Iraq casualties numbers need verification [Archives:2004/797/Letters to the Editor]

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December 9 2004

Richard Rubright
[email protected]

It is strange how the estimates of dead Iraqi civilians seems to grow without verifications. The Yemen Times and many other organizations have quoted the figure of 100,000 from the Lancet group. This plays well in the Arab world and reinforces the sympathies people have. It also is a way of pointing the finger at Bush and claim he is a war criminal.
More recently we are now hearing of numbers as high as 200,000. This number will continue to climb, not because it is factual, but because it has to increase for biased parties to be able to continue to use it as propaganda to be fed to sympathetic readers and viewers.
Strange how Iraqi hospitals put the total number of dead at 3,000-4,000 civilians. Yet Arab papers will readily lunge for the 100,000 figure that even Lancet cant explain.
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