Johnny Bravo wrote:
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 18:16:38 GMT, Ricardo wrote:

The Iraqis ARE standing up and fighting for themselves but the trouble
is, like when the Germans invaded France in WW2 (although at least the
French had declared war on Germany), the occupying power with its
indiscriminate killing of civilians then brands anyone who reacts to
this as a 'terrorist'.

So how many civilians have we rounded up according to policy and shot in
reprisal?

If you answered none, you'd be correct.

That has yet to be determined. At present the accusation stands
around 27, with three of those deaths being prosecuted and the
other 24 still under invstigation.

Plus there were the two prioners beaten to death in Bagram
prison in Afghanistan. Men convicted for contributing to those
murders have been fined, reduced in rank and returned to duty.
This stands in stark contrast to the vigorous prosecutions of
persons involved in lesser crimes at Abu Ghraib which shows
that the sentence a man recieves is more influenced by the
publicity surrounding the crime than by its severity.

We're a whole lot better than Nazis, but less than perfect and
if we forget that, we'll become a whole lot more like the
Nazis.

In October 2004 the best scientific data in the world on civilian casualties
in Iraq was analysed and they came up with a guess; they were 95% sure it was
somewhere between 6,000 and 194,000 and they didn't, or couldn't, even try to
narrow it down further.

Since you are not familiar with statistics, let me explain
a bit here, though an actuary or an epidemiologist coudl
explain better.

The Lancet study used the methods of epidemiology, the
statistical study of illness and death to test the hypothesis
that mortality in Iraq had imporved after the invasion.

The study addressed overall mortality without regard to cause of
death. It was not an estimate of deaths from direct US action.

Some of the data were gathered by interviews with persons to
determine date of death of immediate family members. This
may lead to overstimates due to exagerration, a tendency for
people to remember such events as being more recent
than the really are, and multiple counting of deaths of persons
with close ties to two or more families.

OTOH, it was considered to be too dangerous to conduct interviews
in some areas, those were assumed to have the same mortality
rates and the safer surrounding areas. That tends to underestimate
mortality.

The numbers 6,000 to 194,000 were not estimated total deaths.
They were an estimate of deaths in excess of the number of deaths
in a similar period before the invasion. Thus the conclusion, was
that the hypothesis was false, with better than 95% confidence.

I do not remember the median value exactly, it was around 100,000.
That implies a 50% confidence that the excess deaths were less
than 100,000 and simultaneously 50% confidence that they were
greater.

It is important to keep in mind that it is not possible for statistics
to answer a question. Statistics can only tell us the probablity
that a given answer is correct.

A lot of people don't like that, but that's just tough ****.

--

FF