“Having said that where are the pictures in the western media of the mass graves in Fallujah that were dug as a result of what the “good guys“tm did.”

We don’t know that there are any mass graves arising from the Falluja battles.

“Where in the western media of the tens of thousands of other innocent men, women, and children killed by the coalition? Where are their images? Where are their stories?’

We don’t know that the coalition has killed ” tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.”

I don’t question that several thousand civilians have been accidentally killed by the coalition (We have enough information from the Iraqi government and IBC to make that assumption). Beyond that, we really don’t know, primarily because of the complete uncertainty as to how many Iraqi non-combatants have been killed by coalition air strikes. I believe this figure is much lower than the estimate provided by the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study, for a variety of reasons. That doesn’t mean I’m right, but I think there is sufficient cause for the time being to avoid using a ” tens of thousands ” or ” 100,000 ” death toll from coalition violence until we have further information and statistics available.

I thought Muslims had strict burial customs. I’d be suspicious of any claims that deaths from regime change were winding up in mass graves. Saddam often buried his victims in mass graves, because the families of the victims had no way to prevent this.

That wasn’t the case with those killed as a result of regime change. The reports I recall from the April 2004 fighting in Falluja uniformly reported a death toll of approximately 600 civilians, while qualifying that it was likely that many others had been buried in backyards. The question is, how many others? We have no way of knowing. I don’t want to create work for you, but I’d like to see the Guardian articles, if you have any archived. I really don’t buy the mass graves claims.

>>”What is “several thousand”? IBC puts the current count between 21 & 24 thousand, the Lancet report puts numbers considerably higher.”

“Several thousand “ means single digits, something less than 10,000. As I said in my earlier post, we can safely assume that many, based on media, hospital and morgue reports (collected by IBC) and on information released from the Iraqi government. The number could certainly be greater than 10,000, perhaps much higher. My point is, I believe this is an assumption for which there isn’t reliable corroboration at this time.

The IBC count includes those civilians killed by insurgents and Iraqi security forces, and those who died from criminal homicide, none of which can be directly attributable to coalition military forces. Moreover, even though it says these deaths are a “ civilian” count, it’s clear from their own incident by incident summary that IBC includes Iraqi security forces casualties in this count as well. When you subtract all these deaths from the 21-24,000 deaths, how many are coalition caused?

The Lancet study estimates a coalition-caused death toll from bombing and gunfire to be in the vicinity of 26,000 (9,000 from gunfire, 17,000 from air strikes). 3,000 deaths from the gunfire total “ may be “ insurgents, based on the study picking up one survey death who “may have been” an insurgent.

I should add that this 26,000 figure is only taken from the non-Falluja clusters, since the Falluja cluster was abandoned as an outlier for purposes of the 100,000 excess death estimate that headlined this study. It is the opinion of the authors, therefore, that the coalition caused violent death toll is much higher than 26,000, because the Falluja toll, whatever it is, will add to that figure, but isn’t reliably calculable from this single Falluja cluster.

The problem with the Lancet results is that it is a one-off study. An identical study, using the same sample size and methodology, could provide radically different figures for some of the key death subsets. The deaths attributed to the coalition are extrapolated to 26,000 from only 9 surveyed deaths (6 bombing deaths from 3 incidents, and 3 shooting deaths). I’m no longer a critic of the methodology of the study, however a single such survey does not seem capable of providing data that can be reliably extrapolated nation wide for deaths caused by events such as targeted bombing.

When I wrote my original comment, I recalled a BBC story from late 2005, which reported Iraqi government casualty figures for non-combatants as being around 3,000 for a 6 month period in 2004. I remembered the story was particularly noteworthy because the BBC reported that the majority of the civilians killed were at the hands of coalition and Iraqi security forces. Even if those figures had been accurately reported, there was still no breakdown of how many of the approximately 2,000 non-combatants killed by the U.S. and Iraqi friendly forces had been killed by coalition forces as opposed to Iraqi security forces. But when I was trying to find the original BBC article, I stumbled upon a BBC correction, which dramatically alters the disposition of the 3,000 figure (it’s actually 3,274) to include insurgent deaths as well.

“The figures said that 3,274 people had died in that period, 2,041 of them as the result of “military operations”.
The other 1,233 deaths were attributed to “terrorist operations”. ‘

>>Break

“However, the Iraqi Ministry of Health then clarified that the figures included not just civilians, but also insurgents and Iraqi security forces. And it said that the phrase “military operations” referred to Iraqis killed by insurgents as well as coalition or Iraqi forces.

The ministry said the BBC had misinterpreted the figures.”

Let’s say for argument’s sake that the Iraqi Health Ministry’s numbers are accurate, and the coalition killed somewhere around 1,500 non-combatants during that 6 month period (the Health Ministry statistics don’t give us such a figure, I’m just ball parking this). You’re going to have a tough time getting to “ tens of thousands “ of civilian deaths caused by coalition fire, when you have 1,500 for a period that represents 1/4 of the total time of occupation.