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100,000 Civilians Dead in Iraq

Posted by michael on from the one-is-a-tragedy-100,000-is-a-statistic dept.

asldihf writes "New Scientist is reporting that 100,000 civilians in Iraq are now dead due to America's war in Iraq. Make sure you vote next week."

1 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. The skeptic's opinion: Number hard to calculate by MobyDisk · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It would be nice to have a link to the real article, rather than an oversimplistic summary. This number is _extremely_ difficult to calculate. Some estimates say tens of thousands. Some say hundreds of thousands. With wild variations like that no one should believe any of these numbers at all. When they are within a factor of 2 then we have a reasonable range. But it will be 10 years before we really have a good idea. The same thing happened with WWI, WWII, Hiroshima, etc.
    For this report, the sample numbers were EXTREMELY EXTREMELY low: 988 housholds. The potential for error here is astounding.
    Confirmation was sought to ensure that a large fraction of the reported deaths were not fabrications...but only in two cases for each cluster of [30] houses.
    So they had confirmation of 6%.
    But the team believes that lying about deaths is unlikely
    That's silly. The death count is constantly overreported. Every article about military firefights ends with a quote from some official saying how the Americans attacked mostly women, children, and the elderly. It's the standard line and it gets old and less believable each time. I would really like to see statistics on who was killed and how the deaths occurred. Firefights with US troops? Bombings? Deaths during reconstruction? Who is called a "civilian?"