The Baquba killings will become part of the disparate statistics and numbers being amassed and studied to tally Iraq’s official civilian death toll, a body count that has drawn widely differing estimates. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a new study saying that roughly 151,000 Iraqi civilians died violently during the three years following the U.S. invasion.
The new U.N. report marks the most comprehensive effort thus far to document civilian deaths in Iraq, where reliable statistics are scant.The WHO death toll represents a rough average based on a survey of nearly 10,000 households. The low estimate for the study totaled 104,000 civilian deaths, with the high figure reaching 223,000.
Both tallies were well below the 600,000 estimate put forward in a disputed 2006 John Hopkins University study, which surveyed far fewer households. But the new U.N. total rose significantly above the most widely cited running tally by Iraq Body Count, a human rights group that puts the number between 80,000 to 87,000 from the start of the war until now.
“It’s unfortunate and it’s tragic and it’s horrific and brutal when you see the kind of murders that the Iraqis and our soldiers have seen on the street,” Hertling said. “When you see severed heads. When you see people kidnapped, have their family held, and them being told that unless you drive this suicide truck laden with ammunition, your family is going to die. That’s not an ideology, that’s a threat.” MORE
On Just Foreign Policy.org, another set of statistics places Iraqi civilian deaths at 1,168,058. LINK
It’s obvious there are major discrepancies in the actual death count, however, those “in the know” are aware that America’s Mainstream News Media is controlled by corporations that support the war profiteering of the Bush administration, so these figures will remain in contention until another President is elected, unless, through hook and crook, another Republican is placed in office to continue the Neo-conservative agenda rather than the rule of law this country was based upon.
I wish the death-count would have ended here, but is doesn’t, and what lies in our future, as well as current trends and policies that will usher in misery and death throughout the global community, will be covered in Part II of this essay.
Unfortunately, “The Master of Disaster” isn’t finished yet - and what awaits us here, in the continental United States, is just beginning to unfold.
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