U.S. has killed more Iraqi civilians than Saddam

he Lancet, the respected British medical journal, will come out with this on Saturday. (it is not on their Web site yet).
The death toll is appalling!

This is account will be in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate.

A similar story is now on the The New York Times Web site. And The Washington Post.

Excerpts of this report will be in Wednesday's New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

The study was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health by sending teams of Iraqi doctors across Iraq from May through July.

The Defense Department until 2004 eschewed any effort to compute the number of Iraqi dead but this summer released a study putting the civilian casualty rate between May and August at 117 people a day.

Other tabulations using different methodologies put the range of total civilian fatalities so far from about 50,000 to more than 150,000. President Bush in December said "30,000, more or less" had died in Iraq during the invasion and in the violence since.
The Johns Hopkins team conducted its study using a methodology known as "cluster sampling." That involved randomly picking 47 clusters of households for a total 1,849 households, scattered across Iraq. Team members interviewed each household about any deaths in the family during the 40 months since the invasion, as well as in the year before the invasion. The team says it reviewed death certificates for 92 percent of all deaths reported. Based on those figures, it tabulated national mortality rates for various periods before and after the start of the war. The mortality rate last year was nearly four times the preinvasion rate, the study found.

"Since March 2003, an additional 2.5 percent of Iraq's population has died above what would have occurred without conflict," the report said. The country`s population is roughly 24 million people.

Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.

Via DailyKos