100/day is not my number it's the UN and Iraqi government's.  If they don't like what the UN says they can always ask the UN to leave their country, it hasn't stopped Iraqis in the past. 

 

You're right though you aren't using their data, you aren't using any data as far as I can tell.  You make assertions that because we haven't heard it in the big bad liberal MSM then there is no way there are 100 dead Iraqis a day, since we all know the liberal MSM wants the Bush Administration to fry for Iraq.  The MSM may hate Bush but it is hard to count bodies in the middle of a war zone.  People die and their bodies aren't recovered, other times the media just doesn't bother reporting the "ho-hum" more violence in Iraq stories since they have become so commonplace. 

 

You can cite unnamed government officials that state the UN numbers are "grossly exaggerated" all you want, but dead bodies are hard evidence to deny especially when they have bullet holes in them.  The Iraqi Health Minister states 150,000 civilians have died as a result of the war, the Iraqi Health Ministry and the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute (counting bodies at the morgue) state that an average of 3,200 Iraqis die each month from violence (i.e. gun shots), and the UN Assistance Monitor for Iraq confirms that number.

 

 All those organizations still stand by their numbers, and I haven't seen what number of civilians that  died in October that your government source is willing to quote.  Keep in mind now this is only violent deaths and doesn't even count the number of people who are Internally Displaced (1,000 per day) or who die from malnutrition or other maladies indirectly caused by the violence.  I don't know what point you are trying to prove in arguing that some number less than the "official" stated number have died in Iraq, other than to prove that Iraq is not in a state of crisis. 

 

Do you still believe that?  Do you honestly believe that the murder rate in Iraq (estimated at over 150 per 100,000) is somewhere near

The Health Minister was asked how he came up with 150,000....he admitted it was NOTHING more than a guess based upon 100/day for 4 years. That is 100% of your data out of Iraq...

No it's not, if you read my post a little more carefully you would know that the UNAMI reports (UN in Iraq) are based on data collected  by the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute in addition to the Health Ministry.  The number of a 100 per day started around May with 2,669 dead, June with 3,149 dead, July 3,509 dead, August 3,009 dead, September 3,345 dead, and October with 3,709 dead.

 

That is a total of 19,390 dead by violence in 184 days or 105 dead per day on average...just civilians.

 

Now you state that the Iraqi government finds this number "grossly exaggerated" but then do not come up with an alternative number, or a rationale as to why it is "grossly exaggerated" or why the UN would "grossly exaggerate" a number given to it by the Iraqi government.  Those are specific numbers and not estimates, and that's just the bodies we know that lie in morgues and hospitals, not every body is found and not every body is taken to the morgue.

 

  His number was/is automatically triple the previous numbers from Iraqi institutions and the media (+/- 55,000)...which jived with each other until Lancet, and this new number...

 

Well I still haven't seen the link to his assertion that he guessed at the number, no other Iraqi officials have disputed his number, and he has not retracted it to my knowledge.

 

Yes the ho-hum violence is reported on from Iraq...all the way down to single-victim drive-bys and "a construction worker was shot and killed in YakDungistan"  There are just as many if not more instances of multiple reporting than there are unreported acts of war.

All the violence that is reported in the media comes from Iraqi government sources, they choose what to release and not to release.  The AP reporters do not go around town in their convertibles counting dead bodies, because...you know Iraq is sort of a dangerous place to be in right now, what with all the violence.

The only question is:  Are the media's sources in Iraq reliable?  Are they under-reporting or over-reporting the violence in Iraq? 

 

 I meant Hispaniola. something in a subsequent post made me think you got that. Right around the time of 9/11 it was news (barley a blip)that there were 275 homicides in the Dominican republic. pop. 69,000..Just Homicides...I lumped Haiti in with that violence and had Dominica on the brain.

 

Well I am still confused about your comparison.  Hispaniola has over 17 million people on it (Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and the Dominican Republic has a population of over 8 million, not 69,000. 

 

The island of Dominica has a population of 69,000, but I already showed you what its murder rate was. 

 

If you don't know the difference between the Dominican Republic and Dominica then perhaps you shouldn't cite their respective murder rates

"Baghdad has an "official"
murder rate of 160 per 100,000, the murder rate for New Orleans is 54
per 100,000 (worst in the United States), Cape Town had the highest
murder rate for any city prior to the Iraq invasion at 82 per
100,000--half the rate of Baghdad."

Funny how you use the focal point of the war in Iraq as your baseline.

It also has 25 percent of the population of Iraq.  The only accurate counts we get from a morgue in Iraq is the Baghdad morgue.  We do not have hard data for Anbar, Basra, Maysan, Diyala, Mosul, Salan-din, and Babil provinces.  Anbar, Diyala, Mosul, and Slan-din are the four Sunni provinces that see a lot of violence and chaos.  Basra, and Babil are home to Shiites and Shiite death squads, and no accurate data on death tolls has been recorded. Maysan is on the Iranian border, the home of the Marsh Arabs, and controlled by Sadr, and no coalition forces have control there. Those provinces combined have 10.5 million people and could be as violent as Baghdad.  You add in Baghdad’s 6.5 million people and you have 17 million out of Iraq’s total population of 24 million that potentially could see violence every day.  That’s 71% of the population. 

 

In Basra, one estimate, showed at least 2,400 assassinations for this year, which translates into a murder rate of 92.3 per 100,000.  That's just assassinations.  Take the average of the two largest cities if you like (Baghdad and Basra), and the murder rate is 142 per 100,000.  Those two cities have an estimated 38 percent of Iraq's popualtion.  Add in the other provinces and yeah your murder rate is probably way up there in the 140-160 per 100,000 range. 

 

Even if there is not a single other murder in Iraq, just those figures that I cited, Iraq would still have the highest murder rate of any other country in the world.  

 

"Morgue official said bodies unclaimed after 15 days are transferred to the cemetery administration to be catalogued, and then taken for burial at a cemetery in Najaf. As he spoke, three Iraqi police pick-up trucks loaded with about 10 bodies each arrived at the morgue.

At the cemetery administration, an official told IPS: "From February 1 to March 31, we've logged and buried 2,576 bodies from Baghdad."

Requests by IPS to meet with administration officials at the Baghdad morgue were turned down for "security reasons."

Several surveys have pointed to large numbers of civilian deaths as a result of the U.S.-led occupation.

Iraqiyun, a humanitarian group affiliated with the political party of interim president Ghazi al-Yawir reported Jul. 12 last year that there had been 128,000 violent deaths since the invasion. The group said it had only counted deaths confirmed by relatives, and that it had omitted the large numbers of people who simply disappeared without trace..

Another group, the People's Kifah, involved hundreds of academics and volunteers in a survey conducted in coordination with "grave-diggers across Iraq." The group said it also "obtained information from hospitals and spoke to thousands of witnesses who saw incidents in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. fire."

The project was abandoned after one of the researchers was captured by Kurdish militiamen and handed over to U.S. forces. He was never seen again. But in less than two months' work, the group documented about 37,000 violent civilian deaths up to October 2003.

The Baghdad central morgue alone accounts for roughly 30,000 bodies annually. That is besides the large number of bodies taken to morgues in cities such as Basra, Mosul, Ramadi, Kirkuk, Irbil, Najaf and Karbala"

 

link

Here's the report address:

 

link

From LittleGreenFootballs, reporting on a peer review that smacks Lancet left and right, up and down, for fraud:

 

 

Lancet's Iraq Study: Bogus, Po...

Remember the study released last year by British medical journal The Lancet that ludicrously claimed more than 650,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Iraq War? The study that was seized upon by “anti-war” groups, and is now cited as fact and repeated endlessly in the propaganda from International ANSWER, CODEPINK, Stop the War Coalition and every other loony left organization on the planet?

Now, a damning peer review has come to the conclusion that the Lancet’s study has “no scientific standing”?and may in fact be fraudulent.

Well, knock me over with a feather.

Could 650,000 Iraqis really ha...

One critic is Professor Michael Spagat, a statistician from Royal Holloway College, University of London. He and colleagues at Oxford University point to the possibility of “main street bias” – that people living near major thoroughfares are more at risk from car bombs and other urban menaces. Thus, the figures arrived at were likely to exceed the true number. The Lancet study authors initially told The Times that “there was no main street bias” and later amended their reply to “no evidence of a main street bias”.

Professor Spagat says the Lancet paper contains misrepresentations of mortality figures suggested by other organisations, an inaccurate graph, the use of the word “casualties” to mean deaths rather than deaths plus injuries, and the perplexing finding that child deaths have fallen. Using the “three-to-one rule” – the idea that for every death, there are three injuries – there should be close to two million Iraqis seeking hospital treatment, which does not tally with hospital reports.

“The authors ignore contrary evidence, cherry-pick and manipulate supporting evidence and evade inconvenient questions,” contends Professor Spagat, who believes the paper was poorly reviewed. “They published a sampling methodology that can overestimate deaths by a wide margin but respond to criticism by claiming that they did not actually follow the procedures that they stated.” The paper had “no scientific standing”. Did he rule out the possibility of fraud? “No.”

If you factor in politics, the heat increases. One of the Lancet authors, Dr Les Roberts, campaigned for a Democrat seat in the US House of Representatives and has spoken out against the war. Dr Richard Horton, Editor of the Lancet is also antiwar.

 

 

swhitebull -  you be the judge.  I'm sure more to come.