Iraq civilian body count exposed

Well, sort of. It seems recently killed humanitarian worker Marla Ruzicka stumbled onto a body count of sorts:

... in an essay Ms Ruzicka wrote a week before her death on Saturday and published yesterday, the 28-year-old revealed that a Brigadier General told her it was "standard operating procedure" for US troops to file a report when they shoot a non-combatant.

She obtained figures for the number of civilians killed in Baghdad between 28 February and 5 April, and discovered that 29 had been killed in firefights involving US forces and insurgents. This was four times the number of Iraqi police killed.

Effectively this means approximately one civilian death per day in Baghdad, on average. Even if we increase that to twenty per day for the whole of Iraq, it would take over 13 years to get the 100,000 deaths reported in the much discussed Lancet study.

Obviously the Yanks aren't dealing out enough death. Pussies.


Update: I was going to send the link to this article to Tim Lambert – he who has 50 posts on the Lancet study – but I don't want to be responsible for Ruzicka's figures causing his brain to blow a gasket.