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Media telling lies to discredit pro-family Bush This article, below about the deaths in Iraq, reveals some very interesting detail about the tragedy that is unfolding. It is interesting because it shows that the major media outlets, BBC and RTE and the national newspapers are in fact pushing an agenda and not telling the truth. Their agenda is that George Bush is a wicked man and so everyone must hate him. He is wicked in their eyes because he is pro-life and pro-family and is trying to reverse the decline in morality that took place under the Clinton decade of permissiveness and his undermining of marriage. They ramp up hostility towards him by pushing out propaganda claiming that Coalition-led forces have killed 34 Iraqi civilians a day since they invaded. This article exposes that lie. It states that since the invasion when there were the regrettable but sadly inevitable casualties of war and 7000 Iraqis died, approximately 17,000 civilians have died from violent means. This total represents 25 per day, already considerably less than the hyped-up 34 per day. Yet even this is misleading. The article further reveals that in fact 2400 civilians died as a direct result of Coalition action. This means that even though this number is still very regrettable the actual figure is 3 (three) per day killed by troops. The other 22 per day were killed by fellow Iraqis or by insurgents. Two figures remain to be known. 1. How many Iraqis died per day BEFORE THE INVASION, ie under Saddam Hussein. 2. How many Iragis who died were of the Sunni or Shi'at faith. What we need to know is whether what is going on there now is just a continuation of the conflict between Sunni and Shiat groups and whether it is worse or better now since the invasion. This should be the real story that the media is concerned about. That will not happen unfortunately whilst the media is in the hands of extreme left wing propagandists who care nothing for the truth or the people they pretend to serve, just the elevation of their own flawed ideology. Roger Eldridge, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/20/wirq20.xml Fighting in Iraq 'has cost
25,000 civilian lives' Nearly 25,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the two years since US and British troops invaded Iraq - an average of 34 people a day - according to figures published yesterday by British academics. They estimate that about four out of five Iraqi civilians killed were men, while nearly one in 10 were children. According to the survey by the Oxford Research Group and a website called Iraq Body Count, US-led coalition forces are responsible for about 37 per cent of these deaths, mostly during the initial invasion phase when about 7,000 civilians were killed. But over the months of the occupation, insurgents and common criminals have inflicted ever more suffering. About 22 per cent of the total civilians deaths are believed to have been caused by insurgents. A surprising 35 per cent died as a result of crime in the widespread breakdown of law and order. The authors of the report do not hide their opposition to the war in Iraq. But in a conflict where coalition forces do not publish regular statistics, their work provides the best approximation of the scale of suffering of ordinary Iraqis. "The ever-mounting Iraqi death toll is the forgotten cost of the decision to go to war in Iraq," said John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count. "On average, 34 ordinary Iraqis have met violent deaths every day since the invasion of March 2003. Our data show that no sector of Iraqi society has escaped." He dismissed US and British government claims that statistics were too difficult to compile, and demanded that occupying forces be required to report civilian casualties to the United Nations Security Council. "If a few people with a couple of computers can do it, governments with all their resources certainly can do it. It's not a question of capacity. It's a question of will," said Prof Sloboda. Iraq Body Count draws up its figures by compiling deaths reported in the stream of international media reports, and by collating data from other sources such as Iraqi morgues. Given the limited sources of reported deaths, Iraq Body Count says its figures are likely to be an underestimate of the real totals. It gives a "maximum" estimate of 24,865 civilians killed by violence in the two years between the invasion of Iraq and March 19 this year. That is the equivalent of about one in every 1,000 Iraqis. It also estimated that 42,500 civilians were wounded. Since President George W Bush announced the end of "major combat operations" on May 1, 2003, Iraq Body Count estimates that about 16,500 civilians died. Of these, about 2,400 are attributed to US-led forces. More than 14,000 were caused by criminal violence, insurgents or "unknown agents". That is the equivalent of 3.5 people a day killed by the coalition, compared with 20.5 who died at the hands of others. By extrapolating from a survey of about 1,000 Iraqi households, Iraq Body Count estimated 98,000 "excess dead" up to September 2004. Of these, 57,600 were due to violence, the rest by accidents, infections and chronic diseases. A larger study of 22,000 households, published earlier this year by the United Nations Development Programme estimated 24,000 "war-related" deaths up to May 2004. But the Iraq Body Count's dossier excludes the latest wave of suicide bombings, which have killed an estimated 1,500 people since the end of April. It also leaves out deaths of combatants, whether US and British forces or insurgents. However the coalition's military casualties are closely monitored by other groups. The method adopted by Iraq Body Count provides a wealth of detail. It finds that where the information was available, about four out of five people killed were men, while nearly one in 10 were children. The geographical distribution shows that 45 per cent of the deaths occurred in and around Baghdad. In places such as the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah and Saddam Hussein's home town of Tirkit, about one per cent of the population has died violently. The monthly charts are also revealing. The major peaks in those killed by US-led forces coincide with major operations - the invasion between March and April 2003, and the two operations in Fallujah in April and November last year. The bulge of deaths last autumn is partly due to the uprising by the Shi'a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in August. At the same time, other deaths, including those caused by insurgents, have shown an upward trend, with marked escalation in the months leading to the creation of the interim government in June last year, and last January's general elections. |