“MoD has acknowledged the "deci-Holocaust" in Iraq (10% of the Holocaust).” Which is a very libellous comment to make on the assumption that 600 000 are directly involves UK/US forces, firstly the report that you mention does not distinguish the direct cause of each death is a direct as a result of terrorism, military or criminal activity . Secondly there seems a strong element of doubt in the validity of the report but not dismissed out of hand.

Also the very idea to compare the Holocaust to the death total in your report can only be describe as being “Tabloidly and extreme distasteful”.

Next you will be declaring that Iraqi is within 45 minutes of attacking another country with WMD! Don't sue me, sue Tony Blair...

The 650,000 figure quoted was a median figure at the time, and called conservative by the reports authors. Which means it could have been a million at the time, which was the higher end figure produced. And whatever the figure was back when the survey was done, months before it was released in October, it will be obviously higher now. So where you read 655,000 bear in mind it could be double that now.

I don't mean to distract from the significance and tragedy of the deaths, but the fact the establishment can finally admit this now draws attention to the campaign of ridicule and dismissiveness and aggression that greeted the report. And it wasn't just political minions, jaded newspaper hacks and war-mongering 'academics' who rubbished the report and attacked the authors, it was George Bush and Tony Blair.

Apart from the Lancet itself that was brave enough to publish the facts, individual Indymedia posters gave it credit and ZMag recorded it. I think in this case though MediaLens in particular deserves special credit for keeping the issue alive, as they kept the issue in the in-trays of every crappy, cowardly excuse for an editor in the country.

Not one of these people would have died if Tony Blair had refused to pay his 'blood debt' to George Bush which gave the neo-cons the political cover they needed. Tony Blair is Britains biggest serial killer by a factor of more than 100,000. And yet he will live unrepentant in luxury for the rest of his life.

British government scientists endorsed the validity of a study released last October that estimated 655,000 Iraqis have been killed as the result of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, the BBC reported March 26.

Despite the advice of its own scientists, however, the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, along with US President Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard, brushed aside the study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and published in the British medical journal the Lancet, calling its methodology “flawed” and its results “suspect.” The media in both the US and Britain buried the report.

According to documents obtained by the BBC World Service’s “Newshour” program under a freedom of information request, senior officials and scientists had advised the Blair government against publicly criticizing the findings, saying that the methodology was “a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.”

The BBC report confirms the validity of the Johns Hopkins study and underscores the monumental scale of US and British war crimes in Iraq. It also highlights the dishonesty and complicity of the media in these crimes.

The Johns Hopkins study, published October 11, 2006, compared mortality rates before and after the US-led invasion by conducting thousands of interviews in Iraq. The survey was an enormous undertaking, with a sample size of over 12,800 individuals in 1,849 households in 47 randomly chosen areas throughout the country. With 95 percent statistical certainty, researchers concluded that the number of war dead was between 392,979 and 942,636, with the highest statistical likelihood around 655,000.

In 92 percent of the interviews, respondents furnished death certificates for the researchers. They concluded that, in three years, 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population had been killed in the war—an average of more than 500 a day. Most of the deaths were from gunfire. If the rate of Iraqi deaths were extrapolated to the US population, the toll of American fatalities would be 7.5 million—nearly equal to the population of New York City.

At a press conference the same day the study was published, President Bush told reporters, “I don’t consider it a credible report . . . Neither does General Casey, neither do Iraqi officials.” The Iraqi Health Ministry’s mortality estimate is one-tenth the Johns Hopkins estimate. Without providing an explanation, alternative estimate, or even demonstrating that he had read the study, Bush described the methodology as “pretty well discredited.”

Australian Prime Minister Howard declared, “I don’t believe that Johns Hopkins research. I don’t. It’s not plausible. It’s not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey.”

Likewise, a spokesman for Tony Blair told the press, “The problem is they’re using an extrapolation technique from a relatively small sample from an area of Iraq which isn’t representative of the country as a whole. We have questioned that technique right from the beginning and we continue to do so.”

The British government issued a statement following Monday’s BBC report in which it reiterated the same “uncertainty:” “The methodology has been used in other conflict situations, notably the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the Lancet figures are much higher than statistics from other sources, which only goes to show how estimates can vary enormously according to the method of collection.”

Among the documents obtained by the BBC was a memo by the chief scientific adviser at the British Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, written just two days after the Johns Hopkins study was published. The memo said, “The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to ‘best practice’ in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq.”

Responding to Anderson’s memo, a British government official wrote, “Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies.”

Another official responded to Anderson’s statement: “We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate.” Yet in the same email, the official stated, “However, the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.”

Clearly, the reason the Blair government did not accept the estimates had nothing to do with the science, and everything to do with the political and legal implications of a death toll on the scale of genocide for which the US-led coalition is responsible.

There has been virtually no US media coverage of the BBC’s damning report. A day after the story broke in Britain, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, the four major broadcast networks and other outlets failed to mention the report. Only the Washington Times online picked up the story, reposting a United Press International brief of less than two hundred words.

The mainstream press has played an integral role in suppressing politically damaging information from the build-up to the Iraq invasion up to the present. With its latest blackout, the US media yet again affirms its complicity in the mass killing and social devastation carried out by American imperialism in Iraq.

Last October, when the Johns Hopkins study was released, the New York Times and Washington Post buried the story in their back pages and made no editorial comment. When confronted by reporters for the World Socialist Web Site about his newspaper’s handling of the subject during a talk on security and press freedom at the University of Michigan in October, New York Times editor Bill Keller shrugged off the suppression of the story, saying, “We didn’t splash it on the front page.”

On October 18, 2006, the Wall Street Journal ran the despicably entitled opinion piece, “655,000 War Dead? A Bogus Study on Iraq Casualties.” It was written by Steven Moore, who had worked under Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Declaring that “the Johns Hopkins tally is wildly at odds with any numbers I have seen in that country,” Moore suggested that the study was ideologically biased.

As the blackout on Monday’s BBC report makes clear, the media continues to keep people in the dark about the scale of the carnage in Iraq and shield those who are responsible.

An extraordinary story appeared once this morning on BBC News 24, and then was buried.

The BBC World Service has obtained a document. It is an official appraisal by British government scientists across government departments, commissioned by 10 Downing Street, of the study published by the Lancet that estimated 655,000 dead in Iraq. The appraisal says that the methodology is correct and that the study "follows best practice".

Astonishingly, the official DFID verdict was that 655,000 dead is "If anything, an underestimate".

Yet the Government poured scorn on the Lancet study, despite having commissioned a report from their own scientists that said it was good. Who can doubt that if the government scientists had rubbished the study, the number ten spin machine would have publicised that like crazy?

Doubtless the Official Secrets Act will be wheeled out to try and sit on the government scientists' report, which the BBC already seems to have reburied, showing its typical craven attitude towards the Blair government.

Personally, I did not know how much credence to give the study published in the Lancet, not being technically equipped to evaluate it. We can now be confident that the death toll in Iraq was over 600,000 a year ago, and probably over 700,000 now.

There is much talk of Blair's legacy. In fact he has two major legacies. 700,000 rotting corpses, and the culture of lies that sought to suppress the truth about it.

all those that Allbright & Co. killed under the Oil for Food programme.

Note also that these figures only account for immediate fatalities and do not extrapolate lives lost "indirectly" due to the effects of war (e.g. disease, infant motality, murder, suicide, accident) nor estimated population loss.

Observations on the Iraq death toll

When, last October, the Lancet published a study which concluded that the Iraq war had caused 655,000 more deaths than would have been expected if the conflict had not happened, the Prime Minister's official spokesman dismissed its findings as nowhere near accurate. He said the survey had used an extrapolation technique, using a small sample from an area of Iraq that was not representative of the country.

Now, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that British government experts backed the methodology used by the scientists responsible for the study. If the Lancet estimate is correct, it means 2.5 per cent of the Iraqi population - an average of more than 500 people a day - have been killed since the invasion. Of these, 601,000 died in violent acts - the majority involving gunfire.

Asked by officials to comment on the survey, the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, concluded: "The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to 'best practice'." He recommended "caution in publicly criticising the study".

The documents, released to the BBC World Service, show civil servants suggesting that ministers should not "rubbish" the Lancet report. In one email, an official, apparently from No 10 but whose name has been blanked out, asks: "Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies."

Another nameless official replies: "We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate", but goes on to say: "The survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones."

The documents advise ministers to use figures from the Iraqi health ministry, which estimates the number of deaths at less than 10 per cent of the Lancet's figure.

The ministry in Baghdad relies on hospitals to report the number of victims of terrorism or military action. But, critics say, the ministry did not start counting until well after the invasion and required busy hospital staff to report daily.

A statistician at the Department for International Development was also asked for an opinion of the Lancet study. The techniques used were "tried and tested", he said. If anything, the method "should lead to an underestimation of the deaths in the war and early post- invasion period".

The survey published by the Lancet was conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and compared mortality rates before and after the invasion by surveying 47 randomly chosen areas across 16 provinces. The researchers spoke to nearly 1,850 families. In nearly 92 per cent of cases, family members produced death certificates.

Asked how it was possible to accept the methodology yet reject the findings, the government said: "The methodology has been used in other conflict situations, notably the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the Lancet figures are much higher than statistics from other sources, which only goes to show how estimates can vary enormously according to the method of collection."

Owen Bennett Jones presents Newshour on BBC World Service