by scientists in the UK, who claimed that the households interviewed tended to be located in violence-hit streets.

Sean Gourley and Professor Neil Johnson of the physics department at Oxford University and Professor Michael Spagat of the economics department of Royal Holloway, University of London, claimed the methodology of the study was fundamentally flawed by what they term "main street bias".

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/oct/24/iraq.internationalnews



Now this report backs the methodology of the lancet report, that is damning in itself, as it attempts to argue against main street bias, the criticism without any conviction or evidence to is counter views. It claims it has debunked them, sorry, it has not. This is just another antiwar report, which I can understand the reason to make, but it places everything at the door of the war on terror, which is misleading due to the other conflicts going on, separate from the war on terror. That is the biggest flaw within the report. It fails to factor in Iran or Saudi and their play in this. Like I said there was no Islamic expert or Military expert.
Anyway nobody seems to want to actually debate any of the points, oh well

Irn Bru wrote:No Didge. You can't bring yourself to even look at the the report and come up with any numbers of your own or the methodology. You have failed to counter any points in this report and instead try to rubbish it with a load of nonsense without even trying to address anything in detail in any way.

I'm here to be convinced and so far you haven't managed it.

That's the truth of it and it shows.

Oh I have read right through it Irn, very much so, hence why I know my points are spot on, if you think they are not, then I suggest you prove otherwise and stop wasting my time with babble

The Major Flaws With The Lancet Reports On Iraqi Deaths, Part I


A final issue was that the authors refused to share their data. The Lancet authors have only released a limited amount of their material, and given it directly to others, rather than circulate it to everyone. Not only that, but Lafta refused to talk with reporters or answer any questions about how he conducted the fieldwork in Iraq. Likewise, Roberts said that he couldn’t release any information, because of confidentiality requirements at Johns Hopkins, and that it could endanger the lives of those interviewed back in Iraq. He would later give a speech in 2007 where he stated that he didn’t want to share the Lancet statistics with anyone, and if it was up to him, it never would be made public. Instead of looking at the Lancet data, Burnham suggested that researchers could verify their work by going to graveyards in Iraq and counting the number of dead or going to morgues. He would later say that morgues were unreliable. They would not support him either as the Health Ministry and Baghdad morgue recorded only 50,000 deaths by June 2006. It is common for researchers to make their data public, so that others can repeat their work, check it, and critique it. That was impossible with the Lancet studies, because the authors did not release their fieldwork except in limited form to specific people. Burnham ended up being censured by the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 2009 for not sharing the survey results. This was just another cloud hanging over the Lancet work. What did the authors have to hide that they did not want to share their results, which is a common practice? Could there be anomalies in the statistics that could point to fraud? No one can know for sure, and the critics cannot be answered, because of the authors' stubbornness on this issue.

http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-major-flaws-with-lancet-reports-on.html


Major Flaws With The Lancet Reports On Iraqi Deaths, Part II

http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/major-flaws-with-lancet-reports-on.html

Your throwing everything into the Lancet report but they were only part of the information collected and as I said the blogger in your other link said that the UN were much more reliable and as shown the former assistant general secretary to the UN backs and welcomes this report.

You keep coming back with links to what other people say with no real evidence that they are any better than this report and all I'm asking is that you give me your numbers and the methodology used to arrive at the data but so far you won't do it.

If you can do that then it may give some clarity to what the real numbers are and the real truth.

C'mon Didge - I'm sure you can do it.

Irn Bru wrote:Your throwing everything into the Lancet report but they were only part of the information collected and as I said the blogger in your other link said that the UN were much more reliable and as shown the former assistant general secretary to the UN backs and welcomes this report.

You keep coming back with links to what other people say with no real evidence that they are any better than this report and all I'm asking is that you give me your numbers and the methodology used to arrive at the data but so far you won't do it.

If you can do that then it may give some clarity to what the real numbers are and the real truth.

C'mon Didge - I'm sure you can do it.

I am just showing you one of the reports it tries to defend has major flaws, one being its never given all the details or their methodology and how it is thus not testable.
So I give countless points on this and at every turn you just weasel out of countering any of my points, which leads me to only one conclusions. You know how valid they are and that you cannot refute my points.
That is fine, just stop wasting my time with irrelevant points, it reeks of desperation on your part.
Why my numbers? This is on the reports numbers, I can certainly provide you Morgue numbers:

In June 2006, the Iraqi Health Ministry and Baghdad morgue only issued around 50,000 death certificates. If the second Lancet was correct, that would mean that approximately 500,000 certificates had been handed out, but never recorded.


You do realise the report is estimates, do you not?
My methodology would separate the sectarian conflicts going on which had nothing to do with the war on terror, in fact I would factor many things as I have pointed out above, all of which you have avoided like the plague. Now unless you can find anything in the report to counter my points, then you are like I said wasting my time, even more so when you refuse to even discuss them.
So you have one last chance, because I am bored every time playing our silly little games
If you failed to address any of my points, then you will be left looking rather silly, up to you.

Night

Of course it's estimates and the report authors make it quite clear with caveats to cover that. Numbers are not certain by any means and I won't hold you to any any numbers that you come up with either or the methodology that you use to say what you think they are.

It's all very well to be critical of this report and specify in detail where they are wrong but I think it's only fair that you match it with numbers of your own and say how you arrived at them.

Not much to ask is it?

You had your chance Irn.

Brasidas wrote:You had your chance Irn.

No Didge. You can't come up with any numbers of your own or address any specific points in this report so I just have to believe that you don't really know what the numbers are and you are therefore in no position to dismiss this report as nonsense and a load of lies.

And just to point out that I have been perfectly civil to you in this discussion and your unwarranted attack was unjustified and unnecessary. There was no need for it.