[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 139 (Wednesday, September 19, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H10600-H10601]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATH TOLL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, we now know that the President intends to 
keep U.S. forces in Iraq throughout the remainder of his term and that 
he intends for the U.S. to perpetually occupy Iraq via massive and 
permanent military bases he has ordered built. We have just learned of 
the staggering loss of life as a result of this war.
  According to a new and incredible study, the number of civilians 
killed in Iraq since the war began now exceeds 1 million Iraqi people. 
The Iraqi civilian death toll exceeds the death toll from the genocide 
in Rwanda. For years, we and others said we didn't know how bad it was 
in Rwanda. With this report, that excuse is no longer valid in Iraq.
  The official death toll in Iraq, fewer than 100,000 is what the 
official number is, has long been considered fictitious by humanitarian 
and other international organizations. Now we are forced to confront 
evidence that puts the death toll above 1 million Iraqis.
  Opinion Research Business, a respected and mainstream London-based 
research company that works for major corporations and government 
clients, including the U.K.'s Conservative Party, conducted the survey 
in August. I point this out to inoculate my colleagues, the media and 
the American

[[Page H10601]]

people from the venom that will spew from this for those who want to 
keep the real cost of this war in human lives as far from public view 
as possible, because no one who knows the truth could stand and let it 
go on.
  Joshua Holland, a journalist at AlterNet, broke the news online the 
other day. I enter his story into the Record, which includes a link 
directly to the Opinion Research site where people can read the entire 
research survey online. It was conducted in 15 out of Iraq's 18 
provinces during mid August.
  In his speech last week, the President referred to Anbar Province as 
a model of success. The research company did not even visit Anbar or 
Karbala for security reasons. And they were not allowed to conduct 
their field research in Irbil.
  While the President is willing to stand up and say that he sees signs 
of success, the survey found that in Baghdad alone, almost half the 
houses say they have lost at least one member of their family. That's 
the reality in the largest Iraqi city, which has the largest 
concentration of U.S. military forces. Baghdad may have a fortified 
green zone for U.S. diplomats and Iraqi government officials, but the 
rest of the people live in a bloody red zone, where the killing has 
claimed someone from 50 percent of the households.
  The President cannot claim signs of success in Iraq when his stubborn 
determination to remain is dissolving Baghdad into a dead zone. The 
civilian carnage is not isolated in Baghdad. Other major cities also 
registered dramatic civilian murder rates that would make the world 
weep at the staggering loss of humanity occurring in Iraq.
  For a long time, I and other Members have spoken out about the number 
of U.S. soldiers killed or gravely wounded in Iraq, and we must never 
forget the sacrifices made by American soldiers and the painful losses 
suffered by American families across this country. But Congress must 
not ignore the overwhelming loss of life in Iraq. News that 1 million 
Iraqi civilians have been killed should compel us to get the U.S. 
forces out of Iraq immediately.
  I know and respect many of my Republican colleagues. Our politics may 
differ, but our principle to protect innocent people does not. How many 
more Iraqis must die? The carnage will continue as long as Republicans 
in Congress wear the blinders that the President hands out to enforce 
allegiance to his blind and bloody armed occupation in Iraq.
  For the sake of humanity, remove the blinders and speak the truth to 
power. The Iraq war is a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale that 
exceeds the genocide in Rwanda. We claimed we didn't know about Rwanda. 
We can't claim that any more about Iraq

                    [From AlterNet, Sept. 17, 2007]

    Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields

                          (By Joshua Holland)

       A new study estimates that 1.2 million Iraqis have met 
     violent deaths since Bush and Cheney chose to invade.
       According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met 
     violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate 
     of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the 
     British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face 
     interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of 
     Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces--al-Anbar and Karbala--
     were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, 
     Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. 
     The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent. Field 
     workers asked residents how many members of their own 
     household had been killed since the invasion. More than one 
     in five respondents said that at least one person in their 
     home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three 
     Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors ``actually 
     living on [their] street'' had fled the carnage, with around 
     half of those having left the country.
       In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at 
     least one violent death in their household.
       Before the study's release, the highest estimate of Iraqi 
     deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins' 
     study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-
     reviewed British medical journal. Unlike that study, which 
     measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the 
     first three years of the occupation with the mortality rate 
     that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only 
     at deaths due to violence.
       The poll's findings are in line with the rolling estimate 
     maintained on the Just Foreign Policy website, based on the 
     Johns Hopkins' data, that stands at just over 1 million 
     Iraqis killed as of this writing.
       These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of 
     Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century--the human 
     toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the 
     Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 
     million) who died in Cambodia's infamous ``Killing Fields'' 
     during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.
       While the stunning figures should play a major role in the 
     debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won't. 
     That's because there are three distinct versions of events in 
     Iraq--the bloody criminal nightmare that the ``reality-based 
     community'' has to grapple with, the picture the commercial 
     media portrays and the war that the occupation's last 
     supporters have conjured up out of thin air. Similarly, 
     American discourse has also developed three different levels 
     of Iraqi casualties. There's the approximately 1 million 
     killed according to the best epidemiological research 
     conducted by one of the world's most prestigious scientific 
     institutions, there's the 75,000-80,000 (based on news 
     reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media 
     allow, and there's the clean and antiseptic blood-free war 
     the administration claims to have fought (recall that they 
     dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no 
     numbers of their own). Here's the troubling thing, and one 
     reason why opposition to the war isn't even more intense than 
     it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier 
     this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been 
     killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the 
     median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third 
     of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors 
     in 2006 alone.
       Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American 
     exceptionalism--the United States is, by definition, the good 
     guy, and good guys don't launch wars of choice that result in 
     over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that's 
     exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates 
     intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a 
     nation, we won't.

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