Sorry, doublepost.

[edit on 13-1-2008 by v01i0]

Originally posted by v01i0
Being serious, I've heard that in some cases, they don't count victims that die in hospitals later enough being lethally wounded. And somehow I have feeling that UN would be motivated to underestimate the casualties, for the sake of everyone's reputation.

I would think the UN would love to jump on higher numbers if they could. The problem, as I stated before, is where are the bodies? Where are the death certificates? Where is anything other than one flawed consensus?

With numbers as high as 2.5 million that people are spouting, people just do not think about the sheer amount of dead that would be unaccounted for. Also the vast majority of these dead are not at the hands of the US, but are caused from all the Muslim on Muslim secular fighting that has been going on. As example the US kills around 100 to 200 per month and the secular fighting accounts for over 10 times that in deaths.

For your calculations how do you figure in that out of the 4000 about 800 died to non battle accidents and most of the others were from IEDs and not direct fighting? There just isn’t any massive bombing campaigns going on to account for your 600k plus, nor are there large scale battles on the Army side. And there just isn’t any massive troop build ups to attack.

The majority of fights are from small groups attacking the military convoys. There is some from the door to door patrol, but that is usually snipers or IED traps, and lastly from surgical air strikes on a small group or one house type scenarios.

Yes, at times there is Collateral Casualties, but those are rare and when it does happen the numbers are in the single digits max for any given firefight or bombing.

Even if someone wanted to say that secular fighting has killed 100s of thousands or millions once again there needs to be physical evidence backing it up, and there just isn't any other than the 2k to 3k per month max that we have seen these past four years.


[edit on 13-1-2008 by Xtrozero]

Originally posted by Midav
So now, what does your research say about this incident that two soldiers supposedly kicked a pregnant woman?

I guess your remark is justified; I haven't yet commented the issue at hand. For that, I haven't yet reached any conclusions; while it may be possible, majority of "evidence" posted here suggest contrary. In fact, I'd like to believe that there were no kicking of pregnant woman, but keeping in mind that media is unreliable, especially in warzone - and that US troops have committed attrocities before with approval higher from command chain - I have no reason make conclusions about truthfulness of original claim of this thread.

I was in contact with someone that actually lives in Iraq, and he cannot confirm either if the story is true or false, everything in there is just as messy about this particular event.

[edit: typoes]

[edit on 13-1-2008 by v01i0]

Originally posted by Midav
Just because a small minority of people have done bad things, does not mean ever bit of news, as well as propaganda, is true.

Exactly, we actually don't know a poop of what happens there if we rely on corporate media alone. During years of my personal interest on middle-east region, I've seen all sides doing questionable media tricks where even photo-ops aren't out of question.

Also I think that in this particular case which this thread is about, media and propagandist may even have confused two different events. All kind of violence takes place in that kind of setting - I'll be meaning Iraq's situation. There may have been kicking of a pregnant woman, but not necessarily when this shooting took place; after all it's nothing new that there are some lunatics in ranks that uses violence to terrorize or satisfy their own pervert needs (note: I'm not saying that all marines are lunas).

And also we need to remember (as people have mentioned earlier in this thread) The americans are not there for nothing, but neither are insurgents. U.S is trying to invade the country and insurgents are trying to fight the invaders back. And in this kind of situation, if you want to get reliable info, I guess you'll have to go there by yourself

Originally posted by Midav
My nephew is currently in Iraq as well as several friends.

Hmm, then you are american I assume? So your nephew and friends are with military right? Or some contractors? Anyway, I'm bit surprised that they claim it to be insurgent attack in such certainty, when my contact - who is native Iraqi, lives and works there as a doctor - can't say anything for sure about what happened. Well, I'm sure that your nephew would tell you things lot more confidental than would my "acquitance" in Iraq to me.

...But, I really don't want to engage into a debate about the truthfulness of this incident; Reason for posting was that I wanted to people to realize that the talk about 'few bad apples' is misleading.

I think that future trend will be more like that these incidents where american/allied troops are engaged, will decrease, while the incidents where iraqi militants and foreign contractors(like Blackwater) will increase. This will be the "handwash": First artificial secterian violence is created(this phase has been going on for a while) - then the people shall be so confused that what once was artificial secterian violence, becomes real and will uphold itself, and after that allied forces are really seen as a saviours and peacekeepers.

Oh well, there I went again wide out of the subject

[edit on 13-1-2008 by v01i0]

Originally posted by zerbot565
enlighten me once again as to why i shouldent belive the story to be true when i once again read about a U.s soldier who´s raped an other human and now it even seams he cut her throut and burned her and tried to burie the remains....

Because you have evidence of a crime in one story, and no evidence of a crime in the other. No evidence=presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Originally posted by zerbot565
the question is how to count the the victims since apparently the lower stats dont contain ppl that have died in hospitals from wounds.

Can you show us where the lower stats don't reflect those that have died at hospitals? If a stat excludes hospitals, it's not much of usefu stat is it? This is just as ridiculous a claim, as saying the US doesn't count fatalities, if the victim made it onto a helicopter before dying. You'd still have to see a certain number of people wounded in an attack prior to them being taken to a hospital, to allow for those numbers of people dying in hospitals.
Once they died, they'd have to be buried somewhere, and now that Saddam isn't in power, I'm just not seeing hospitals loading up truckloads of corpses to be taken to mass graves, so they could hide their civilian casualties from the US and UN.

Originally posted by jerico65

Atrocties at Abu Ghraib? Nope, sorry. No atrocites there. Abuse? Yes, the prisoners were abused. That's wrong.

An atrocity is different. A good example would be the US Soldiers that were executed after capture by the Saddam Fedayeen in the beginning of the war. Most people seem to forget about that. Good ol' Al Jazeera had photos of the Soldiers with bullet holes in their heads.

Thanks for correcting me there, but isn't atrocity synonym to cruelty? I'm not native english speaker, but my english dictionary - which should be decent one - defines atrocity as cruelty. Not sure about the emphasis tho, I guess its just a word. And I wonder whether you be meaning that "death by force" is an atrocity because thats what you're saying: "An atrocity is different. A good example would be the US Soldiers that were executed". Well, as you know there were at least one case of death in Abu Ghraib.

Originally posted by jerico65

And how many Troops are in Iraq? 160,000, give or take a few? And you have that list to show about how horrible we are behaving over there?

Not sure what you mean by "guard company". A company in the US Army is about 200 or so troops, I think.

Sorry about confusing that company size. In my language word closest to company is around 30 man excluding the officers. By guard company I meant the unit which runs the facility, isn't it about a that size?

Originally posted by GT100FV
How is the bad apple analogy wrong in light of that?

Did I say wrong anywhere? No I didn't. I said it's misleading.

Originally posted by GT100FV
America is not trying to invade Iraq, and being fought back by insurgents.

You're dead right there. It has already invaded Iraq.

Originally posted by v01i0

Originally posted by GT100FV
How is the bad apple analogy wrong in light of that?

Did I say wrong anywhere? No I didn't. I said it's misleading.

Originally posted by GT100FV
America is not trying to invade Iraq, and being fought back by insurgents.

You're dead right there. It has already invaded Iraq.

A- how is the Bad Apple analogy misleading(seeing as how you admitted that it wasn't wrong)? 30 individuals out of countless hundreds of thousands=somewhere in the tenths to hundreths of a percent levels. What's misleading is trying to make every US soldier into a mindless killer who kills, rapes, and tortures Iraqis for fun.

B-Iraq has a government. The US is working with that government and the Iraqi military/police. I'm sorry, but the insurgent as freedom fighter isn't gonna fly. They are criminal thugs desperately trying to hold onto power, influence, and relevance, in a Post Saddam world, and trying to make sure that democracy is unsuccessful.

Originally posted by v01i0
The number must be something between 100,000 and 1.5 million as stated. Thats why I guessed around 400k in some of my previous posts.

Honestly checkout iraqbodycount.com. They are actually used by both the pro and con parties of the war, and they do slant against the war. It would be very hard to prove 200k much less anything higher.