Hope those who were in the illusion that Coalition forces invaded Iraq to help Iraqis NOW realise that the agenda was GENOCIDE & OIL & indebting the populace FOR ZIONISM!! This has been explained in Eustache Mullins video, please take the time to view and learn from Eustache at http://tinyurl.com/wm9s5 . Mullins explains that the business of the Worlds’ Banklords is to foment wars which they fund (both sides) by creating money from nothing since they are the bankers of issue and thereby creating eternal debt for the populace which the BankLords collect in the form of public property and taxes.

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=8667011121551944391&q=eustace+mullins

See also Jewish Historian Norman Finkelstein’s latest book “Beyond Chutzpah” to know why Zionists see anything they do as justified http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/.

These liars in power think nothing of sending thousands of U.S. military personnel to their deaths, maiming for life tens of thousands, murdering hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq, murdering anyone that they can't control and running kangaroo courts to justify killing innocent people who were picked up and surrendered to them for bounties.  One can not seriously think that they would hesitate one nanosecond to fix any election that they could.  They are murderers, liars and traitors and fit the Biblical description of the Pharisees of the Synagogue of Satan.  Of course they have fixed the past two elections and are planning to do the same in November (see Robert F. Kennedy Junior’s articles http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__will_the_next_election_be_hacked).

Just look back at the past 200 years in Europe where over 100 million Christians died in about 400 wars which left the BankLords’ Dynasties enriched and firmly in control of Europe. Similarly, after the US civil war, the international BankLords from the square mile City of London, gained control of the US, especially after the creation of their Central Bank in 1913 which is fraudulently called the Federal Reserve (please view the 4 hour documentary on "The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America" at http://www.themoneymasters.com right click link - save target as) Download Part 1 87 MB - Windows Media Format (right click link - save target as) Download Part 2 67 MB - windows Media Format). 

First, let’s review the words of Albert Pike which were repeated at the World Zionist Congress in 1896 per Eustache Mullins:

Albert Pike [33rd degree Mason] 'Morals and Dogma' 732 (Note: Commander Albert Pike was Grand Master of the Central Directory at Washington, D.C., Grand Commander of the Supreme Council at Charleston, S.C., and Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry. He was an honorary member of almost every Supreme Council in the world, personally receiving 130 Masonic degrees). General Albert Pike, Grand Commander, sovereign pontiff of universal freemasonry, giving instructions to the 23 supreme councils of the world after these quotes:

"The First World War must be brought about in order to permit the Illuminati to overthrow the power of the Czars in Russia and of making that country a fortress of atheistic Communism. The divergences caused by the "agentur" (agents) of the Illuminati between the British and Germanic Empires will be used to foment this war. At the end of the war, Communism will be built and used in order to destroy the other governments and in order to weaken the religions." ²Students of history will recognize that the political alliances of England on one side and Germany on the other, forged between 1871 and 1898 by Otto von Bismarck, were instrumental in bringing about the First World War.

"The Second World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences between the Fascists and the political Zionists. This war must be brought about so that Nazism is destroyed and that the political Zionism be strong enough to institute a sovereign state of Israel in Palestine. During the Second World War, International Communism must become strong enough in order to balance Christendom, which would be then restrained and held in check until the time when we would need it for the final social cataclysm." ³

After this Second World War, Communism was made strong enough to begin taking over weaker governments. In 1945, at the Potsdam Conference between Truman, Churchill, and Stalin, a large portion of Europe was simply handed over to Russia, and on the other side of the world, the aftermath of the war with Japan helped to sweep the tide of Communism into China.  

(Readers who argue that the terms Nazism and Zionism were not known in 1871 should remember that the Illuminati invented both these movements.  In addition, Communism as an ideology, and as a coined phrase, originates in France during the Revolution.  In 1785, Restif coined the phrase four years before revolution broke out.  Restif and Babeuf, in turn, were influenced by Rousseau - as was the most famous conspirator of them all, Adam Weishaupt.)

"The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the "agentur" of the "Illuminati" between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion…We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time." ⁴

Using the name of their self-created bogeymen Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, both of whom have been CIA assets since as far back as 40 years in the case of Saddam and 1979 in the case of Osama (aka Tim Osman), the following War Crimes have been committed by the forces of the Neocon-Zionist New World Order Cabal.

In addition, 1,000 Iraqi professors and scientists have been murdered by most likely Mossad death squads, over 1,600,000 Iraqis have left the country, 1,000,000 are refugees in their own country, at least 4,000 young Iraqi men killed by death squads CIA El-Salvador style, hundreds of young Iraqi girls have been forced into sex slavery, hundreds are tortured and raped daily, etc.

In addition, hundreds of thousands will die or will be born deformed/crippled from Depleted Uranium (the US dirty bomb) contamination.

Meanwhile, the Neocon Zionist war mongerers and their corporations are laughing all the way to their banks.

Here are some more of the Zionist BankLords atrocities:

1. Staging 911 and then blaming Arabs and profiting immensely from related events such as short selling of airline stocks before the attacks, insurance claims after the attacks, etc. As per Retd. Colonel Bowman, Dick Cheney was the mastermind behind the attacks leading the simulated hijacking exercises from his bunker on September 11, 2001.

2. Conducting illegal wars of aggression and bombing, invading, occupying and installing a government of criminals, just as criminals as the Congress critters as Jim Hightower calls them, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

3. Killing over 650,000 Iraqis and 50,000 Afghans in the process.

4. Stealing Iraqi wealth of all types.

5. Murdering Iraqi intelligencia, scientists, and professors.

6. Polluting the World with Depleted Uranium which has already and will cause cancer of the lungs and birth defects.

7. Lying and misleading the people of the World.

8. Murdering journalists to reduce negative reporting.

9. Spending millions on lies and propaganda companies and censoring news. Just look at the real rich news content available on the Internet from alternative news sites versus the controlled news and unreported news and fabricated news promoted on the corporate media.

10. Embezzling funds and issuing no-bid contracts to military-industrial-congressional complex companies.

11. Subcontracting the business of killing and torturing to lavishly paid mercenaries.

12. Institutionalizing torture and kidnapping of relatives, including children.

13. Using weapons of mass destruction such as napalm, phosphorous, daisy cutters, depleted uranium.

14. Conducting election frauds, disenfranchising certain voters, etc. Although Zionist imperialism is bipartisan, the Democratic is less infiltrated by the demagogue war-mongerers.

15. Passing Soviet-Stalin type laws to restrict freedoms and imprison without trial, i.e. end of Habeus Corpus/Magna Carta. Remember that the Patriot Act was written before 9/11.

16. Persecuting those who dare to expose their crimes.

17. Massively increasing US and Iraqi taxpayers’ debts and deficits.

18. Fabricated and lied about intelligence reports.

19. Forced downtown Manhattan to reopen after 9/11 even though the air was toxic and now many people and rescue dogs are dying from the effects.

20. Genociding entire cities such as Fallujah, etc.

21. Spending funds marked for reconstruction on expensive Blackwater Mercenaries.

22. ETC., ETC.,

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1904962.ece

Medics beg for help as Iraqis die needlessly

Half of all deaths preventable, say country's medics
Reconstruction seen as disaster
More than 2,000 doctors and nurses are killed
18,000 more leave the nation
Even the most basic treatments are lacking

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor

Published: 20 October 2006

The disintegration of Iraq's health service is leaving its civilians defenceless in the continuing violence that is rocking the country, Iraqi doctors warn today.

As many as half of the civilian deaths, calculated at 655,000 since the 2003 invasion, might have been avoided if proper medical care had been provided to the victims, they say.

In separate appeals, the doctors beg for help to stem the soaring death rate and ease the suffering of injured families and children. They say governments and the international medical community are ignoring their plight.

In the first 14 months after the 2003 invasion almost $20bn (£11bn) was spent on reconstruction by the British and American funds, including hundreds of millions on rebuilding and re-equipping the country's network of 180 hospitals and clinics.

But billions went missing because of a combination of criminal activity, corruption, and incompetence, leaving Iraqis without even the essentials for basic medical care.

The violence for which the Allied forces failed to plan has meant a $200m reconstruction project for building 142 primary care centres ran out of cash earlier this year with just 20 on course to be completed, an outcome the World Health Organisation described as "shocking".

In March, the campaign group Medact said 18,000 physicians had left the country since 2003, an estimated 250 of those that remained had been kidnapped and, in 2005 alone, 65 killed.

Medact also said "easily treatable conditions such as diarrhoea and respiratory illness caused 70 per cent of all child deaths", and that " of the 180 health clinics the US hoped to build by the end of 2005, only four have been completed and none opened".

Writing in the British Medical Journal today, Dr Basssim Al Sheibani and two colleagues from the Diwaniyah College of Medicine in Iraq says that, as the violence escalates, "the reality is we cannot provide any treatment for many of the victims."

"Emergency departments are staffed by doctors who do not have the proper experience or skills to manage emergency cases. Medical staff ... admit that more than half of those killed could have been saved if trained and experienced staff were available."

They say equipment, supplies and drugs are in many cases unobtainable. " Many emergency departments are no more than halls with beds, fluid suckers and oxygen bottles."

They add: "Our experience has taught us that poor emergency medicine services are more disastrous than the disaster itself. But despite the daily violence that is crushing Iraq, the international medical community is doing little more than looking on"

The shortages were graphically highlighted in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary made by GuardianFilms, and broadcast in February. It revealed that children with diarrhoeal disease were dying of dehydration because hospitals lacked the right sized needles to inject them with fluids.

In Diwaniyah children's hospital, doctors were shown struggling to give drugs by ventilation to a two-day old girl, Zehara, who was born with underdeveloped lungs, because they had the wrong sized plastic mask. Masks costs pennies but, like all other equipment, are in short supply.

Zehara's father was dispatched on to the streets to try to buy Vitamin K on the black market, urgently needed for an injection. But it was too late - by the time he returned, she was dead and her twin brother also passed away shortly afterwards.

In a separate report yesterday, Peter Kandela, an Iraqi doctor who has practised as a GP in Surrey for 30 years, travelled through Jordan and Syria interviewing Iraqi medical staff who had escaped the violence.

"The current Iraqi brain drain is the worst the country has seen in its modern history," he writes

"In the new Iraq there is a price tag linked to your position and status. Those doctors who have stayed in the country know what they are worth in kidnapping terms and ensure their relatives have easy access to the necessary funds to secure their speedy release if they are taken."

He describes a kidney surgeon seized by a group of armed men, despite the presence of security guards who he had hired to protect himself, whose first act was to go through his contacts book for other potential victims. " They had the audacity to suggest that in return for receiving better treatment inn captivity I should recommend others for kidnapping", the surgeon said.

He was released unharmed after a ransom of $250,000 was paid by his wife.

In Baghdad where no one can escape violence, hospitals provided the last refuge. But they are now unsafe and Iraqis are avoiding them. Public hospitals in the city are controlled by Shiia - who have come under suspicion for allowing death squads to enter them to kill Sunnis.

Abu Nasr, the cousin of a man injured in a car bomb who was dragged from his hospital bed and riddled with bullets, told the Washington Post: "We would prefer now to die instead of going to the hospitals. I will never go back to one, never. The hospitals have become killing fields."

Medical notes

34,000 The number of Iraqi physicians registered before the 2003 war.

18,000 The estimated number of Iraqi physicians who have left since the 2003 invasion.

2,000 The estimated number of Iraqi physicians murdered since 2003.

250 The number of Iraqi physicians kidnapped.

34 The number of reconstructive surgeons in Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

20 The number who have either been murdered of fled. 72 per cent of Iraqis needing reconstructive surgery are suffering from gunshot or blast wounds.

164 The number of nurses murdered - 77 wounded.

$243,000,000 The amount of money set aside by US administration to build 142 private health clinics in post-invastion Iraq.

20 The number of such clinics built by April 2006.

$0 The amount of money left over.

$1bn The amount of money the US administration has spent on Iraq's healthcare system.

$8bn The amount of money needed over the next 4 years to fund the health care system

70 the percentage of deaths among children caused by "easily treatable conditions" such as diarrhoea and respiratory illnesses.

270,000 The number of children born after 2003 who have had no immunisations.

HEALTH INDICATORS:

68 per cent of Iraqis with no access to safe drinking water.

19 per cent of Iraqis with sewerage access.

 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1919327.ece

24 October 2006 10:27

The Exodus: 1.6m Iraqis have fled their country since the war

By Patrick Cockburn

Published: 23 October 2006

Iraq is in flight. Everywhere inside and outside the country, Iraqis who once lived in their own houses cower for safety six or seven to a room in hovels.

Many go after they have been threatened. Often they leave after receiving an envelope with a bullet inside and a scrawled note telling them to get out immediately. Others flee after a relative has been killed, believing they will be next.

Out of the population of 26 million, 1.6 million Iraqis have fled the country and a further 1.5 million are displaced within Iraq, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In Jordan alone there are 500,000 Iraqi refugees and a further 450,000 in Syria. In Syria alone they are arriving at the rate of 40,000 a month.

It is one of the largest long-term population movements in the Middle East since Israel expelled Palestinians in the 1940s. Few of the Iraqis taking flight now show any desire to return to their homes. The numbers compelled to take to the roads have risen dramatically this year with 365,000 new refugees since the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samara in February.

Rich and poor, both are vulnerable. "I'll need more than five bodyguards if I am to live in Baghdad," said one political leader who has left Iraq. "The police came to my antiques shop and drove me around Baghdad," said an antique dealer from the formerly well-off district of Mansur. "They wanted money or they'd charge me with illegal traffic in antiques. I gave them $5,000 [£2,650] in cash, closed my shop and went with my brother to Jordan the same night. I haven't been back."

One well-established consultant doctor escaped his kidnappers in Baghdad and fled to the Kurdish capital of Arbil where he reopened his surgery. Bakers, often Shias, have been frequently targeted. Some now make bread with a Kalashnikov rifle propped against the wall beside them. Many have left Sunni districts in some of which it has become difficult to buy bread.

Former pilots who are Sunni and served in the air force believed they were being singled out by Shia death squads because they might once have bombed Iran; many have fled to Jordan. Jordanian immigration authorities are more welcoming to Sunni than Shia Iraqis. The latter find it easier to go to Syria. Every day heavily laden buses leave Baghdad for Damascus.

All sorts of Iraqis are on the run. But the Christian minorities from Karada and Doura in Baghdad are also fast disappearing. Most of their churches are closed. Many leave the country while the better off try to rent expensive houses in Ain Kawa, a Christian neighbourhood in Arbil.

Nobody feels safe. Some 70,000 Kurds have taken flight from the largely Sunni Arab city of Mosul. Among their cruellest persecutors are Arabs, settled in Kurdish areas by Saddam Hussein over the past 30 years, who were in turn expelled by returning Kurds after the US invasion in 2003. In Basra, the great Shia city of the south, Sunni are getting out after a rash of assassinations.

Baghdad is breaking up into a dozen different cities, each under the control of its own militia. In Shia areas this usually means the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. In Sunni districts it means that the insurgents, who are also at war with the Americans, are taking over. The Sunnis control the south and south-west; the Shias the north and east.

The worst slaughter is happening in the towns on the outskirts of Baghdad where Sunnis and Shias live side by side. Shias are fleeing from Mahmoudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, to Suwaira and Kut. The Iraqi army does little to help, and Shias complain that the US is more intent on attacking the Mehdi Army than rescuing villagers. According to one report from the Mahmoudiyah area: after two days of fighting a platoon of Iraqi soldiers "was dispatched from the Suwaira base to break the siege. They turned up for two hours and evacuated some of the women and children to the safe zone of Suwaira, but had to turn back as they were not fully equipped to handle the situation without [US] air support."

The Shias also accuse the US of attacking their own defensive lines. In Mahmoudiyah yesterday, 19 people were killed in a bombing and mortar assault blamed by the main Sunni bloc on the Mehdi Army.

Shias do have relatively safe areas to flee to (so far as any part of Iraq is safe) in east Baghdad or the Shia south of Iraq. But Sunni areas are beset so they may move only a few streets to a house they deem more secure. Otherwise they must leave the country.

Flight often brings a host of difficulties with it. Much of the Iraqi population is unemployed and depends on state-funded rations bought from a single, local grocery shop. A refugee in Baghdad cannot go to another shop even if he has taken up residence elsewhere. The lumbering state bureaucracy only shows flexibility on receipt of a bribe. Sometimes a man may move out of a district but still have his job there which he dare not give up (60 per cent of Iraqis are unemployed); 10 days ago, 14 Shia workers from the Shia town of Balad north of Baghdad were found with their throats cut in the nearby Sunni town of Dhuluiya where they had been working. In retaliation the Shias of Balad hunted down and killed 38 Sunnis.

An e-mail from a Sunni friend in Baghdad that I received in April is worth quoting in full. It reads in shaky English: "Yesterday the cousin of my step brother (as you know my father married two) killed by Badr [Shia militia] troops after three days of arresting and his body found thrown in the trash of al-Shula district. He is one of three people who were killed after heavy torture. They did nothing but they are Sunni people among the huge number of Shia people in the General Factory for Cotton in al-Qadamiyah district ... His family couldn't recognise his face but by the big wart on his left arm."

There is the total breakdown of law and order. Kidnappings are rife. Businessmen pay for the assassination of their rivals. Sunni militants kill women wearing trousers and men wearing shorts.

Rival Shia militias fight pitched battles for control of oilfields. American soldiers often shoot at anything. No wonder so many Iraqis have left their homes or fled their country.

The refugees' stories

MOHAMMED, SUNNI TRADER

Mohammed was living in the al-Jihad neighbourhood of west Baghdad. A self-confident, energetic man who was a small trader in motor parts and a driver, he does not frighten easily. But, two months ago, he decided he had no choice but to leave his pleasant home and is now living with his wife and three daughters in a single cramped room in the house of a friend.

Earlier this year, as sectarian killings increased after the destruction of the al-Askari mosque in February, he and his family fled to Syria for safety. Al-Jihad has four districts, only one of which is Sunni, and Mohammed was living in a Shia district which was increasingly dangerous for him.

Damascus was safe but too expensive. Mohammed went back to Baghdad. But when he got to his house there was bad news. His neighbours said that while he was away the Mehdi Army, the Shia militia, had come to his home. They had asked if he was Sunni or Shia. They were told he was a Sunni. They left a message saying Mohammed must go or he would be killed. He immediately took his family to the solidly Sunni al-Khadra quarter also in west Baghdad where he now lives.

LEILA MOHAMMED, SHIA MOTHER OF THREE

"Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of the four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, the mother of three children in the city of Baquba in strife-torn Diyala province north east of Baghdad. She and her family are Shia by religion and Kurdish by ethnic origin.

The men who threatened her were Sunni. One of them offered her children chocolate to find out the names of the men of the family.

Leila fled to Khanaqin, a Kurdish enclave also in Diyala. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded in fruit in the local market, said: "They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later, I went back to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin with no way of making a living.

MOHAMMED AL-MAWLA, REFUGEE IN SYRIA

Mohammed al-Mawla is adjusting to life in his new home as an Iraqi refugee living in Syria. He operates an internet café outside Damascus and sends his two children to Syrian schools. But al-Mawla, 42, fears the comfort he has found in Syria after escaping the violence in Iraq could quickly disappear if the money he has saved runs out, forcing him to leave his new home in search of work.

 http://www.juancole.com/

Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

655,000 Dead in Iraq since Bush Invasion

It is a big news day. Don't miss my interview with veteran Iraq reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, below.

Among other things, on Tuesday guerrillas blew up a bakery in Baghdad and killed and wounded a lot of people; police found over 50 bodies in the streets of the capital; guerillas claimed to have hit a US ammunition depot with mortar shells, setting off huge explosions that rocked Baghdad for hours but were not known to have killed anyone; and 5 US soldiers were reported killed in separate incidents.

But the big news is a big new Johns Hopkins study published in The Lancet that suggests that the US misadventure in Iraq is responsible for setting off the killing of twice as many civilians as Saddam managed to polish off in 25 years.

A careful Johns Hopkins study has estimated that between 420,000 and 790,000 Iraqis have died as a result of war and political violence since the beginning of the US invasion in March, 2003.

Interesting conclusions are that we are wrong to focus so much on suicide car bombings. The real action is just shooting enemies down with bullets. Only 30 percent of the deaths have been caused by the US military, and that percentage has declined this year because of the sectarian war.

And, folks, this is a major civil war, with something close to 200,000 dying every year.

I once warned that a precipitate US withdrawal could result in a million dead a la Cambodia or Afghanistan. Little did I know that the conditions created by the US invasion and occupation have all along been driving toward that number anyway!

This study is going to have a hard ride. In part it is because many of us in the information business are not statistically literate enough to judge the sampling techniques. Many will tend to dismiss the findings as implausible without a full appreciation of how low the margin of error is this time. Second, it is a projection, and all projections are subject to possible error, and journalists, being hardnosed people, are wary of them.

The New York Times report has already made a serious error, saying that deaths in the Saddam period were covered up. The families interviewed knew whether their loved ones were disappearing in 2001 and 2002 and had no reason to cover it up if they were. The survey established the baseline with a contemporary questionnaire. It wasn't depending on Iraqi government statistics.

Another reason for the hard ride is that the Republican Party and a significant fraction of the business elite in this country is very invested in the Iraq War, and they will try to discredit the study. Can you imagine the profits being made by the military-industrial complex on all this? Do they really want the US public to know the truth about what the weapons they produce have done to Iraqis? When you see someone waxing cynical about the study, ask yourself: Does this person know what a chi square is? And, who does this person work for, really?

Then Anthony Cordesmann told AP that the timing and content of the study were political. But is he saying that 18,000 households from all over Iraq conspired to lie to Johns Hopkins University researchers for the purpose of defeating Republicans in US elections this November? Does that make any sense? And, if Cordesmann has evidence that the authors and editor set their timetable for completion and publication according to the US political calendar, he should provide it. If he cannot, he should retract.

Ironically enough, the same journalists who will question this study will accept without query the estimates for deaths in Darfur, e.g., which are generated by exactly the same techniques, and which are almost certainly not as solid.

The study concludes that an average of 470 Iraqis per day have likely died as a result of political violence since March 19, 2003, though the number could be as low as 350 per day if the margin of error skewed to the low side. United Nations estimates based on figures from Iraqi morgues are more like 100 per day.

I follow the violence in Iraq carefully and daily, and I find the results plausible.

First of all, Iraqi Muslims don't believe in embalming or open casket funerals days later. They believe that the body should be buried by sunset the day of death, in a plain wooden box. So there is no reason to expect them to take the body to the morgue. Although there are benefits to registering with the government for a death certificate, there are also disadvantages. Many families who have had someone killed believe that the government or the Americans were involved, and will have wanted to avoid drawing further attention to themselves by filling out state forms and giving their address.

Personally, I believe very large numbers of Iraqi families quietly bury their dead without telling the government of all people anything about it. Another large number of those killed is dumped in the Tigris river by their killers. A fisherman on the Tigris looking for lunch recently caught the corpse of a woman. The only remarkable thing about it is that he let it be known to the newspapers. I'm sure the Tigris fishermen throw back unwanted corpses every day.

Not to mention that for substantial periods of time since 2003 it has been dangerous in about half the country just to move around, much less to move around with dead bodies.

There is heavy fighting almost every day at Ramadi in al-Anbar province, among guerrillas, townspeople, tribes, Marines and Iraqi police and army. We almost never get a report of these skirmishes and we almost never are told about Iraqi casualties in Ramadi. Does 1 person a day die there of political violence? Is it more like 4? 10? What about Samarra? Tikrit? No one is saying. Since they aren't, on what basis do we say that the Lancet study is impossible?

There are about 90 major towns and cities in Iraq. If we subtract Baghdad, where about 100 a day die, that still leaves 89. If an average of 4 or so are killed in each of those 89, then the study's results are correct. Of course, 4 is an average. Cities in areas dominated by the guerrilla movement will have more than 4 killed daily, sleepy Kurdish towns will have no one killed.

If 470 were dying every day, what would that look like? That is .0017 percent of the population each day.

West Baghdad is roughly 10% of the Iraqi population. It is certainly generating 47 dead a day. Same for Sadr City, same proportions. So to argue against the study you have to assume that Baquba, Hilla, Kirkuk, Kut, Amara, Samarra, etc., are not producing deaths at the same rate as the two halves of Baghad. But it is perfectly plausible that rough places like Kut and Amara, with their displaced Marsh Arab populations, are keeping up their end. Four dead a day in Kut or Amara at the hands of militiamen or politicized tribesmen? Is that really hard to believe? Have you been reading this column the last three years?

Or let's take the city of Basra, which is also roughly 10% of the Iraqi population. Proportionally speaking, you'd expect on the order of 40 persons to be dying of political violence there every day. We don't see 40 persons from Basra reported dead in the wire services on a daily basis.

But last May, the government authorities in Basra came out and admitted that security had collapsed in the city and that for the previous month, one person had been assassinated every hour. Now, that is 24 dead a day, just from political assassination. Apparently these persons were being killed in faction fighting among Shiite militias and Marsh Arab tribes. We never saw any of those 24 deaths a day reported in the Western press. And we never see any deaths from Basra reported in the wire services on a daily basis even now. Has security improved since May? No one seems even to be reporting on it, yes or no.

So if 24 Iraqis can be shot down every day in Basra for a month (or for many months?) and no one notices, the Lancet results are perfectly plausible.

The abstract for the study says:

' Methods: Between May and July 2006 a national cluster survey was conducted in Iraq to assess deaths occurring during the period from January 1, 2002, through the time of survey in 2006. Information on deaths from 1,849 households containing 12,801 persons was collected. This survey followed a similar but smaller survey conducted in Iraq in 2004. Both surveys used standard methods for estimating deaths in conflict situations, using population-based methods.

Key Findings: Death rates were 5.5/1000/year pre-invasion, and overall, 13.2/1000/year for the 40 months post-invasion. We estimate that through July 2006, there have been 654,965 “excess deaths”—fatalities above the pre-invasion death rate—in Iraq as a consequence of the war. Of post-invasion deaths, 601,027 were due to violent causes. Non-violent deaths rose above the pre-invasion level only in 2006. Since March 2003, an additional 2.5% of Iraq’s population have died above what would have occurred without conflict.
The proportion of deaths ascribed to coalition forces has diminished in 2006, though the actual numbers have increased each year. Gunfire remains the most common reason for death, though deaths from car bombing have increased from 2005. Those killed are predominantly males aged 15-44 years. '

More on the techniques from the text:

' The surveyors from the School of Medicine of Al Mustansiria University in Baghdad conducted a national survey between May and July 2006. In this survey, sites were collected according to the population size and the geographic distribution in Iraq. The survey included 16 of the 18 governates in Iraq, with larger population areas having more sample sites. The sites were selected entirely at random, so all households had an equal chance of being included. The survey used a standard cluster survey method, which is a recommended method for measuring deaths in conflict situations. The survey team visited 50 randomly selected sites in Iraq, and at