[Zipperfish]

mentalfloss wrote:

The one true parallel between this and climategate is that it is a good thing that the information was leaked. On the climategate scandal, you had some great revelations between skeptics and AGW promoters. On this end we will have some great deliberations about refining war protocol and whether it was worth being in Afghanistan in the first place.

I would agree whoelheartedly with that. Nothing adds to my deliberations like access to information that is being kept from me!

[Zipperfish]

Psudo wrote:

I think a distinction needs to be made between armchair commentators debating casually and the political class who actually run things, whether those things be the government or the press or whatnot. Zipperfish's comparison of Climategate and the Wikileaks leak fits very well among the armchair commentators (like all of us), but the people with political jobs are biased by the jobs they have to do more than by ideology. The Obama Administration is upset about the leaks because it's their job to run the war being criticized and to preserve confidentiality of such documents. Their duty strips them of a little of their ideology.

Without any practical obligations to bias us, we armchair commentators are free to consider things in the abstract and embrace our partisanship in a more pure, idealized way. We're allowed to be a little stupider than people who actually do things are. I appreciate Zipperfish's demonstration that we don't have to be.

Exactly. Thank you. I was trying to be alittle less partisan in my orginal observation (however I've drifted, predictably and unfortunately, back to partisan territory; we're all, ultimately, prisoners of our internalized biases, aren't we?)

[Psudo]

Zipperfish wrote:

we're all, ultimately, prisoners of our internalized biases, aren't we?

Until we're employed, yes.

[Quantum_Wizard]

Regarding the parallel between this affair and climategate. How much is there reason worry in light of this leaked information? (In case someone is curious, I haven't seem anything in those climategate emails that, in my opinion, should make one seriously doubt AGW.)

Based on what I've heard I'm somewhat worried, but I've not yet heard any arguments to the contrary so maybe I'm not aware of all relevant details. So, are you worried, and should there be any major changes in how the fighting in Afghanistan is run?

[Quantum_Wizard]

Here is an interesting interview of Julian Assange (from WikiLeaks). In the interview he claims that they did withhold documents that they thought might endanger people and even offered to cooperate with the White House to review the documents (who however refused the offer) to help that goal. If this is so, I wonder how successful they actually were. Do any of you have any comments on this?

[Psudo]

It seems a little disingenuous to claim you'll work with the organization whose secrets you're leaking to help determine which secrets to leak. You already know their position; the entire endeavor is, by definition, against their will.

Also, the same criticism of the Patriot Act and 2009 ARRA (the stimulus bill) also faces Wikileaks in this release of documents; there's just no way they reviewed that much data thoroughly before taking action on it. There will certainly be some regrets and negative repercussions. It's possible that good people will die.

Despite these criticisms, it is an overall good to have the reality of the situation exposed to public scrutiny. It could've been done better, but it needed to be done.

[Calbeck]

Zipperfish wrote:

Calbeck wrote:

As a centrist, I consider both and avoid neither.

But, again, the fact that you focus on the criminal element here reinforces my theory: the right (in this instance) focusses on the criminal element, the left on the content.

To repeat: "As a centrist, I consider both and avoid neither."

And to clarify: the point is that nothing in the Wikileaks material unearths new issues to consider. It's simply more of what's been debated and discussed over most of the last decade. What's to focus on? Giving "equal weight" isn't valid because the only truly new item is the criminal conduct by Wikileaks.

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A similar example is if an underling gets caught dooing something nasty--take Abu Ghraib for example. The reaction of the right was to contain the crisis as low down the food chain as possible, whereas the left sought to spread the rot to the upper levels of the administration.

Not me. I derided it as utterly unprofessional behavior, at a minimum. No one deserved to get off the hook, and far more heads should have rolled.

I also, however, recognized it as being a bunch of NG troops who'd never been trained to do the job they were given, shoved into that role by paper-shufflers who then imposed "rules of engagement" that weren't acceptable by American military standards. The shame of our troops is that they did not refuse orders.

Similarly, I recognized that what was going on was extremely similar to an American college frat hazing gone stupid. This was our troops at their worst --- but to compare the acts carried out to those perpetrated by the Hussein regime was an insult to all the victims who were actually tortured and killed in the years preceding our arrival. Even at our worst, we were a dramatic improvement.

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Well the US may get pretty close to a million yet. They are already at 600,000, according to a peer-reviewed study by the Lancet

Sorry, nope. The method, not the number, was peer-reviewed.

The Lancet used simple extrapolation, based off interviews with 1,000 Iraqi households, where they asked how many family members had died and how. This is, in fact, a standard polling technique, and thus the basis for the peer-review acceptance. The death numbers came directly from the fact that these 1,000 households purportedly produced 500 death certificates, and that most of these were supposedly corroborated with Iraqi morgues.

Problem: this accounted for a full 1% of all Iraqi death certificates issued since the March 2003 invasion by that point (approximately 50,000).

Simple extrapolation, using the same "peer-reviewed methodology", means there can only be 100,000 Iraqi households. Assuming 10 members per household on average, that's a million actual Iraqis to start from.

And according to the same groups which continue to rely on the Lancet Report, simply updating its extrapolations (remember, it came out about 2004), well over one million Iraqis are already dead.

The Lancet numbers either reveal that we have completely depopulated Iraq, or that perhaps many of the "corroborated" death certificates were faked by poor families desperate to claim death benefits in the middle of economic and social crisis.

EDIT: Whoops, forgot to mention --- those interviews, according to the Lancet, also solidly plunked two-thirds of all such deaths in the laps of the insurgents. The "US" did not "get" these people.

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But that's an aside. Again, you reinforce my point by pointing to the "greater good" (collateral damage OK because Saddam was nasty).

Nope. I'm saying collateral damage caused fewer dead than Saddam's average over the same amount of time. Hence, net plus for living beings.

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Iraq Body Count, an American orgainzation, based its estimate on newspaper clippings.

Actually, no. It relies on all reports, including those from morgues and hospitals. It also continually updates; IBC's numbers have gone up as they find more numbers to add.

And as an openly anti-war group, it includes all instances of violent death including those not caused by military action, but nonetheless holds the view that none of these people would have died but for the Coalition invasion. Nor does saying that it is an "American" organization make an argument that it is any less anti-war.

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It should be noted that the expressed purpose of leaking the documents was not to name Afghan informants. It bears pointing out that a similar leak, alleged to be from the same source, showed a video of American soldiers gunning down a crowd of civilians, including at least one journalist, while laughing.

Actually, no. I saw the entire 45-minute version of the video. There is precisely one trigger-happy idiot cursing and demanding people open fire...and he himself is not armed, but just yelling over the comm. No one is laughing at any point during or even prior to the gunfire, making me wonder if you checked the footage yourself. I honestly cannot vouch that no one may have chuckled afterward at a joke made in poor taste, because I seem to recall the same aforementioned moron making one and getting that sort of reaction.

Further, the full video clearly shows various of the "civilians" the cameramen are walking with to be carrying AK-47s. Nor can any cameras actually be seen, identifiable as such, until moments before the shooting begins. Prior to that, one can only see men carrying satchels, and for a brief moment the wide telephoto lens of a camera poking around a building --- in profile, with no reflection, and looking like nothing more or less than a rocket launcher. Immediately on seeing this, "RPG, RPGs" is heard over the comm.

It is clear in context that the Reuters men had embedded themselves with insurgents; not an uncommon or even illegal thing...but quite obviously something which put them at risk of coming under fire. Also, by this point, merely being a civilian amongst insurgents does not make a person immune from being fired upon, because the insurgent "uniform" is itself "civilian".

It is also clear that, believing the insurgents had one or more RPGs, these being deadly to helicopter crews, the gunner --- who actually hesitates for several crucial seconds before opening fire, when we CAN finally see the camera --- is goaded by the aforementioned trigger-happy moron into shooting.

The US fault was in letting said moron rattle on like he did to start with in the half-hour leading up to the shooting. It is likely that, had commo standards been enforced (if you have nothing professional and informative to say on the channel, SHADDAP, the grown-ups need to talk), this tragedy would never have occurred. On those grounds alone, people needed court-martialing.

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The greater good would be served by perhaps showing that the war is going badly, thus bringing political weight to bear against those prosecuting the war and causing them to withdraw, resulting in less war thus less death.

A presumption based on the notion that a withdrawal will actually result either in less war or less death. It only guarantees that our hands, Pilate-like, will be removed from further stain. An unsecured Afghanistan, with a still-unstable political structure, would be expected to collapse into the same exploitable anarchy which led to the Taliban in the post-Soviet era to start with.

And what was America's failure there? Not staying in Afghanistan to help stabilize the country, before declaring victory and ignoring the country because the Russkies had been run off. Repeating the error does not seem a likely life-saving effort.

[Zipperfish]

Calbeck wrote:

And to clarify: the point is that nothing in the Wikileaks material unearths new issues to consider. It's simply more of what's been debated and discussed over most of the last decade. What's to focus on? Giving "equal weight" isn't valid because the only truly new item is the criminal conduct by Wikileaks.

...As it was with Climategate. The emials didn't really contain any silver bullets, like evidence of fraud or gross misconduct. It was just proof of what was suspected all along--that scientists involved were obfuscating adn not generally playing good cricket.

However, to the Right, this was a silver bullet to finally slay the AGW werewolf.

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Not me. I derided it as utterly unprofessional behavior, at a minimum. No one deserved to get off the hook, and far more heads should have rolled.

I also, however, recognized it as being a bunch of NG troops who'd never been trained to do the job they were given, shoved into that role by paper-shufflers who then imposed "rules of engagement" that weren't acceptable by American military standards. The shame of our troops is that they did not refuse orders.

Similarly, I recognized that what was going on was extremely similar to an American college frat hazing gone stupid. This was our troops at their worst --- but to compare the acts carried out to those perpetrated by the Hussein regime was an insult to all the victims who were actually tortured and killed in the years preceding our arrival. Even at our worst, we were a dramatic improvement.

You are kind of contradicting yourself here. At first you say more heads should have rolled, but then you say that it was just a bunch of "NG troops" (which I'm guessing means grunts), and compare it to frat hazing, of all things. Again--that speaks to trying to lay the blame as low down as possible--"Boys will be boys." And again, you prove my point (while belying your centrist self-perception, I might add).

Of course, as a lefty, I will point to the fact that Rumsfeld authorized all kinds of ill treatment of detainees (thus trying to move the blame as far high up the ladder as I can).

And no, Bush and Blair, I'm sorry to say, were not much of an improvement over Saddam. A marginal improvement, perhaps. We never really did get the full story at Abu Ghraib because the US government covered it up and wouldn't release any more photographs or documents. But we do know that detainees were actually tortured to death, and we do know that civilians were maliciously gunned down, and we do know that girls were raped and killed--all by American and British troops. And we do know that the civilian toll was outrageous.

Saddam never made any serious pretensions to human rights. Bush and Blair, and their henchmen, did. They couched all there actions in these terms ("the Iraqis will throw roses at our feet" and such), although when you look at the raw numbers and methods used--not a huge difference.

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Sorry, nope. The method, not the number, was peer-reviewed.

The study was peer-reviewed--that would be the introduction, methods, results and discussion. The result is an extension of the method and the data. The Lancet is a peer-reviewed journal--and quite a well-respected one at that.

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The Lancet used simple extrapolation, based off interviews with 1,000 Iraqi households, where they asked how many family members had died and how. This is, in fact, a standard polling technique, and thus the basis for the peer-review acceptance. The death numbers came directly from the fact that these 1,000 households purportedly produced 500 death certificates, and that most of these were supposedly corroborated with Iraqi morgues.

No problem there, except the extrapolation wasn't that simple. The method was in keeping with epidemiological norms. Also, it bears mentioning that there were actually two studies. The second study was larger (almost 2000 households) and corroborated the results of the first.

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The Lancet numbers either reveal that we have completely depopulated Iraq, or that perhaps many of the "corroborated" death certificates were faked by poor families desperate to claim death benefits in the middle of economic and social crisis.

This would be speculation on your part. Again, I'm afraid I'm going have to side with the peer-reviewed science conducted in the field. Had the US government opted to try to account for civilian casualties, they might have a rebuttal, but they didn't so now they are left merely speculating as to why the number shouldn't be so high.

Another defining aspect of the Lancet studies were that the authors were not interested parties (e.g. a government involved in the conflict, or an anti-war group).

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Nope. I'm saying collateral damage caused fewer dead than Saddam. Net plus for living beings.

I'm not so sure. Human rights watch estimates that Saddam killed about a quarter of a million Iraqis through 25 years of Ba'ath rule. That's about ten thou a year. Far lower than the Iraqi occupation annual count. Of course you have to throw in the Iran-Iraq War too (about a million), but then you'd have to factor in US support for Iraq which may have lengthened the war considerably (not to mention the US shot down a civilian airliner).

So total: 1.25 million over 25 years would be around 50,000/year. And 600,000 over 8 years is about 75000/year. So deaths during US occupation of the country were the same order of magnitude.

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Actually, no. It relies on all reports, including those from morgues and hospitals. It also continually updates; IBC's numbers have gone up as they find more numbers to add.

And as an openly anti-war group, it includes all instances of violent death including those not caused by military action, but nonetheless holds the view that none of these people would have died but for the Coalition invasion. Nor does saying that it is an "American" organization make an argument that it is any less anti-war.

Let me quote from their website:

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IBC’s documentary evidence is drawn from crosschecked media reports of violent events leading to the death of civilians, or of bodies being found, and is supplemented by the careful review and integration of hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures.

They describe their efforts as a "conservative, cautious minimum." It also bears mentioning that the Lancet survey measured excess deaths (which would include deaths due to deprivation of food, water, medicine, power, etc. due to war), whereas Iraq Body Count considers only violent deaths (printed in at least two newspapers).

But they are a good indicator of minimum casualties, and have put an honest effort in. Various casualty counts go downhill, for the most part, from IBC. It's not bad--it's just not up to the rigor of studies that actually used academically accepted epidemiological approaches combined with field staff on the ground in Iraq and then published in a respected peer-reviewed journal.

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Actually, no. I saw the entire 45-minute version of the video. There is precisely one trigger-happy idiot cursing and demanding people open fire...and he himself is not armed, but just yelling over the comm. Further, the full video clearly shows various of the "civilians" the cameramen are walking with to be carrying AK-47s.

Nor can any cameras actually be seen, identifiable as such, until moments before the shooting begins. Prior to that, one can only see men carrying satchels, and for a brief moment the wide telephoto lens of a camera poking around a building --- in profile, with no reflection, and looking like nothing more or less than a rocket launcher. Immediately on seeing this, "RPG, RPGs" is heard over the comm.

It is clear in context that the Reuters men had embedded themselves with insurgents; not an uncommon or even illegal thing...but quite obviously something which put them at risk of coming under fire. Also, by this point, merely being a civilian amongst insurgents does not make a person immune from being fired upon, because the insurgent "uniform" is itself "civilian".

It is also clear that, believing the insurgents had one or more RPGs, these being deadly to helicopter crews, the gunner --- who actually hesitates for several crucial seconds before opening fire, when we CAN finally see the camera --- is goaded by the aforementioned trigger-happy moron into shooting.

The US fault was in letting said moron rattle on like he did to start with in the half-hour leading up to the shooting. It is likely that, had commo standards been enforced (if you have nothing professional and informative to say on the channel, SHADDAP, the grown-ups need to talk), this tragedy would never have occurred. On those grounds alone, people needed court-martialing.

Thanks for that. I didn't know that RPGs were found among the dead. However, listening to the tape, the disregard for the lives of the civilians is evident and could be indicative of the general attitude of the soldiers towards the locals (E.g., upon shooting the young children who were in the van trying to rescue the camera man they say that it "serves them right", or the way the pilots want to continue to shoot the cameraman as he lay, barely crawling on the sidewalk, the way they giggle like kids playing a video game).

There are plenty of other incidents too--Blackwater opened fire a bunch of civilians in one notable one.

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And what was America's failure there? Not staying in Afghanistan to help stabilize the country, before declaring victory and ignoring the country because the Russkies had been run off. Repeating the error does not seem a likely life-saving effort.

America's (and Britain's) failure was the invasion and occupation of Iraq was based on false pretenses, likely killed hundreds of thousands, and where, evidence shows, the use of torture, executions and arbitrary detention was commonplace.

The result of that failure was loss of standing in the world community, loss of moral authority, and strengthening of Islamist elements, Iran and Pakistan.

Hopefully that was a reasonable response. I'm usually quite reasonable, but the invasion of Iraq still makes me see red.

[Calbeck]

Zipperfish wrote:

You are kind of contradicting yourself here. At first you say more heads should have rolled, but then you say that it was just a bunch of "NG troops" (which I'm guessing means grunts), and compare it to frat hazing, of all things.

1) Because faked electroshock, sexual harassment, and nudie piles are in fact well-known examples of frat hazing. And these are, in fact, amongst the worst known examples of US behavior at Abu Gharib.

2) "NG" is "National Guard". Troops who get boot camp plus two weeks of training per year. They are qualified within their military specialties, but they get no training outside that, beyond direct experience with deployments. These troops were not qualified or trained to handle prison operations.

3) Neither of these points suggest there should not have been more heads rolling. The people who made the decisions which put those troops in Abu Gharib were idiots, their "rules of engagement" were not in line with internal military law, and various of the soldiers themselves acted like the aforementioned college punks.

Unfortunately, only a few of the punks got a semblance of what they deserved.

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Again--that speaks to trying to lay the blame as low down as possible--"Boys will be boys."

Hardly. It seems like you're simply pre-disposed to imagine that I aim for minimization in favor of the troops. One of the first things an American soldier learns in boot camp is how fast "being a boy" will land him in trouble.

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Of course, as a lefty, I will point to the fact that Rumsfeld authorized all kinds of ill treatment of detainees (thus trying to move the blame as far high up the ladder as I can).

Much of that treatment, regarding particular detainees, I don't have issues with. Nonetheless, Rumsfeld screwed up enough to earn himself a resignation, and I don't disagree with that either.

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And no, Bush and Blair, I'm sorry to say, were not much of an improvement over Saddam.

Then you either have no idea what went on in Iraq under Saddam, or you are pushing it out of your head in order to insist on the equivocation.

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We never really did get the full story at Abu Ghraib because the US government covered it up and wouldn't release any more photographs or documents. But we do know that detainees were actually tortured to death, and we do know that civilians were maliciously gunned down, and we do know that girls were raped and killed--all by American and British troops.

And of course, one could readily use the same argument to associate American, French, British, and in fact most Western prison systems to Abu Gharib --- simply because incidents of torturing people to death, the malicious gunning down of innocents, and the rape of girls has happened in all of them. Yet the reason we don't consider such cases equivalent is because they were isolated incidents as opposed to being a deliberately-installed regime.

Once removed from that reality, it is of course easy to equivocate between Saddam's Abu Gharib and any prison system on the planet, or any military occupation, or any war.

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And we do know that the civilian toll was outrageous.

Actually, an historical low for a military operation of this size. And according to all reports, including even the Lancet, the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths are due to deliberate insurgent attacks on civilians.

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The study was peer-reviewed--that would be the introduction, methods, results and discussion.

And was stated as being qualified on grounds of its methodology. Introduction and discussion, after all, are simply statements and opinions, not facts of themselves, and the results are what were obtained via the methods. The only objective item to peer-review was the methodology.

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No problem there, except the extrapolation wasn't that simple. The method was in keeping with epidemiological norms. Also, it bears mentioning that there were actually two studies. The second study was larger (almost 2000 households) and corroborated the results of the first.

And you miss the point that the first 1,000 households came up with 1% of the number for all death certificates issued to that date. Regardless of whether or not another 1,000 household "corroborated" the first number set, you are left with the fact that the interviewees came up with a vastly disproportionate number of death certificates.

Given that the Lancet Report's death numbers were based on these death certificates, they are unsupportable.

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Another defining aspect of the Lancet studies were that the authors were not interested parties (e.g. a government involved in the conflict, or an anti-war group).

Er, Lancet Report author Les Roberts admitted that that he was anti-war and also interested in making Iraqi civilian deaths a 2004 political issue:

"I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election. My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq. I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea..."

Roberts also admitted that he had a habit of rushing reports out because of the gravity involved in people dying: "I have done over 20 mortality surveys in recent years and have never taken more than a week to produce and release a report (because people dying is important) until this article. Thus, this was the least rushed mortality result I have ever produced."

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Human rights watch estimates that Saddam killed about a quarter of a million Iraqis through 25 years of Ba'ath rule.

Ah, but that's only counting actual murder (gassing, executions, etc) by which lights the US-related death toll goes to less than twenty confirmable cases. Don't you recall the sanctions-era 500,000 Iraqi dead from failing sewers, electrical grids, and hospitals? It wasn't that there was no money or resources to support these things --- it's that Saddam put it into rebuilding his military, not to mention the gold-plated toilet seats in his literally hundreds of new Presidential Palaces. When we invaded, our troops ended up stumbling over crates stuffed with hundreds of millions of dollars that the regime had set aside for itself.

And the whole while, Saddam declared to the world that Iraqis were dying because of the sanctions.

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Of course you have to throw in the Iran-Iraq War too (about a million)

Not at all; that's a war, and we're talking about Iraqi civilian deaths Saddam was responsible for...not the ones Iranians may have killed in the progress of combat.

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Let me quote from their website:

If that were in disagreement with what I'd said, you might have a point there...

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They describe their efforts as a "conservative, cautious minimum."

Being as that it is based on confirmable facts, it would have to be.

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It also bears mentioning that the Lancet survey measured excess deaths (which would include deaths due to deprivation of food, water, medicine, power, etc. due to war), whereas Iraq Body Count considers only violent deaths (printed in at least two newspapers).

The Lancet Report also stated that, of the deaths reported by the interviewees, two-thirds were from deliberate insurgent attacks on civilians. Even if you wholly eliminated Coalition-caused deaths, adding in the same ratio of deprivation figures would not radically change the IBC numbers.

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It's not bad--it's just not up to the rigor of studies that actually used academically accepted epidemiological approaches combined with field staff on the ground in Iraq and then published in a respected peer-reviewed journal.

By which you specifically mean interviewing a couple thousand households, tallying up their total death certificates, and extrapolating that death figure to in excess of 600,000 --- despite the total number of death certificates issued by that time being approximately 55,000.

Of course, if peer-reviewed articles appearing in science journals were never wrong, you might have a point here, but as it happens they do tend to end up being erroneous from time to time.

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Thanks for that. I didn't know that RPGs were found among the dead.

No, and I didn't say there were. It seems you scanned over what I wrote without comprehending. What was seen in the videos were clear-cut AK-47s in the hands of several of the "civilians" the photographers were with.

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However, listening to the tape, the disregard for the lives of the civilians is evident and could be indicative of the general attitude of the soldiers

There was precisely one soldier making any comments about the locals. Had you bothered to read what I wrote, you'd notice I excoriate him for precisely this. None of the other voices on the radio, not even in the extended version, make any such quips.

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(E.g., upon shooting the young children who were in the van trying to rescue the camera man they say that it "serves them right"

I note that you missed the initial statements of shock from the gunner when he does notice there are children in the car --- AFTER the shooting. And then AFTER the statements of shock, the same idiot who'd been making the comments about the locals popped off with "serves them right bringing kids to a battlefield".

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or the way the pilots want to continue to shoot the cameraman as he lay, barely crawling on the sidewalk, the way they giggle like kids playing a video game).

You must have heard and watched a completely different video. Not only did I not hear any giggling, and not only do they not apparently believe they just shot up a cameraman, but you still haven't pointed me to this "laughing" you said was going on.

Am I to understand your previous presentation of a rollicking good time by all troops involved has now been reduced to someone purportedly "giggling"?

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America's (and Britain's) failure was the invasion and occupation of Iraq was based on false pretenses, likely killed hundreds of thousands, and where, evidence shows, the use of torture, executions and arbitrary detention was commonplace.

Simply wrong on all counts.

1) Iraq, even according to Hans Blix in his January 2003 pre-invasion report, had not accounted for over 1000 metric tonnes of chemical weapons, tens of thousands of chemical-delivery warheads, and 650kg of anthrax growth agent.

1a) People forget that Clinton's "Operation Desert Fox" bombed over 70 Iraqi sites believed to be manufacturing or storing WMDs. Since Hussein insisted that he had none (both before and after), and because there was no ability for an on-the-ground confirmation since Iraq had ejected the UN inspectors (the reason for the bombing), it is entirely possible that "Desert Fox" actually hit its targets. This would have put Hussein in the impossible position of not being able to produce the remaining WMDs, but also not wanting to admit he ever had them, and thus he ended up trying to bluff his way through.

1b) Even before the invasion, Iraq was caught violating the WMD provisions of UN Resolution 687 by putting "decommissioned" missile-production equipment back into service, as well as by building missiles outlawed under the same WMD provisions.

1c) No intelligence service in the world, pre-invasion, was willing to suggest Iraq had no WMDs.

2) The numbers don't support "hundreds of thousands", unless possibly by including combatants.

3) No evidence supports the notion that torture or executions were any more commonplace than in Western prison systems.

[Zipperfish]

Calbeck wrote:

1) Because faked electroshock, sexual harassment, and nudie piles are in fact well-known examples of frat hazing. And these are, in fact, amongst the worst known examples of US behavior at Abu Gharib.

A pledge can walk any time he feels like it. Also, a frat pledge doesn't fear for his life.

We don't really know what happened at Abu Ghraib, since the US government has decided to cover it up. There is evidence that it got a lot worse than what you describe.

Salon: Other Government Agencies, is an investigative report on an Iraqi man tortured to death at Abu Ghraib.

The New Yorker: The General's Report, in which Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba staes in his official report that "Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse." The general was asked point-blank by Wolfowitz if the events at Abu Ghraib was abuse or torture. The general responded: "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That’s not abuse. That's torture.'" Also "Taguba said that he saw 'a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.'"

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Hardly. It seems like you're simply pre-disposed to imagine that I aim for minimization in favor of the troops. One of the first things an American soldier learns in boot camp is how fast "being a boy" will land him in trouble.

I'm just referencing your comparison of the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to frat hazing. That comparison is not a reasonable one. It's like calling rape "assault with a friendly weapon." To me, it speaks to your need to minimize the level of responsibility for those involved.

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Then you either have no idea what went on in Iraq under Saddam, or you are pushing it out of your head in order to insist on the equivocation.

I'm just doing body counts. What is so great about life in Iraq now compared to life in Iraq under Saddam? Are people richer? More safe? More free?

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Actually, an historical low for a military operation of this size. And according to all reports, including even the Lancet, the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths are due to deliberate insurgent attacks on civilians.

I haven't seen any evidence to show that the cost to civilians in this war was "a historical low." The deaths may have been mostly due to insurgent attacks. However, the US must bear a good portion of the responsibility for that as they occupied and ran the country, and failed to protect civilians.

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And was stated as being qualified on grounds of its methodology. Introduction and discussion, after all, are simply statements and opinions, not facts of themselves, and the results are what were obtained via the methods. The only objective item to peer-review was the methodology.

If the methodology was peer-reviewed and the data were correct, then the conclusions can be deemed reliable, within the bounds of uncertainty for the statistical approach used. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

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And you miss the point that the first 1,000 households came up with 1% of the number for all death certificates issued to that date. Regardless of whether or not another 1,000 household "corroborated" the first number set, you are left with the fact that the interviewees came up with a vastly disproportionate number of death certificates.

Given that the Lancet Report's death numbers were based on these death certificates, they are unsupportable.

And when I see a peer-reviewed report to that effect, I'll give it due weight. As it stands, the Lancet report is corroborated by similar studies. Actually, the Lancet numbers struck me as a little high too. The Iraq Family Health Survey another peer-reviewed study) estimated 151,000 violent deaths (although you'd have to add three more years owrth of data to that). The Opinion Reserach Bureau came up with around a million, though their study was not peer-reviewed. Associated Press and Iraq Body Count both figure around 100,000, but neither of those was peer-reviewed.

Whether it's 100,000 or a million dead, the US and UK are doing a poor job of protecting civilians in that country.

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Er, Lancet Report author Les Roberts admitted that that he was anti-war and also interested in making Iraqi civilian deaths a 2004 political issue:

"I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election. My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq. I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea..."

Roberts also admitted that he had a habit of rushing reports out because of the gravity involved in people dying: "I have done over 20 mortality surveys in recent years and have never taken more than a week to produce and release a report (because people dying is important) until this article. Thus, this was the least rushed mortality result I have ever produced."

Roberts said the release of the report before an election was not politically motivated. As evidence, he cites the fact that Kerry and Bush had more or less the same outlook on Iraq at the time, so he didn't see the report as influencing the election one way or the other. Roberts has a long history of conducting casualty estimates. The criticism of his work, conversely, was definitely politically motivated--scorn was heaped on the study by senior government officials and elected officials with no experience in epidemiology.

However, I grant that his stating his opinion on the war seems a little prejudicial.

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Ah, but that's only counting actual murder (gassing, executions, etc) by which lights the US-related death toll goes to less than twenty confirmable cases. Don't you recall the sanctions-era 500,000 Iraqi dead from failing sewers, electrical grids, and hospitals? It wasn't that there was no money or resources to support these things --- it's that Saddam put it into rebuilding his military, not to mention the gold-plated toilet seats in his literally hundreds of new Presidential Palaces. When we invaded, our troops ended up stumbling over crates stuffed with hundreds of millions of dollars that the regime had set aside for itself.

And the whole while, Saddam declared to the world that Iraqis were dying because of the sanctions.

Add a few more hundred thousand then. I'm not defending Saddam. The guy was brutal dictator. However, as far as body count goes, Bush and Blair haven't fared much better. Whether through malice or incompetence, they did little for Iraqis. Iraqis had to deal with various Shia/Sunni death squads romaing their streets, instead of Saddam's death squads.

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By which you specifically mean interviewing a couple thousand households, tallying up their total death certificates, and extrapolating that death figure to in excess of 600,000 --- despite the total number of death certificates issued by that time being approximately 55,000.

Exactly. It's a peer reviewed report. It's methodology was subsequently approved by John Hopkins (from whence the reseacrhers came). The fact that you don't agree with it is noted, but it remains authorative.

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Of course, if peer-reviewed articles appearing in science journals were never wrong, you might have a point here, but as it happens they do tend to end up being erroneous from time to time.

Again, several other studies come up with numbers in the same order of magnitude, which is probably the best estimate you could hope for given the vagaries of doing these studies in a war zone.

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Am I to understand your previous presentation of a rollicking good time by all troops involved has now been reduced to someone purportedly "giggling"?

I would say the emotional involvement by the average Amercian soldier in that tape is akin to a kid playing a war video game. Which, in a way, they are.

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Simply wrong on all counts.

1) Iraq, even according to Hans Blix in his January 2003 pre-invasion report, had not accounted for over 1000 metric tonnes of chemical weapons, tens of thousands of chemical-delivery warheads, and 650kg of anthrax growth agent.

1a) People forget that Clinton's "Operation Desert Fox" bombed over 70 Iraqi sites believed to be manufacturing or storing WMDs. Since Hussein insisted that he had none (both before and after), and because there was no ability for an on-the-ground confirmation since Iraq had ejected the UN inspectors (the reason for the bombing), it is entirely possible that "Desert Fox" actually hit its targets. This would have put Hussein in the impossible position of not being able to produce the remaining WMDs, but also not wanting to admit he ever had them, and thus he ended up trying to bluff his way through.

1b) Even before the invasion, Iraq was caught violating the WMD provisions of UN Resolution 687 by putting "decommissioned" missile-production equipment back into service, as well as by building missiles outlawed under the same WMD provisions.

1c) No intelligence service in the world, pre-invasion, was willing to suggest Iraq had no WMDs.

2) The numbers don't support "hundreds of thousands", unless possibly by including combatants.

3) No evidence supports the notion that torture or executions were any more commonplace than in Western prison systems.

Nice try. You are taking Mr. Blix way out of context, and if you read any of his statements at the time and following the invasion, Blix says that the UK and the US dramatized the threat of WMD. This has been borne out time and time again. Your simply engaging in ham-fisted revisionism here. The evidence indicates that the invasion was premised on bad faith, that the war was poorly executed resulting much higher than necessary civilian casualties, and that abuse and torture were common and authorized at high levels. I could get into a point-by-point refute, but frankly, your aversion to facts (the Lancet study, Abu Ghriab documentation, inter alia) demonstrates that, in your case, ideology and your need to believe in the Goodness of America, trumps reality.

[BartSimpson]

Zipperfish wrote:

With Climategate, the left focussed on the criminal element and the right focussed on the damage done by the content.

Just to remind you, with Climategate what happened was emails that were already supposed to be public according to a British court order were made public by an employee in advance of a management effort to destroy those emails and to defy the court. Releasing information to the public that a court has already determined was public information is not a crime.

Just clarifying that.

[Zipperfish]

BartSimpson wrote:

Zipperfish wrote:

With Climategate, the left focussed on the criminal element and the right focussed on the damage done by the content.

Just to remind you, with Climategate what happened was emails that were already supposed to be public according to a British court order were made public by an employee in advance of a management effort to destroy those emails and to defy the court. Releasing information to the public that a court has already determined was public information is not a crime.

Just clarifying that.

Thank you for clarifying--and yet again, my point is proven. The political left likes to highlight the illegal nature of the theft, while the right likes to dismiss that and focus on content.

Like the left, for the latest wikileaks stuff, wants to focus on the content, while the right wants highlight the illegal origian of the material.

I didn't think I was really making a controversial claim--just a general principle of how we defend our positions.

[BartSimpson]

Agreed. Both sides tend to see what they want to see.

In the Wikileaks issue I'm frankly happy that the info on the general situation is now public. I frankly think it will help that the public has an accurate perception of what they're paying for.

[Calbeck]

Zipperfish wrote:

A pledge can walk any time he feels like it.

So it's suddenly not inhumane because a person can leave after it occurs?

You seem to be locked in on the idea that if it's "like hazing, it's okay". It is NOT. And by insisting on a separate standard of judgment, you minimize the cruelty of college punks in order to maximize the cruelty of military punks.

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We don't really know what happened at Abu Ghraib

We know plenty of what happened, and it was bad enough to warrant justice which was never served. Replacing what you actually know with what you prefer to imagine simply shows your predisposition. This was also common to right-wingers who insisted that Bill Clinton "covered up what really happened at" (insert favorite plot here).

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Quotes from Salon and The New Yorker

Having read these articles in whole, they support precisely what I've been saying. Would you like me to trot out articles on abuses, tortures, and even murders committed in US/British/French prisons? I assure you the forum can easily be flooded with them.

Yet, I keep insisting that this was utterly unacceptable behavior, and yet, you keep insisting that I am accepting it --- because I don't take your position that things under the Coalition were no different than they were under Saddam.

Your position is reliant on exaggeration; hence, I reject it as a centrist.

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Then you either have no idea what went on in Iraq under Saddam, or you are pushing it out of your head in order to insist on the equivocation.

I'm just doing body counts.

And hence, the equivocation on your part, and your reliance on puffing up the death count numbers in order to "equate" to Saddam. You are doing exactly what you are accusing me of doing: spin-doctoring to suit a preferred stance.

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What is so great about life in Iraq now compared to life in Iraq under Saddam? Are people richer? More safe? More free?

Had you paid attention to how things went under Saddam, you would realize the answer to all three. Of course, the answer in large part relies on: What Ethnicity are You?

Kurd? Then YES, YES, YES. Shia? YES, MAYBE, YES. Sunni? NO, NO, NO.

And why is that? Because Hussein's Iraq was divided by ethnicity and tribal lines, placing almost the entirety of power --- social, economic, and military --- squarely in Sunni hands. Shia were second-class citizens, roughly on par with US blacks circa 1920. And Kurds were third-class, the rough equivalent of Jews living in Germany circa 1930.

The invasion upset this power structure by eliminating Sunni monopoly on power. The Sunni response should have been predictable: about the same as American whites circa 1920 being ordered at the barrel of a gun to treat black people as complete equals. Race riots, lynchings, and sectarian violence were unavoidable responses.

So Sunnis have fewer liberties than they had before, because they cannot abuse Shia and Kurds under color of law. They don't have a lock on the national wealth and are thus poorer for it. And because they have been the wellspring of the insurgency, they are certainly not safer --- nor is anyone they target. Conversely, the Shia and Kurds have improved their lot, but the Shia of course have been targeted by the Sunnis in the process, while the Kurds are too far away from the center of the insurgency to have been primary targets.

Hence, the turning point in Iraq has come with the Sunni-led "Awakening Councils" deciding that they would rather get along than continue trying to upset the entire apple cart.

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I haven't seen any evidence to show that the cost to civilians in this war was "a historical low."

Then you haven't studied casualty reports from any previous wars of similar or greater scale. Vietnam, for example, killed between 850,000 and 2,000,000 depending on whose figures you pick. There, too, the US was engaged against an enemy which relied in large part on dressing as civilians in order to escape counterattacks, though the Viet Cong were nowhere near as genocidal against their own countrymen as the Iraqi insurgents have been.

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The deaths may have been mostly due to insurgent attacks. However, the US must bear a good portion of the responsibility for that as they occupied and ran the country, and failed to protect civilians.

So by the same logic, police are responsible for murders they fail to prevent?

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If the methodology was peer-reviewed and the data were correct, then the conclusions can be deemed reliable

And you keep evading the point: it is not a representative sample for 1,000 Iraqi households to possess 1% of all issued invasion-era death certificates. It is simply a classic case of stumbling onto a statistical anomaly.

As the data was flawed, so therefore were the conclusions taken from it.

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As it stands, the Lancet report is corroborated by similar studies.

Actually, there are no studies which come close, including those you cite, with the sole exception of the ORB report. And yet, for its part, the ORB figures are wholly based on approximately 1,900 Iraqis saying how many members of their household had died as a result of the conflict. 72% said none had.

http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_detai ... NewsId=120

As it was a simple poll, none of the answers were corroborated, even from those who said they had lost family members, nor were any checks made to see if various persons polled were from the same family and, hence, counting the same death multiple times. And again, the ORB numbers rely on nothing more than simple extrapolation of these results, applying them to every household in Iraq.

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Roberts said the release of the report before an election was not politically motivated.

To repeat: "I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election. My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq. I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea..."

That's a political motivation. That he was not particularly in favor of either candidate doesn't change a thing; plenty of political organizations have a given issue that they flog to all parties and candidates.

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Add a few more hundred thousand then. I'm not defending Saddam. The guy was brutal dictator. However, as far as body count goes, Bush and Blair haven't fared much better.

Yes, in fact, they have. You are reliant upon faulty numbers which you can only defend as "peer-reviewed" to deny that they are wholly out of whack with confirmable estimates. The reality is that the real numbers are somewhere between the IBC and Lancet estimates, and in fact may never be solidly determined --- no other war has managed that feat for civilian death estimates, either.

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By which you specifically mean interviewing a couple thousand households, tallying up their total death certificates, and extrapolating that death figure to in excess of 600,000 --- despite the total number of death certificates issued by that time being approximately 55,000.

Exactly. It's a peer reviewed report.

All righty then.

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Again, several other studies come up with numbers in the same order of magnitude

Actually, you produced only one: the ORB report. The other studies you mentioned are closer to the IBC.

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I would say the emotional involvement by the average Amercian soldier in that tape is akin to a kid playing a war video game.

By "average", I take it that you mean "one". Since we are, after all, talking about a single soldier using any such language or attitude.

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Nice try. You are taking Mr. Blix way out of context

I am in fact citing his January and March 2003 reports to the United Nations Security Council. As example (bolding mine):

March 2003: http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/documen ... h%2003.pdf

"...[Iraqi Air Force documents indicate] that 6,526 fewer aerial CW bombs had been “consumed” during the Iraq Iran War. This would mean that approximately 1000 tonnes of agent (predominantly Mustard, but also Sarin and Tabun) had not consumed as previously thought...The Sulphur Mustard contained in artillery shells that had been stored for over 12 years, had been found by UNMOVIC to be still of high purity. It is possible that viable Mustard filled artillery shells and aerial bombs still remain in Iraq."

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Your simply engaging in ham-fisted revisionism here.

Actually, I'm engaging original source material. Whether or not Blix publically, or after the fact, engaged in his own revisionism doesn't change a thing.