TIT for TAT: 98,000 civilian fatalities in Iraq, Lancet report.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030206D.shtml.

urying The Lancet Report
By Nicolas J. S. Davies
Z Magazine

February 2006 Issue

Over a year ago an international team of epidemiologists, headed by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, completed a "cluster sample survey" of civilian casualties in Iraq. Its findings contradicted central elements of what politicians and journalists had presented to the US public and the world. After excluding any possible statistical anomalies, they estimated that at least 98,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the previous 18 months as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of their country. They also found that violence had become the leading cause of death in Iraq during that period. Their most significant finding was that the vast majority (79 percent) of violent deaths were caused by "coalition" forces using "helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry," and that almost half (48 percent) of these were children, with a median age of 8.

When the team's findings were published in the Lancet, the official journal of the British Medical Association, they caused quite a stir and it seemed that the first step had been taken toward a realistic accounting of the human cost of the war. The authors made it clear that their results were approximate. They discussed the limitations of their methodology at length and emphasized that further research would be invaluable in giving a more precise picture.

A year later, we do not have a more precise picture. Soon after the study was published, US and British officials launched a concerted campaign to discredit its authors and marginalize their findings without seriously addressing the validity of their methods or presenting any evidence to challenge their conclusions. Today the continuing aerial bombardment of Iraq is still a dark secret to most Americans and the media present the same general picture of the war, focusing on secondary sources of violence.

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