Iraq hides true casualty figures
Two years ago, The Lancet journal published a study by researchers from Johns Hopkins University who surveyed nearly 1000 Iraqi households in September 2004, asking how many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths there had been since January 2002.
The study estimated that 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect result of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
The researchers’ study is based on comparing the death rate among those households during the 15 months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began with the 18 months after it. The study was rejected by the U.S. government.
And last week, another study by the same researchers concluded that about 665,000 Iraqis have been killed since March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. And as expected the U.S. President George W. Bush questioned the investigation's findings.
In their latest study, Johns Hopkins’ team of researchers found that Iraqis were 2.5 times more likely to die in the 17 months following the invasion than in the 14 months before it.
In both surveys, the researcher acknowledged that the process of collecting the data was to a great extend difficult, especially that Iraq is still a war zone. However the data they managed to collect is credible.
But that’s not all- more shocking revelations have came up.
The French newspaper Le Monde revealed today that the Iraqi Government ordered medical authorities not to reveal to the UN the true figures of civilian killed in Iraq as a result of the U.S.-led war.
"This development risks damaging the capacity of the UN's Assistance Mission to report the number of civilians killed or injured," the paper quoted a telegram sent by Ashraf Qazi who heads the UN mission in Iraq, to headquarters in New York.
Since July last year, the UN has been depending largely in its estimate of Iraq casualties on data provided by Baghdad's Forensic Institute and the Iraqi health ministry.
A day following the report release, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki wrote to the health ministry asking it not to disclose more figures.
The telegram described previous UN estimate as "imperfect but an indicator nonetheless of the growing number of civilian victims".
So Bush's lies have killed not only 30,000 innocent Iraqis as the American President not long ago claimed.
As with previous revelations, the U.S. mainstream media and officials from Bush’s admin, which brought the puppet Nouri Al Maliki to power, are going to dispute the French paper’s report, especially that the American President is about to face a tough battle next month that will determine the future of his decision to invade Iraq in the first place.
Neither the Pentagon nor the world press have made much effort to make such truths known to the Americans and the world. It's not just because they’re not that important to anyone, but also because they would be really tarnishing to the image of President Bush, already struggling to win back pubic support ahead of his mid-term elections, scheduled to be held next month.