Beowulf,
You know, again you are exactly right and I was wrong. I shouldn't have gotten my source from a U.S goverment website. It was well written and that is why I chose it. Instead of posting the stories from every other media worldwide organization that is obviously biased in their stories, we'll use the story that you have just posted.
I'm looking hard at the story, even reading between the lines. Show me the line in your story that says there
are not mass graves in Iraq. I'll give you a moment to read that story so you can tell me where it says they do not exist.
Did you find it yet?
Perhaps a few excerpts to prove your point that there are no mass graves?
Has Blair Sexed Up Saddam’s Atrocities, Too?
Doesn't deny they don't exist. It says Blair Sexed the numbers up. Additionally why is there a question mark? Is this a question or is this a headline statement?
In the past ten days, Mr. Blair has said at least three times – including once on the floor of the House of Commons – that the United Nations is claiming that some 300,000 bodies lie in mass graves in Iraq, and that this alone justifies the US-UK invasion.
If you read the article, the UN did claim those numbers. Mr Blair wasn't pulling them out of his arse. The UN later said it wasn't their numbers they were using in their own speeches, but that they were using the numbers from another organization. That third party may have had inflated numbers. Sounds to me like it was Human Rights Watch that was sexing things up. Granted Blair and his crew should have done a little better job at checking the numbers, but I would think that the United Nations could be considered as a reliable source. What would your reaction be if the UN said that US soldiers were responsible for 10,000 Iraqi civilian deaths? Would you be outraged that the US was guilty of such atrocities? Would you be on this very same forum saying 'Look what the UN says...the US killed 10,000 civilians'? You wouldn't claim that as truth, but will post stories from muslim websites saying that US soldiers are gassing entire cities in Iraq.
While Red Cross officials in Geneva say they might privately accept it as a working basis for evaluating the scale of their task, they absolutely refuse to give the figure their official support. "We would not say that there are 300,000 people missing in Iraq," Antonella Notari, a spokesman, told me.
Why would the Red Cross say that the number is high? Why not say that all numbers were fabricated and in fact there were no mass graves in Iraq? If they don't exist, why didn't the red cross deny it? I guess I'm guilty of reading too much between the lines, huh?
In fact, the Human Rights Watch figures are not even their own figures. Instead, they come from other people. One of their main sources is the Kurds in Northern Iraq. They can hardly be regarded as neutral observers. For the last twenty years, the Kurds have been fighting the Iraqis for their autonomy. In the very bloody, decade-long Iran-Iraq war, they sided with Iran, a massive and very powerful country. The Kurds present Iraqi military action against their forces as "genocide", which Human Rights Watch does too.
I agree with this statment 100%. While I feel for the Kurds, it is difficult to consider them an unbiased source. It would be within reason that they could inflate things because of their treatment by Saddam. I do believe they did suffer from genocide, but they have every reason to inflate numbers.
Caution should also be exercised because of the unreliability of eye-witness accounts which have not been subject to judicial cross-examination. Human Rights Watch did not start to interview the witnesses of one of the worst alleged atrocities until between four and five years after the events. Some of the evidence is clearly unreliable. One report quotes a man saying, "They blindfolded us … and then they put us in Landcruisers with shaded windows." But how could he know the make of the car, or the colour of the windows, if he was blindfolded? The same man claims to have escaped alive from a mass grave, a story I have heard too many times in Kosovo to find easy to believe.
Shouldn't the third sentence say 'All of the evidence is clearly unreliable'. If some of it is unreliable, then some of it would have to be reliable, correct? It wasn't totally ficticious, was it? As for the blindfolded Kurd, I guess it would be impossible for them to see the landcruisers with shaded windows before being blindfolded. If you were at your house, I drove up, blindfolded you, and drove off with you, can you honestly say 100% factually that you couldn't later tell the police what I looked like or what kind of car I was driving? I will give credit to the story and assume the man knew he was going to be kidnapped so he closed his eyes so he couldn't see anything.
No one would deny that huge numbers of people have died in Iraq in the last two decades. The Iran-Iraq war claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Huge numbers were killed by the Americans in the first Gulf War, and their bodies were sometimes bulldozed into mass graves. Amnesty International reckons that Saddam executed a few hundred people a year. If true, it is an appalling level of violence – so why exaggerate it? It is, incidentally, far lower than the rate at which we have killed Iraqi civilians in the war on Saddam. The civilian death toll in the last few months is at least 6,000.
Still no denial that they mass graves exist. Ironic that they mention the civilian death toll of 6,000 (more than saddam is responsible for according to the story), but they make no mention of where that number come from. Did it come from Human Rights Watch or a similar organization who could also be wrong. Why mention other groups irresponsible actions when it comes to numbers but not provide information about where their own numbers come from.
They also quote amnesty international saying that Saddam executed only few hundred (hey, its only a few hundred so what the heck).
Iraq: Field Update
The horror of the past is beginning to surface in the form of mass graves which continue to be uncovered throughout the country. In the latest discovery in the town of al-Mahawil, near al-Hilla, Iraqis have dug up some 3,000 bodies from a site that is said to contain up to 15,000 "disappeared" people. All are believed to have been arrested and summarily executed in the aftermath of the 1991 uprising.
Hmmm...Saddam executes only a few people yet 3000 bodies are recovered after an uprising? Sounds fishy to me.
Iraq's bloody past exposed
Evidence of the fate of thousands of "disappeared" people is coming to light in post-conflict Iraq as mass graves are uncovered throughout the country.
AI is seeking assurances that the US and UK forces in Iraq are doing everything in their power to ensure that evidence such as mass graves and documentation is protected and preserved. US and UK forces should establish and publicize a mechanism to receive reports of suspected secret prisons. Where such reports appear reliable the US and UK forces should investigate them, as a matter of urgency, with a view to finding any detainees. Such investigations should be carried out in such a way as to preserve evidence and information that may be used in future investigations and prosecutions.
What assurances are they looking for? Just like WMD, these mass graves do not exist, correct?
Iraq: ‘Disappearances’ – the agony continues
In early 1988, during “Operation Anfal” in Iraqi Kurdistan, entire Kurdish families “disappeared” from hundreds of villages after they were rounded up by government forces. Amnesty International collected the names of more than 17,000 people who “disappeared” in this wave, but Kurdish sources put the total at over 100,000.
There is a lot of news from Amnesty International. If your article wants to report numbers, then they should report them accurately.
