ISTANBUL--The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), a grouping of NGOs,
intellectuals and writers opposed to the war in Iraq, on Friday accused the
United States of causing more deaths in Iraq than ousted president Saddam
Hussein. . . .
Founded in 2003, the WTI is modelled on the 1960s Russell Tribunal, created
by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell to denounce the war in Vietnam.
It has held about 20 sessions so far in different locations around the
world. . . .
The tribunal has for the past two years been gathering what it says is
evidence that the war launched in March 2003 to oust Saddam was illegal, and
it has also been gathering evidence of exactions allegedly committed by
coalition troops.
Its verdict on Monday after its final session is expected to condemn both
the United States and Britain. . . .
Hans von Sponeck, former director of the UN's so-called oil-for-food
programme for Iraq, told the Istanbul gathering that the humanitarian
programme "was totally irrelevant."
Von Sponeck ran the programme until 2000 when he resigned because he said it
failed to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people. . . .
He singled out the United States and British governments for allegedly
blocking projects that would, he said, have allowed more people to survive.
Some 200 non-governmental organsiations -- including the environmentalist
group Greenpeace, the anti-globalization ATTAC and Vietnam Veterans Against
the War -- as well as a number of prominent intellectuals such as US
linguist Noam Chomsky and Egyptian sociologist Samir Amin are involved in the
WTI.
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S. Amjad Hussain, "US Policies Killing
Children In Iraq," The Wisdom Fund, June 14, 1997
K. Shreeram, "U.S. in Iraq:
Ritual Genocide," The Wisdom Fund, November 14, 1998
"War Has Cost 655,000 Iraqi
Lives," The Wisdom Fund, July 9, 2003
"Wrongful Death Compensation:
Afghan $200, Iraqi $600, Indian $1200, French $1 Million, American $10
Million, Israeli-American $48 Million," The Wisdom Fund, November
26, 2003
Scott Ritter, "More than 100,000 Iraqis
have died - and where is our shame and rage?," Guardian, November 1,
2004
[Greenspan's damning comments about the war come as a survey of Iraqis,
which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have
died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in
the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.--Peter Beaumont and Joanna
Walters, "Greenspan
admits Iraq was about oil, as deaths put at 1.2m," Observer, September 16, 2007]
[BRITISH government officials backed the methodology used by scientists who
concluded that more than 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US-led
invasion in 2003, the BBC reported today. . . . the chief scientific adviser
to the Defense Ministry, Roy Anderson, described the methods used in the
study as "robust" and "close to best practice."--"Iraq death toll survey 'robust'," Associated Press, March
27, 2007
Lawrence K altman and Richard A Opple Jr, "W.H.O. Says Iraq Civilian Death Toll Higher Than
Cited," nytimes.com, February 2, 2008
John Tirman, "Iraq's
Shocking Human Toll: About 1 Million Killed, 4.5 Million Displaced, 1-2
Million Widows, 5 Million Orphans," Nation, February 2, 2009
[If Lambert were
to revisit the issue today, he would produce a table that would
look something like this:
Survey ..................Violent deaths .....Excess deaths
ILCS .................... 180,000
Lancet 1 ................ 400,000 ................. 580,000
IFHS .................... 350,000 ................. 840,000
Lancet 2 .............. 1,370,000 ............... 1,480,000
ORB ................... 1,370,000
--Robert Naiman, "Deaths in Iraq," Nation, August 7, 2010]
[The methods used by IBC and the others are "passive" surveillance: they
rely on reporting (from journalists, morgues, and now soldiers) that is not
able to capture more than a fraction of all fatalities.--John Tirman, "Wikileaks Docs Underestimate
Iraqi Dead: For all their value, the newly leaked documents will,
unfortunately, reinforce the inaccurate lower estimates of Iraqi
mortality," alternet.org, October 25, 2010]
Sherwood Ross, "U.S.-U.K.
Genocide Against Iraq 1990-2012 Killed 3.3 Millions,"
ukprogressive.co.uk, December 5, 2012
[This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly,
killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan,
i.e. a total of around 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones
such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the
public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major
NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the
three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure
below 1 million is extremely unlikely.--"Body Count,"
Physicians for Social Responsibility, March 2015]
[Iraq Body Count (IBC), is deeply embedded in the Western foreign policy
establishment. . . .
USIP, with its pro-war sanitization and promotion of US violence in Iraq, is currently a
funder of the very same executives, John Sloboda and Hamit Dardagan, who run the Iraq
Body Count project.--Sherwood Ross, "How the Pentagon is hiding the dead," medium.com, April 21,
2015]
