From The Ramparts

Bu$h’s Negative Karma Continues to Accrue

“What is America's reward for Bush's illegal wars that have killed 655,000 Iraqis, an uncounted number of Afghans, and disabled as many as 400,000 U.S. troops? According to the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate and to practically every Middle East expert, Bush's invasions have radicalized the Muslim Middle East, created legions of recruits for extremists, undermined America's puppet rulers, imperiled Israel, and destroyed America's reputation. We are talking about over 1 million casualties that have no other cause than blatant lies by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the bloodthirsty neoconservative cabal that occupies Bush's subcabinet, and their corporate media propagandists, especially The Weekly Standard, Fox News, National Review, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Bush regime deceived America and the world with its lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that would be turned against the West by terrorists. By giving speeches that continually mentioned Iraq in the same context as 9/11, the Bush regime created the widespread impression, still prevalent among Americans, that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. ” Bush Has Achieved America’s Demise Paul Craig Roberts http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=9844

A new report just released is making the rounds on the Internet. According to just released report in The Lancet a British medical journal, the total number if Iraqis killed as a result of the AmeriKKKan led invasion and occupation of Iraq is 654, 965! This figure was arrived at by an extensive survey conducted jointly by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad in co-operation with the MIT Center for International Studies. The study selected a random sampling of 1800 Iraqi households. Researcher’s explained the methodology of the survey, “The two survey teams consisted of two females and two males each with one male supervisor. All were medical doctors with previous survey and community medicine experience and were fluent in English and Arabic. All were Iraqis. All were trained in the use of the questionnaire. Rules were established about how to randomly choose another area if the first one chosen was unsafe on the day of the survey visit. In each cluster, queries were made about any household that had been present during the survey period that had ceased to exist because all members had died or left. This was done to judge the degree of “survivor bias” where only the households still 'alive' could report. The survey was explained to the head of household or spouse, and their consent to participate was obtained. For ethical reasons, no names were written down, and no incentives were provided to participate. The survey listed current household members by sex, asked about births, deaths, and migrations into and out of the household since 1 January 2002. (For more information on the survey methods and collection of data, see Appendix A and B.) Deaths were recorded only if the person dying had lived in the household continuously for three months before the event. In cases of death, additional questions were asked in order to establish the cause and circumstances of deaths (while considering family sensitivities). At the conclusion of the interview in a household where a death was reported, the interviewers were to ask for a copy of the death certificate. In 92% of instances when this was asked, a death certificate was present. Period mortality rates were calculated based on mid-interval population and with regression models. The numbers of excess deaths (attributable rates) were estimated by subtracting the predicted values for the pre-war mortality rates from the post-invasion mortality rates in the three post-invasion periods. Mortality projections were applied to the 2004 mid-year population estimates (26,112,353) of the surveyed areas (which exclude the governates of Muthanna and Dahuk, which had been omitted through misattribution9) to establish the mortality projections. The study received ethical approval from the Committee on Human Research of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the School of Medicine, Al Mustansiriya University, Baghdad.” The Human Cost of the War in Iraq A Mortality Study, 2002-2006 The results of the survey are startling and quite disturbing. In their summary the researchers state, “A new household survey of Iraq has found that approximately 600,000 people have been killed in the violence of the war that began with the U.S. invasion in March 2003.” The Human Cost of the War in Iraq A Mortality Study, 2002-2006

Of course George W Bu$h the man whose lies caused the carnage that resulted in all these deaths, disavows the report and says it is “not credible”. That’s like the kettle calling the pot black! The White House spin machine is going into overdrive to minimize the damage and limit the dissemination of this report. “The president, in a Rose Garden news conference, refused to cite a figure for the total number of casualties in Iraq. ‘I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me and it grieves me,’ Bush said. Military officials brushed off the Hopkins figures, calling them strikingly higher than most other available estimates of civilian deaths. Gen. George Casey Jr., commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, said the report's estimate was ‘way, way beyond any number I have seen. I have not seen a number higher than 50,000, and so I don't give it that much credibility at all.’