Antiwar.com Blog

Get ready for a furor:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country. …

The study was conducted under the supervision of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and will be published in the British medical journal the Lancet.

According to polls, tens of millions of Americans believe that the government was behind the 9/11 attacks. But 2 more conspiracy theories were pretty well debunked recently.

(1) That the government shot down United Flight 93.

(2) That the air force was ordered to “stand down” on 9/11.

Michael Bronner, a producer of the movie United 93, asked for the NORAD 9/11/01 transcripts, & published excerpts in Vanity Fair. He actually provides sound clips — here.

It seems that NORAD was unable to track or intercept any of the planes before they crashed. At one point they believed that the White House was targeted, and, incredibly, the air force planes were unable to find the White House:

Nasypany: “Goddammit! I can’t even protect my N.C.A. [National Capital Area].”

[A] dramatic chase towards the White House continues. Two more problems emerge: the controllers can’t find the White House on their dated equipment, and they have trouble communicating with the Langley fighters.

CITINO: 15 miles. One-five … noise level please … It’s got to be low. Quit 2-6, when able say altitude of the aircraft.… Did we get a Z-track [coordinates] up for the White House?
HUCKABONE: They’re workin’ on it.
CITINO: Okay. Hey, what’s this Bravo 0-0-5 [unidentified target]?
FOX: We’re trying to get the Z-point. We’re trying to find it.
HUCKABONE: I don’t even know where the White House is.

Conspiracy theorists still have some material to work with, though. On 9/11/01 there was a NORAD hijacking exercise, which seems to have caused some confusion when the real hijackings occurred:

BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.
POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?
BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

WATSON: What?
DOOLEY: Whoa!
WATSON: What was that?
ROUNTREE: Is that real-world?
DOOLEY: Real-world hijack.
WATSON: Cool!

FOX: I’ve never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise.
NASYPANY: This is what I got. Possible news that a 737 just hit the World Trade Center. This is a real-world.

—Is this explosion part of that that we’re lookin’ at now on TV?
—Yes.
—Jesus …
—And there’s a possible second hijack also—a United Airlines …
—Two planes?…
—Get the f*ck out …
—I think this is a damn input, to be honest.

The last line — “I think this is a damn input” — is a reference to the exercise, meaning a simulations input.

Also surprising is (1) that the terrorists knew to turn off the planes’ transponders, and (2) that this succeeded in making the planes invisible to NORAD. The Vanity Fair article suggests that civilian air traffic controllers had a better understanding of what was going on than did NORAD; even talking to each-other on the phone might have cleared up the confusion, but this didn’t happen.

No conspiracy theory is necessary to make the anti-imperial argument: ethics aside, a government that can’t find the president’s house during an attack shouldn’t be abroad shaking up hornets’ nests.

(Readers might be interested in checking out the Peace section of my science blog.)

On Sept. 12, the Smith Family Foundation held a discussion on “Responding to Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: Have We Been Effective Since 9/11?” Our own Leon Hadar was there, along with David “Axis of Evil” Frum and pollster Craig Charney. To watch a video or listen to audio of the vent, click here.

Not since “Dewey Defeats Truman” adorned the front page of the Chicago Tribune has a headline-writer gotten it more wrong:

“N. Korea appears to back down on threat“ 

That Associated Press story, posted hours before the North Koreans announced a successful nuclear test, detailed newly-elevated Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s trip to China, and noted his success in getting Beijing to issue a strong joint statement condemning North Korea’s stated intention of testing a nuke.

This unusual Sino-Japanese rapprochement might have been a primary cause of the North Koreans’ decision to go ahead with the test, rather than evidence Kim Jong-il was about to back down. By way of further explanation, here’s a snippet from an article in Dong-a Ilbo detailing recent developments in the DPRK:

“North Korea’s stance is clearly revealed in Kim’s message to a meeting of heads of North Korea’s overseas diplomatic missions held in Pyongyang from July 18 to 22 that said, ‘We should solve difficult problems on our own as the whole world is our enemy.’“Kim didn’t attend the meeting but is said to have criticized China and Russia for supporting the adoption of resolution and Korea for freezing additional aid of fertilizer and food as ‘not reliable.'”

The Bush administration has long campaigned to totally isolate North Korea, and now it can be fairly said to have succeeded. The question now is: how many more such “successes” can we afford?  

 

Tuesday, October 10, 2006, at 9pm Eastern, government TV’s Frontline – after all the bogus arrests on terrorism charges across this country over the last few years – will be taking on the question of whether al-Qaeda actually has people here in America at all.

Frontline‘s splash page says they’ll be looking at that poor Hamid Hayat kid out of Lodi, California, who was entrapped by a snitch and convicted of “Un-Americanism.” If they do the story justice at all it will generate outrage in .001 percent of the U.S. population for at least an hour.

It is clear from their ad on the front page of RawStory who the real enemies of freedom are.

If the state does a comparably competent job with Americans turned over to the military under the new Destroy American Liberty Forever by Suspending Habeas Corpus Act (DALFSHCA) as they have done with those lucky enough to get trials, I guess I’ll be seein’ ya’ll at Guantanamo Bay.

Update: Watch the whole thing here.

(comment at Stress)

National Review (October 9, 2006, p. 4) is upset with Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the lead Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Not only has he said that the Iraq War he voted for was badly planned and badly fought, and that the Bush administration lied its way into it, he also uttered the unmentionable and unthinkable: “The world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq — even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.”

Well, I can think of some people that would be better off:

• Between 43,799 and 48,639 Iraqi civilians
• 20,468 wounded American soldiers
• 2,737 dead American soldiers

All figures are from the Antiwar.com Casualties in Iraq page.