Molly Ivins - forgets to check the facts

Molly Ivins: She rants, she raves, she doesn't bother checking her facts. She hates George Bush, the republicans and hates Supreme Court justices who think it's not OK to take private property to build luxury condos.

Today, Ms.Ivins confesses that she never bothered to check the facts when she accused the USA of killing more Iraqi civillians than the mass murderer Saddam Hussein. She figured Saddam killed 20,000 people over 24 years which averages to 834 killings a year. (With such a low death count I'm not sure why she even opposed him). But alas, she confesses she never checked her figures and didn't realize Saddam killed closer to 1,000,000 people. Actually, she doesn't really say how she came to those numbers other than saying: Saddam's regime left 271 mass graves, with more still being discovered. That figure alone was the source for my original mistaken estimate of 20,000."

Ms. Ivins was so blinded by her hatred for America, Pres. Bush and the Republicans that she never saw how absurd it is to think Saddam killed only 20,000 people in 24 years. It's like Holocaust deniers who can't see the truth because they are so blinded by their hatred of Jews. That's not a fair comparison, Holocaust deniers don't have the resources that a national syndicated columnist and author of numerous books has. Maybe she outsources her fact checkers to France.

CROW EATEN HERE
This is a horror. In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong. The only problem is figuring out by how large a factor I was wrong. I had been keeping an eye on civilian deaths in Iraq for a couple of months, waiting for the most conservative estimates to creep over 20,000, which I had fixed in my mind as the number of Iraqi civilians Saddam had killed. The high-end estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths in this war is 100,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University study published in the British medical journal The Lancet last October, but I was sticking to the low-end, most conservative estimates because I didn't want to be accused of exaggeration.

Ha! I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam's killing of civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, Hussein killed several hundred thousand of his fellow citizens. The massacre of the Kurdish Barzani tribe in 1983 killed at least 8,000; the infamous gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja killed 5,000 in 1988; and seized documents from Iraqi security organizations show 182,000 were murdered during the Anfal ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurds, also in 1988. In 1991, following the first Gulf War, both the Kurds and the Shiites rebelled. The allied forces did not intervene, and Saddam brutally suppressed both uprisings and drained the southern marshes that had been home to a local population for more than 5,000 years.

Saddam's regime left 271 mass graves, with more still being discovered. That figure alone was the source for my original mistaken estimate of 20,000. Saddam's widespread use of systematic torture, including rape, has been verified by the U.N. Committee on Human Rights and other human rights groups over the years. There are wildly varying estimates of the number of civilians, especially babies and young children, who died as a result of the sanctions that followed the Gulf War. While it is true that the ill-advised sanctions were put in place by the United Nations, I do not see that that lessens Hussein's moral culpability, whatever blame attaches to the sanctions themselves -- particularly since Saddam promptly corrupted the Oil for Food Program put in place to mitigate the effects of the sanctions, and used the proceeds to build more palaces, etc.

There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong. I was certainly under no illusions regarding Saddam Hussein, whom I have opposed through human rights work for decades. My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not have checked. I am so sorry.