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Report says 600k iraqi deaths since war { September 2006 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20061012/1050342.asphttp://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20061012/1050342.asp
Bush rejects study's total of war deaths
Says 600,000 killed is "not credible' finding
From News Wire Services
10/12/2006
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Wednesday angrily rejected as "not credible" the findings of a new report putting the number of violent Iraqi civilian deaths at more than 600,000 since the war began more than three years ago, 20 times what Bush has estimated.
Calling the study's methodology "pretty well discredited," Bush declined to reassert his 2005 claim that about 30,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq. But, he said, "I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life."
White House officials disputed as pure guesswork the new report, published in the online edition of a leading British medical journal. They added that the timing - four weeks before the midterm elections - was politically motivated.
Democrats seized on the study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, using data compiled from May to July, to criticize Bush's handling of the war. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts called it "a chilling and somber reminder of the unacceptably high human cost of this war, standing in stark contrast to the administration's refusal to admit that Iraq is spiraling into a civil war."
The president, in a Rose Garden news conference, refused to cite a figure for the total number of casualties in Iraq. "I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me and it grieves me," he said.
Military officials brushed off the Johns Hopkins figures, calling them strikingly higher than most other available estimates of civilian deaths.
Gen. George Casey Jr., commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, said the report's estimate was "way, way beyond any number I have seen. I have not seen a number higher than 50,000, and so I don't give it that much credibility at all."
Iraq Body Count, a group that gathers fatality figures from news reports and posts them online, estimates civilian deaths since the 2003 invasion between 43,850 and 48,693.
The White House said it considered the Johns Hopkins group's figures "flawed" because the margin of error was huge - numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
U.S. officials "defer to the Iraqi Ministry on Health on the precise number of civilian casualties, but even the highest-end estimates put the figure at a very small fraction of what this study is reporting," said Frederick Jones, a White House spokesman.
The Lancet, which published the report, "seems to be a medical organization that has politicized itself," Jones added.
In a conference call with reporters, Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, defended his findings and research practices, which he called standard among international health specialists.
The study was initially planned to be completed during the summer, he said, denying any political motive behind its release Wednesday.
To compile the study, researchers relied on door-to-door surveys in 47 randomly selected areas of Iraq - encompassing 1,849 households and 12,801 people - to calculate the change in death rates over the years since the U.S. invasion. Researchers extrapolated their results to the entire country, with a population of about 26 million.
During the news conference, Bush also addressed the recent doubts expressed by senior Republicans, including Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and former Secretary of State James Baker, about the current U.S. course in Iraq, which he described as more flexible than critics suggest.
"We're constantly changing tactics to achieve a strategic goal," the president said, adding that "stay the course" is only a partial description of his strategy in Iraq.
"My attitude is, don't do what you're doing if it's not working; change," said Bush, who met Wednesday with the senior U.S. commander in Iraq to review the progress of the war. "Stay the course also means don't leave before the job is done."
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