Category Archives: Iraq

Here’s on way to keep the Iraqi death toll down: Iraq Aims to Limit Mortality Data:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office has instructed the country’s health ministry to stop providing mortality figures to the United Nations, jeopardizing a key source of information on the number of civilian war dead in Iraq, according to a U.N. document.

We may not be able to stop the ‘insurgents’ but (for the time being) we can still manage the news.

The Horse’s Mouth, United States Military Conducts Several Hearings On Detained Associated Press Photographer — Without Defendant Knowing About Them:

One of the interesting things about the case of Bilal Hussein, the Associated Press photographer who’s been detained by the U.S. military in Iraq without charges, is that it is giving us as close to a behind-the-scenes look as we’re going to get of what happens to “enemy combatants” when the U.S. military decides to disappear them from view.

…

So there have now been three hearings held by the U.S. Military against Hussein. And if the AP’s correct, the defendant himself has been at none of them. The defendant has not had a chance to present any evidence on his own behalf, or to argue his own case, or to have his representatives argue his case. Nor was he even informed of two of the hearings. In the case of the third hearing, he learned about it after it happened.

Makes you feel proud, don’t it?

If you put stuff like this in a movie, no one would believe it: Tristero at Hullabaloo, in a post called Scandalous Ignorance, points to an op-ed in the NYT that notes how few of our decision-makers even know the difference between a Sunni and Shiite. Among the folk unclear on the concept is the Vice Chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence. Yes, the subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

Tristero’s explanation is that these guys are not curious or smart enough to find out about the enemy. Digby, though, has a more plausible and more chilling explanation in Beautiful Minds: they were reading books all right, or rather all read the same book, but it was a very nutty (and discredited) book.

Either way…

Cheney: ‘General Overall Situation’ In Iraq Is Going ‘Remarkably Well’.

I would hate to see something he called a bad overall situation.

Via Kevin Drum:

A team at Johns Hopkins has done another study of the post-invasion death rate in Iraq:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

….Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence….Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.

The study has uncertainties, but the estimate is a mid-range one surrounded by fuzz on both sides. If it’s at all right, it’s a shocking number. Consider the context: The CIA estimates the Iraqi population at at 26.7 million. So I make that almost 2.5% of the population!

Think about that. Five out of every two hundred. One out of forty. That’s one person out of every full-sized major league baseball roster. As a war-related death. Not to mention the injuries.