A Death Toll Lower Than DC Murder Rate?
NPR Swallows Bush Guestimate on Iraqi Dead
By APRIL HURLEY, M.D.
To: Scott Inskeep
National Public Radio
Dear Mr. Inskeep:
Yesterday, on your National Public Radio show, Morning Edition, you asked an "expert" to comment on G.W. Bush's evident ignorance. Your stooge pundit, Michael O'Hanlon, was satisfied with George's guestimate that 30,000 Iraqi civilians and combatants have been killed during 32 months of invasion and occupation. He suggested that G.W's figure doesn't include Iraqi crime victims. This proposes a mortality rate for Iraqis from combat alone that is lower than Washington D.C.'s homicide rate during the year of the latest stats, 2002. A war zone also safer than Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans before Katrina. Perhaps a paid professional at NPR, who isn't busy doing the bidding of a White House propagandist, would wonder what's wrong with this picture and do some minimal investigation. Such as the most globally respected survey, an independent and heroic study on the casualties in Iraq, peer reviewed and published in The Lancet. A curious child could get those US city homicide figures and do the math!
I witnessed Shock and Awe in Baghdad and the tsunami of lies discounting those deaths. The bombing then was brutal and the occupation since has been a serial massacre. Iraq today is our massive Guernica. It is obscene that this war president continues in denial that he has, conservatively, caused the death of 150,000-200,000 Iraqi men, women and kids. And this after, conservatively again, more than 500,000 died under Clinton's promoting of UN sanctions. How can you National Public Radio people live with your complicity in hustling such horrific crimes and distortions about them.
The tangled web of deception spun by NPR must feel like a cocoon for you by now! I am another outraged listener reminding all of you. We are an internet-literate audience; we won't tolerate being brainwashed by our own public airwaves. And the drivel you choose to distract us with at these critical times will serve to secure your indictment.
Increasingly outraged,
April Hurley, MD
Source: CounterPunch
To: Scott Inskeep
National Public Radio
Dear Mr. Inskeep:
Yesterday, on your National Public Radio show, Morning Edition, you asked an "expert" to comment on G.W. Bush's evident ignorance. Your stooge pundit, Michael O'Hanlon, was satisfied with George's guestimate that 30,000 Iraqi civilians and combatants have been killed during 32 months of invasion and occupation. He suggested that G.W's figure doesn't include Iraqi crime victims. This proposes a mortality rate for Iraqis from combat alone that is lower than Washington D.C.'s homicide rate during the year of the latest stats, 2002. A war zone also safer than Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans before Katrina. Perhaps a paid professional at NPR, who isn't busy doing the bidding of a White House propagandist, would wonder what's wrong with this picture and do some minimal investigation. Such as the most globally respected survey, an independent and heroic study on the casualties in Iraq, peer reviewed and published in The Lancet. A curious child could get those US city homicide figures and do the math!
I witnessed Shock and Awe in Baghdad and the tsunami of lies discounting those deaths. The bombing then was brutal and the occupation since has been a serial massacre. Iraq today is our massive Guernica. It is obscene that this war president continues in denial that he has, conservatively, caused the death of 150,000-200,000 Iraqi men, women and kids. And this after, conservatively again, more than 500,000 died under Clinton's promoting of UN sanctions. How can you National Public Radio people live with your complicity in hustling such horrific crimes and distortions about them.
The tangled web of deception spun by NPR must feel like a cocoon for you by now! I am another outraged listener reminding all of you. We are an internet-literate audience; we won't tolerate being brainwashed by our own public airwaves. And the drivel you choose to distract us with at these critical times will serve to secure your indictment.
Increasingly outraged,
April Hurley, MD
Source: CounterPunch
posted by Sean M. Madden at
9:22 AM
1 Comments:
I followed through with Dr. Hurley's above challenge that even a "curious child could get those US city homicide figures and do the math" to see, then, whether I, as a curious adult, could do likewise.
As she says, the math is simple, as is the necessary research.
The 2002 homicide rates for major US cities is available via the following URL, which I found via a simple Google search:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004902.html
I then researched the estimated population of Iraq, which is 26,000,000 (the CIA Fact Book says 26,074,906).
Thus,
26,000,000 divided by 100,000 (as the FBI homicide rates are provided per 100,000 inhabitants) = 260.
260 times the 2002 homicide rate for Washington DC (45.9 per 100,000) -- or, 260 * 45.9 -- equals 11,934.
This is an annualized figure, which must be divided by 12 so that we may then multiple it by the 32-month invasion/occupation period referred to in Dr. Hurley's letter to NPR:
11,934 / 12 * 32 = 31,824
So, this would indicate that Dr. Hurley was right to say that George W. Bush's "guestimate" would, in fact, suggest a lower combat-related mortality rate in Iraq than the homicide rate in DC or any of the other major high-murder-rate cities listed in her letter.
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