Intellectuals - Integrity - Strawmen - Bullies - Victims - Culprits

by - Tue Jul 19, 2005 15:10

U.S.-led forces, insurgents and criminal gangs have killed nearly 25,000 civilians, police, and army recruits since the war began in March 2003, according to a survey by Iraq Body Count, a U.S.-British non-government group.

Nearly half the deaths occurred in Baghdad, where a fifth of Iraq's 25 million people live, according to media reports that Iraq Body Count has surveyed.

The second-highest death toll was in the former insurgent stronghold of Falluja, where one in every 137 of the town's population has died violently.

Of the total, nearly 37 percent were killed by U.S.-led forces, according to the group.

The group said the information "provides a unique insight into the human consequences of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq".

"Leaders who commit troops to wars of intervention have diminishingly few excuses for failing to seriously weigh the human costs," it said in a 28-page dossier.

The numbers include civilians, army and police recruits, and serving police. They do not include serving Iraqi military or combatant deaths, for which there are "no reliable accounts ... either official or unofficial".

The group took its data, including figures showing that more than 42,000 civilians wounded in the same two years, from an analysis of more than 10,000 press and media reports published since the war began.

The death toll almost mirrors a U.N.-funded survey conducted last year, which found some 24,000 conflict-related deaths since the U.S.-led invasion.

Another survey, published in Britain's Lancet medical journal last October, found nearly 100,000 war-related deaths in the 18 months after the invasion. These findings were contested by U.S. and British officials.

Since the media in Iraq is forced to focus on Baghdad for security reasons, it is likely Iraq Body Count's death toll throughout the country is an under-estimate.

INSURGENT ATTACKS WORSENING

The survey found that almost a third of civilian deaths occurred during the invasion itself, from March 20 to May 1, 2003, when U.S.-led forces carried out their "shock and awe" bombing campaign on Baghdad.

In the first year after the invasion, around 6,000 civilians were killed, a number that nearly doubled in the second year, indicating a general increase in violence. The group said deaths caused by insurgents and criminals had risen steadily.

U.S.-led forces were found to be chiefly responsible for deaths, and criminals a close second at 36 percent, while insurgents accounted for a surprisingly small 9.5 percent.

That would not appear to tally with the situation on the ground, where insurgent violence is rife. It may reflect media sourcing, since it is often not clear who carried out a specific attack. According to Iraq Body Count, "unknown agents" were responsible for 11 percent of deaths.

The survey would also appear not to capture the full extent of the devastation caused by insurgent car bombings. Over the past 18 months, hundreds of suicide car bombs have exploded around the country -- at least 40 this month alone.

Those attacks have killed an estimated 1,500 Iraqi civilians since the end of April -- a period not covered in the survey.

by an t-uasal aye aye foghlaí Tue Jul 19, 2005 16:12

In leaked reports these last 24 hours, it emerges that that the JTAC warned that the war in Iraq had seriously raised the risk of terrorist activity in the UK.

The pronouncement from the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), which comprises 100 of the most senior MI5, military and Scotland Yard counter-terror specialists, prompted the Government to lower its threat assessment one level, from "severe general" to "substantial".

"Substantial" is the fourth most serious threat level on a scale of one to seven, rating the likelihood of Islamic terrorism only one level higher than the "moderate" threat from the IRA. This compares with "critical," the highest level of alert, which means that an attack is expected within two weeks, down to "negligible," the seventh and lowest level.

Charles Clarke has already been forced to acknowledge that the decision to reduce the threat level was wrong. Today Government officials claimed that it had no practical impact on counter-terrorism measures.

The JTAC report was officially presented to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), Scotland Yard, hospitals and major companies last month and was leaked to The New York Times today. It said: "Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist related activity in the UK."

It was reported the day after the attacks that Britain's threat level had been lowered, but until today the background to the decision had not been disclosed. It is expected to add to mounting pressure for an inquiry into Britain's handling of security intelligence.

Yesterday John Reid, the Home Secretary, and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, both rejected a report from Chatham House, the respected independent research group, which said that the Iraq war had made Britain more vulnerable. Tony Blair has argued that the terrorists are driven solely by their "evil ideology", rather than by political concerns.

Although the report incorrectly concluded that there was no sign of an imminent attack, it did say that a general threat existed from both the international al-Qaeda network and from homegrown radicals acting independently.

The threat from al Qaeda's "leadership-directed plots has not gone away," it said. Despite that threat and the situation in Iraq, it added, "many of our current concerns focus on the wide range and large number of extremist networks and individuals in the UK and individuals and groups that are inspired by but only loosely affiliated to A.Q. or are entirely autonomous.

*****************************
It is important to remember that SIS (MI6) have not so far seen their views represented by leaks in either the british or US press, but they will point to lack of co-operation with US agencies and internal Pakistani concerns and ambitions, which well, wouldn't be helpful...
give 'em time. They have their own scale of threat, alerto rojo, light orange, yellow press, blue white flash of WMD, to name a few...

by - - steady as she goes. Wed Jul 20, 2005 12:17

has aired his thoughts to Londoners, (English Secularists, and British Muslims alike) and more beyond on a BBC Radio 4 program.

Livingstone has said he has no sympathy with the bombers and condemns acts of terror.

& gone on to list the causes of the current crises.

* the "running sore" of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

* "A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy," said Mr Livingstone.

*He attacked double standards by Western nations, such as the initial welcome given when Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq.

*"If at the end of the First World War we had done what we promised the Arabs, which was to let them be free and have their own governments, and kept out of Arab affairs, and just bought their oil, rather than feeling we had to control the flow of oil, I suspect this wouldn't have arisen."

*"I think you've just had 80 years of western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the western need for oil.

"We've propped up unsavoury governments, we've overthrown ones we didn't consider sympathetic.

"And I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s... the Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan. "They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that he might turn on his creators."

Mr Livingstone said he did not just denounce suicide bombers.

He also denounced "those governments which use indiscriminate slaughter to advance their foreign policy, as we have occasionally seen with the Israeli government bombing areas from which a terrorist group will have come, irrespective of the casualties it inflicts, women, children and men".

He continued: "Under foreign occupation and denied the right to vote, denied the right to run your own affairs, often denied the right to work for three generations, I suspect that if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves."

Mr Livingstone also criticised parts of the media for giving too much publicity to certain figures who were "totally unrepresentative" of British Muslims.

*****************************************************

The interview was broadcast on the "Today program". It is indicative of Mr Livingstone accepting his duty to fall into ranks and call for the withdrawl of the UK (& EU forces) from Iraq, the closure of Guantanamo and the return to international law, which need form part of any exit strategy from the crises of imitative fundamentalist religious terrorism.

Accordingly Livingstone as "red ken" and a member of the Labour "old guard" and "maverick" has been presented today by the right wing Telegraph nerwspaper today as "the men who blame britain".

The Telegraph thus attempting to associate Livingstone the Mayor of London with :-

** Anjem Choudary, the British leader of the militant Islamist group al-Muhajiroun, said that Muslim leaders should not meet Mr Blair for talks while Muslims were being "murdered" in Iraq.
Speaking on the same BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he declined to condemn the London bombings, which killed 56 people, and said there was "a very real possibility" of a repetition.
"The British Government wants to show that they are on the side of justice and of truth, whereas in reality the real terrorists are the British regime, and even the British police, who have tried to divide the Muslim community into moderates and extremists, whereas this classification doesn't exist in Islam."

*** Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed said that support for America over Afghanistan and Iraq and the re-election of Mr Blair had all contributed to the attacks- "I blame the British Government, the British public and the Muslim community in the UK because they failed to make the extra effort to put an end to the cycle of bloodshed which started before 9/11 and on July 7 was devastating for everybody," he told the Evening Standard, London's newspaper.

by tack lee wind Thu Jul 21, 2005 17:00

as the COBRA comittee meet in Downing street in response to explosions today on the London public transport system.
Domestic opinion published today in the UK responded to the direction of the last 3 days (see comments and article above) and seem more supportive of the rarely seen parliamentary parnership at the PM question time yesterday.
It will be interesting to see, if this "rolling news format" will up the viewership for Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf address to the nation at 8pm local time (5pm GMT).
Leaks from Pakistan have signalled that Musharraf has been critical of US incursions of Pakistani territory, and that the specific bomb suspects of July 7th have not been included in the more than 300 people rounded up in the last week. General Pakistani public opinion is volatile at this time, in reaction to a three train collision on the 13th of July and yesterday's car bombing in disputed Kashmir which appeared timed with Musharraf's summit with US mid asia Central Command chief General John Abizaid and India's securance of non-military nuclear assistance from Washington.

There will of course be a bit of a change in pundit opinion tomorrow.