Blair admits mass graves claim 'untrue'

[Turbostang]

One has to wonder... are ANY of the claims made against Hussein true?

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http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/...263901,00.html

PM admits graves claim 'untrue'

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday July 18, 2004
The Observer

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.'

The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports 'to the outer limits' in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror, and the location of the bodies of the dead.

The Baathist regime was responsible for massive human rights abuses and murder on a large scale - not least in well-documented campaigns including the gassing of Halabja, the al-Anfal campaign against Kurdish villages and the brutal repression of the Shia uprising - but serious questions are now emerging about the scale of Saddam Hussein's murders.

It comes amid inflation from an estimate by Human Rights Watch in May 2003 of 290,000 'missing' to the latest claims by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, that one million are missing.

At the heart of the questions are the numbers so far identified in Iraq's graves. Of 270 suspected grave sites identified in the last year, 55 have now been examined, revealing, according to the best estimates that The Observer has been able to obtain, around 5,000 bodies. Forensic examination of grave sites has been hampered by lack of security in Iraq, amid widespread complaints by human rights organisations that until recently the graves have not been secured and protected.

While some sites have contained hundreds of bodies - including a series around the town of Hilla and another near the Saudi border - others have contained no more than a dozen.

And while few have any doubts that Saddam's regime was responsible for serious crimes against humanity, the exact scale of those crimes has become increasingly politicised in both Washington and London as it has become clearer that the case against Iraq for retention of weapons of mass destruction has faded.

The USAID website, which quotes Blair's 400,000 assertion, states: 'If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.'

It is an issue that Human Rights Watch was acutely aware of when it compiled its own pre-invasion research - admitting that it had to reduce estimates for the al-Anfal campaign produced by Kurds by over a third, as they believed the numbers they had been given were inflated.

Hania Mufti, one of the researchers that produced that estimate, said: 'Our estimates were based on estimates. The eventual figure was based in part on circumstantial information gathered over the years.'

A further difficulty, according to Inforce, a group of British forensic experts in mass grave sites based at Bournemouth University who visited Iraq last year, was in the constant over-estimation of site sizes by Iraqis they met. 'Witnesses were often likely to have unrealistic ideas of the numbers of people in grave areas that they knew about,' said Jonathan Forrest.

'Local people would tell us of 10,000s of people buried at single grave sites and when we would get there they would be in multiple hundreds.'

A Downing Street spokesman said: 'While experts may disagree on the exact figures, human rights groups, governments and politicians across the world have no doubt that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and their remains are buried in sites throughout Iraq.'

[Sulla the Dictator]

Saddam Hussein never killed one innocent person.

[Von Apfelstrudel]

Originally Posted by Sulla the Dictator

Saddam Hussein never killed one innocent person.

[Mr. Anarky]

Originally Posted by Sulla the Dictator

Saddam Hussein never killed one innocent person.

[KanuckiStang]

5000 is not by any means "pretty" but it ain't nowhere near 400,000. Hell, in their zeal to politically terraform the Middle East the US and its cohorts have killed 13,000 innocent Iraqis.

I rather expect that the infamous "people shredder" will also turn out to have been a hoax, a propagandists tool along the same lines as WMDs and "mushroom cloud" imagery...

http://www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec36.html

...

[oki]

more lies.

[Mr. Anarky]

Only 5,000? Hell, we've murderd more Iraqis than that.

Saddam is beginning to look like a lightweight.

[Turbostang]

I rather expect that the infamous "people shredder" will also turn out to have been a hoax

It was... The story revealing the hoax was posted herea few months ago. I tried to do a search for the link, but the search engine comes back with a memory overload error.

[Sulla the Dictator]

Gentlemen, the story says that only 5,000 bodies have been dug up thus far, not that Saddam only killed 5,000 people. Those human rights figures are derived from estimates based on missing persons. Are you prepared to dismiss the estimates of those murdered by Pol Pot, since they come from numbers of missing persons and census data rather than an exact body count from dug up graves?

It is interesting, though not surprising, to see you leap on the number of 5,000 to paint the United States as worse than Saddam.

I must say that your responses sicken me.

[Mr. Anarky]

Gentlemen, the story says that only 5,000 bodies have been dug up thus far, not that Saddam only killed 5,000 people. Those human rights figures are derived from estimates based on missing persons.

Reading Comprehension issue? The story says that Blair LIED about the number:

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

"Thus far" you say? That's become the stock answer for the war nuts. Haven't found those stockpiles of wmds "thus far" either have we? LOL!!

I know--I bet Saddam shipped all the corpses to Syria.

[Johnson]

Who cares how many Kurds and Shiites Saddam killed? They were continually trying to overthrow the secular goveronment.

[h2g2Fan]

But seriously, can we stop digging up thousands of Iraqis and Kurds?

[Sulla the Dictator]

Originally Posted by Mr. Anarky

"Thus far" you say? That's become the stock answer for the war nuts. Haven't found those stockpiles of wmds "thus far" either have we? LOL!!

I know--I bet Saddam shipped all the corpses to Syria.

Mass murder is pretty funny to you, isn't it? You're starting to remind me of a fellow from the Phora named Wehrmacht.

[Von Apfelstrudel]

Sulla, Sorry, but you're getting ridiculous .

[Turbostang]

Mass murder is pretty funny to you, isn't it? You're starting to remind me of a fellow from the Phora named Wehrmacht.

My my, such a statement coming from someone pushing the war at that...

[Sulla the Dictator]

Originally Posted by Turbostang

My my, such a statement coming from someone pushing the war at that...

Here's a question for you or the rest of your gaggle of apologists. How many bodies were dug up at Auschwitz?

[Sulla the Dictator]

Originally Posted by Von Apfelstrudel

Sulla, Sorry, but you're getting ridiculous .

I find this constant effort to whitewash Saddam to be ridiculous. If showing my disdain and disgust for such efforts strikes you as ridiculous, thats your deal.

[Turbostang]

Here's a question for you or the rest of your gaggle of apologists.

AHEM! Who's the apologist? No WMD, no ties to Al Qaida, now you're backing a man who is now admitting that he "sexed up" Husseins atrocities? Then you have the gall to actually accuse Von Apfelstrudel of whitewashing Hussein?

Talk about shameless hypocrisy.

How many bodies were dug up at Auschwitz?

Oh I see... so you actually have PROOF of the mass graves? I'm sure Tony Blair would love to have a word with you.

[Mr. Anarky]

Originally Posted by Sulla the Dictator

Mass murder is pretty funny to you, isn't it? You're starting to remind me of a fellow from the Phora named Wehrmacht.

Oh, Sulla, stop being such a drama queen. We know what you are worried about: no huge stockpiles of wmds and now no tons of corpses leaves you with a phony war to defend.

Here's the secret Sulla: the USA government ALWAYS exaggerates the numbers of their enemy's victims. It's part of the propaganda to get the nation up for the war. After all, would the USA have gone to war over: Iraq has four or five rusty wmd shells, has met w/ AQ 3 maye 4 times max and it went nowhere and, oh, they fixed some AQ guy up in a hospital? Don't think there would have been many takers. So fudge it was the answer.

Besides, they'll find some more or documentary evidence about others. You might get 20 -40,000 bods out of it but never hundreds of thousands. That claim was just a bit of red meat to get the wolves salivating for the kill.

(If I can find it again, I post an artictle that claimed the gassing of the Kurds wasn't done by Iraq. Rather it was done by Iran and the CIA has known this ever since a few days after the attack. They went there & got the evidence. If I can find the article, I'll post it here. Fascinating read.

[Sulla the Dictator]

Oh I see... so you actually have PROOF of the mass graves?

You didn't answer my question. How many bodies were dug up from Auschwitz, Turbo? Don't you know?