© REXSmoke is seen after an NATO airstrikes hit Tripoli, Libya
In the first two parts of this report, I have estimated that
about 2.4 million people have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, while about 1.2 million have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. In the third and final part of this report, I will estimate how many people have been killed as a result of U.S. military and CIA interventions in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.
Of the countries that the U.S. has attacked and destabilized since 2001, only Iraq has been the subject of comprehensive "active" mortality studies that can reveal otherwise unreported deaths. An "active" mortality study is one that "actively" surveys households to find deaths that have not previously been reported by news reports or other published sources.
These studies are often carried out by people who work in the field of public health, like Les Roberts at Columbia University, Gilbert Burnham at Johns Hopkins and Riyadh Lafta at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, who co-authored the
2006 Lancet study of Iraq war mortality. In defending their studies in Iraq and their results, they emphasized that their Iraqi survey teams were independent of the occupation government and that that was an important factor in the objectivity of their studies and the willingness of people in Iraq to talk honestly with them.
Comprehensive mortality studies in other war-torn countries (like Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda)
have revealed total numbers of deaths that are 5 to 20 times those previously revealed by "passive" reporting based on news reports, hospital records and/or human rights investigations.
In the absence of such comprehensive studies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, I have evaluated passive reports of war deaths and tried to assess what proportion of actual deaths these passive reports are likely to have counted by the methods they have used, based on ratios of actual deaths to passively reported deaths found in other war-zones.
Comment: Russian senator Aleksey Pushkov pointed out the obvious on Twitter: But the British media are silent. D-notice, perhaps??