What is the price of a life?

Op-Ed Contributor
Sometimes in War, You Can Put a Price on Life


By JON TRACY
Published: May 16, 2007
Washington
LAST week the United States military compensated the families of 19 Afghans killed when a Marine Special Operations unit opened fire on a civilian crowd in March; the marines involved face charges for unlawful use of force. What did the Afghans receive? Just $2,000 for each fatality, while the 50 people wounded in the same shooting got nothing but an apology from a Marine colonel.
Such cases are vivid reminders of what happens when soldiers at war run amok. As with the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha in 2005 and the rape and murder of a teenager and the killing of her family in Mahmudiya, Iraq, last year, prosecuting the soldiers is only the first step toward justice. Legitimate compensation and a real show of contrition must also be offered. In fact, there is a law authorizing such payments — the Foreign Claims Act — but...

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October 06, 2004


Iraq ministry says coalition kills more civilians than insurgents do By Nancy A. Youssef
Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis — most of them civilians — as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry.

Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government....
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Published on Saturday, September 25, 2004 by Knight-Ridder
More Iraqi Civilians Killed by US Forces Than By Insurgents, Data Shows
by Nancy A. YoussefBAGHDAD, Iraq - Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder. According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.
http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/...04/0925-02.htm

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U.N. Says Iraq Seals Data on the Civilian Toll
By WARREN HOGE
Published: October 21, 2006
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 20 — The United Nations office in Baghdad says that Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, has ordered the country’s medical authorities to stop providing the organization with monthly figures on the number of civilians killed and wounded in the conflict there, according to a confidential cable.
The cable, dated Oct. 17 and sent to United Nations officials in New York and Geneva by Ashraf Qazi, the United Nations envoy to Iraq, says the prohibition may hinder the ability of his office to give accurate accounts in its bimonthly human rights reports on the levels of violence...

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Fact Sheet
Office of the White House Press Secretary
Washington, DC
April 4, 2003


Life Under Saddam Hussein: Past Repression and Atrocities by Saddam Hussein's Regime




For over 20 years, the greatest threat to Iraqis has been Saddam Hussein's regime -- he has killed, tortured, raped, and terrorized the Iraqi people and his neighbors for over two decades.
When Iraq is free, past crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against Iraqis, will be accounted for, in a post-conflict Iraqi-led process. The United States, members of the coalition, and the international community will work with the Iraqi people to build a strong and credible judicial process to address these abuses.
Under Saddam's regime many hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of his actions, the vast majority of them Muslims. According to a 2001 Amnesty International report, "victims of torture in Iraq are subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings, and electric shocks ... some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage."
Saddam has had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered. Allegations of prostitution are used to intimidate opponents of the regime and have been used by the regime to justify the barbaric beheading of women. There have been documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulting in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.
Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam's 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds. The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths. o 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.
Iraq's 13 million Shi'a Muslims, the majority of Iraq's population of approximately 22 million, face severe restrictions on their religious practice, including a ban on communal Friday prayer, and restriction on funeral processions.
According to Human Rights Watch, "senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south." Refugees International reports that
"Oppressive government policies have led to the internal displacement of 900,000 Iraqis, primarily Kurds who have fled to the north to escape Saddam Hussein's Arabization campaigns (which involve forcing Kurds to renounce their Kurdish identity or lose their property) and Marsh Arabs, who fled the government's campaign to dry up the southern marshes for agricultural use. More than 200,000 Iraqis continue to live as refugees in Iran."
In 2002, the U.S. Committee for Refugees estimated that nearly 100,000 Kurds, Assyrians, and Turkomans had previously been expelled, by the regime, from the "central-government-controlled Kirkuk and surrounding districts in the oil-rich region bordering the Kurdish controlled north."
"Over the past five years, 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition and disease, preventively, but died because of the nature of the regime under which they are living." (Prime Minister Tony Blair, March 27, 2003) Under the oil-for-food program, the international community sought to make available to the Iraqi people adequate supplies of food and medicine, but the regime blocked sufficient access for international workers to ensure proper distribution of these supplies. Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, coalition forces have discovered military warehouses filled with food supplies meant for the Iraqi people that had been diverted by Iraqi military forces.
The Iraqi regime has repeatedly refused visits by human rights monitors. From 1992 until 2002, Saddam prevented the UN Special Rapporteur from visiting Iraq. The UN Special Rapporteur's September 2001, report criticized the regime for "the sheer number of executions," the number of "extrajudicial executions on political grounds," and "the absence of a due process of the law."
Saddam Hussein's regime has carried out frequent summary executions, including:

• prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in 1984;
• 3,000 prisoners at the Mahjar prison from 1993-1998
• 2,500 prisoners were executed between 1997-1999 in a "prison cleansing campaign;
• 122 political prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib prison in February/March 2000;
• 23 political prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib prison in October 2001; and
• At least 130 Iraqi women were beheaded between June 2000 and April 2001.

http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/19675.htm

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000



By --
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 11, 2006; Page A12

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

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Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lancet published two studies on the effect of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation on Iraqi mortality, the first in 2004, the second (by many of the same authors) in 2006. The studies attempt to estimate the number of excess deaths caused by the occupation, both direct (combatants plus non-combatants) and indirect (due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poor healthcare, etc.).
The first survey[1] published on 29 October 2004, estimated the risk of death following the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq to be 50% higher than that prior to the invasion. This led to an estimate of 98,000...

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Quote: Originally Posted by Toro

Me?

I'm priceless!

Quote: Originally Posted by snfu73

War generally seems to bring out the absolute worst in people...for the most part, anyway.

Quote: Originally Posted by Zzarchov

That report is more than a little biased.

It rightly includes carbomb fatalities etc under insurgents, and air strikes under coalition.

But any "incidental" deaths related to there being a war in general are all on the coalition side. It takes two sides to wage a war.

Statistics don't lie, but you can sure lie about what those statistics are.


And in the west the price of life was about $750 last I checked, as in thats what it cost to have someone killed on average (USA and USD). In Afghanistan life is free, just say you saw the person in a homosexual relationship, bam, two people killed for free.

Lessons of Iraq war underscore importance of UN Charter - Annan
16 September 2004 – Secretary-General Kofi Annan believes that the Iraq war in 2003 demonstrated the need for the international community to address the issue of preventive action in the context of Charter principles and showed the importance of joint efforts on matters of use of force, a United Nations spokesman said today.
Responding to media questions about the Secretary-General's comments in a BBC interview, spokesman Fred Eckhard told a press briefing in New York that in his remarks the Secretary-General had reiterated his well-known position that the military action against Iraq was not in conformity with the UN Charter.
In the interview, Mr. Annan was repeatedly asked whether the war was "illegal." "Yes," he finally said, "I have indicated it is not in conformity with the UN Charter, from our point of view, and from the Charter point of view it was illegal."
The Secretary-General said the war in Iraq and its aftermath had brought home painful lessons about the importance of resolving use-of-force issues jointly through the UN. "I think that in the end everybody is...

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Iraq says the U.N. is confusing "the major and the minor issues."
TARIQ AZIZ, Deputy Prime Minister, Iraq: UNSCOM is back to its old games, to its old tricks, games of confusing the major issues and the minor issues, since this is the wish of the American administration to perpetuate the situation, to prolong the current situation, to keep the sanctions on the people of Iraq. As long as this is the American wish, you are serving the American policy.
TOM BEARDEN: Butler promptly left Baghdad. Talking to reporters at the London airport, on his way back to New York, Butler said he was mystified by the latest developments.
AMBASSADOR RICHARD BUTLER: It's a slightly weird thing, because, as I said, we're doing quite well in missile and chemical. I mean, we were getting there. If this was a five-lap race, you know, we were halfway into the fifth lap. Why stop the race when you're getting towards the finishing line? I don't know.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middl...tler_8-6a.html

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ACTION ALERT:
Spying in Iraq: From Fact to Allegation September 24, 2002
Nothing makes a newspaper prouder than a juicy foreign-policy scoop. Except, it seems, when the scoop ends up raising awkward questions about a U.S. administration's drive for war.
Back in 1999, major papers ran front-page investigative stories revealing that the CIA had covertly used U.N. weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq for the U.S.'s own intelligence purposes. "United States officials said today that American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors," the New York Times reported (1/7/99). According to the Washington Post (3/2/99), the U.S. "infiltrated agents and espionage equipment for three years into United Nations arms control teams in Iraq to eavesdrop on the Iraqi military without the knowledge of the U.N. agency." Undercover U.S. agents "carried out an ambitious spying operation designed to penetrate Iraq's...

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