Thursday, September 07, 2006

August Baghdad deathtoll total triples


Fabulous... now we get even worse news out of Baghdad: Last wk, the Pentagon touted the success of Operation Forward Together, a push to improve security in Baghdad. They cited a significant decrease in the number of bodies the city morgue received as evidence the operation was working, and Bush said "the initial results" of the Baghdad opertation were "encouraging." It looks like they spoke too soon. According to ABC News, the Baghdad morgue today revised its figures upward a whopping 300 percent: It turns out the official toll of violent deaths in August was just revised to 1535, up from 550, tripling the total. This means that a much publicized drop off in violence in Aug (heralded by both the Iraqi govt and the US military as a sign that a new security effort in Baghdad was working) apparently didn't exist. Violent deaths now appear roughly in line with the earlier trend: 1855 in July and 1595 in June. And keep in mind that this death toll number is only for Baghdad, and given that the number estimated for Iraqis killed in all of Iraq in July numbered nearly 3500, who knows what that total for August is? And IMHO, the pix I chose for this post is incredibly mild, given the unspeakable violence that is going on in Iraq. I personally think images like these here and here should be shown nightly by Katie Couric instead of pix of Tom Cruise's kid. Just maybe then, US taxpayers would see what kind of horrific carnage we're paying for.
Posted by Tina :: 1:05 AM :: 10 Comments:

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