#13: How much the Pentagon was undercounting dead and wounded--ours and theirs.

[Blogger was screwed when I tried posting earlier, Post link is now live also]

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000

By David BrownWashington Post Wednesday, October 11, 2006; Page A12

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

[Page A12? Back to the earlier bloggered post...]

Advance from tomorrow's NYT, Wapo and WSJ, via EZwriter

WASHINGTON -- A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate.

Excerpts of this report will be in Wednesday's New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

The study was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health by sending teams of Iraqi doctors across Iraq from May through July.

The Defense Department until 2004 eschewed any effort to compute the number of Iraqi dead but this summer released a study putting the civilian casualty rate between May and August at 117 people a day.

Other tabulations using different methodologies put the range of total civilian fatalities so far from about 50,000 to more than 150,000. President Bush in December said "30,000, more or less" had died in Iraq during the invasion and in the violence since.

The Johns Hopkins team conducted its study using a methodology known as "cluster sampling." That involved randomly picking 47 clusters of households for a total 1,849 households, scattered across Iraq. Team members interviewed each household about any deaths in the family during the 40 months since the invasion, as well as in the year before the invasion. The team says it reviewed death certificates for 92 percent of all deaths reported. Based on those figures, it tabulated national mortality rates for various periods before and after the start of the war. The mortality rate last year was nearly four times the preinvasion rate, the study found.

"Since March 2003, an additional 2.5 percent of Iraq's population has died above what would have occurred without conflict," the report said. The country`s population is roughly 24 million people.

Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.

I understand Cluster sampling happens for war zones, epidemics and natural disasters to learn a scope. It has higher risk of statistical error but I can't recall errors of greater than 20% when done by real researchers like Johns Hopkins with long-standing scientific and methodologic credibility to protect.

I'm no stats major but even knocking 50% off Johns Hopkins' numbers means that since March 2003, our meatgrinder is 6 times more efficient than the old Boss's 20+ years long version according to the above numbers. Yes, let's fight them there so we don't fight them here.

There are so many bodies, headless and otherwise, floating down from Baghdad that the fishermen have stopped pulling them out of the water.

Fisherman Mohammed Hussein told ABC News that he used to discover more than 10 bodies a day floating in the Tigris River where it flows by the Baghdad neighborhood of Al Rashdia."We used to fetch them out," he said, "but now there are so many we leave them. Otherwise, there would be no time for fishing."

One fisherman, and his crew, out of the hundreds fishing for food in that sewer of a river no less, can tally 60 or 70 a week it seems. I seem to recall some soulless asshole pundit last summer attempting to equate the safety of Iraq favorably with that of living in US cities. Can't recall the James, Delaware, Chicago or the Missouri being choked with corpses of late.

600k sounds like a lot, doesn't it? Nah. It's called the miracle of compound disinterest. Here's part--read the rest, it's a long list--of what happened just to civvies the weekend of October 1st.

*BAGHDAD - A total of 50 bodies were recovered by Baghdad police in various parts of the city over the 24 hours to Sunday evening, an Interior Ministry official said. Many had been tortured and most were bound and shot in the head.

*NAJAF - Safaa al-Obaidi, the director of the main teaching hospital in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, was shot dead by gunmen outside his house, police said.

*DIWANIYA - The body of an unidentified man was found in the southern Shi'ite city of Diwaniya, police said.

*ANBAR PROVINCE - Two U.S. soldiers from a logistics unit were shot dead in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, on Saturday, the military said in a statement.

FALLUJA - A car bomb in a vegetable market killed four civilians and wounded six in Falluja, 50 km (35 miles) west of Baghdad, police said.

SUWAYRA - Police retrieved five bodies, including that of a schoolgirl, from the river Tigris in the town of Suwayra, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. All bodies were shot in the head and chest.

MAHMUDIYA - The bodies of four people, bound and blindfolded, were found with gunshot wounds to the head in the town of Mahmudiya, just south of Baghdad, police said.

AL-SHIRQAT - Police found the body of a policeman a day after he was kidnapped in the town of al-Shirqat, 80 km (50 miles) south of Mosul, local authorities said.

BALAD - Police found the body of a man with a bullet wound to his head in the town of Balad, 80 km (55 miles) north of Baghdad, local authorities said.

TUZ KHURMATU - Gunmen killed the mayor of Sulaiman Pek on Saturday as he had breakfast in a restaurant in Tuz Khurmatu, 70 km (40 miles) south of Kirkuk, police said.

DIWANIYA - Gunmen killed Sheikh Numan al-Nassri, the head of a civilian organisation funded by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution In Iraq (SCIRI), on Saturday, in Diwaniya, 180 km (112 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

This is one weekend. This level of violence has been in practical effect since spring, while all those "schools were being painted." Before that it was 80% of today's levels. Six months before that, 70%.

600,000 out of a population of 25 million in a country the size of CA. Can't be. That would be the equivalent proportional hit here of 7,000,000 dead.

Or 2,333 September 11 Death tolls.

I'd say we've run up the score enough, wouldn't you think?

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