The Seattle Intelligencer is reporting that an Iraqi epidemiologist who co-wrote the October 1966 article in The Lancet (thelancet.com) estimating Iraqi civilian deaths since the U.S. invasion at 655,000 been denied a visa to address academic audiences in the US.
This estimate is nearly 10 times larger than other studies, according to the paper.
As kossacks know, the Pentagon refuses to estimate civilian deaths in what they have announced as an effort to avoid the Vietnam era echoes of 'body count.'
The Brits simultaneously denied him a visa for a 4-hr stopover to Canada, where--as an alternative to the U.S. visit--he planned to broadcast his talk from Vancouver's Simon Fraser University to the audience at the Univ. of Washington, the original venue.
Now he is studying cancer rates in children in southern Iraq, and hoped to present his data to American academics.
In my opinion, a visit here would have allowed American academics an opportunity to reopen the issue of how many people have died as a result of Bush's war. For example, he could have appeared on cable or something more serious, like Charlie Rose.
Guess State didn't want this to happen. (See their silly disclaimer quotes in the SI story, web address below.) The doctor had been working for months to get a visa.
"What we were going to hear about is a public health disaster in Iraq," said Tim Takaro, an associate professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University. Takaro, who also conducts research with [the Iraqi researcher Riyadh] Lafta, called the 2006 study in The Lancet well-researched.
"The magnitude of that has been lost on the American people. Both the British and U.S. governments have discounted these [civilian casualty] figures," he said.
The purpose of denying him a visa to the US and to Canada has the effect of preventing academics from examining his new children's cancer rate evidence directly, according to the story.
If he visited Vancouver, UW researchers could have driven there to meet him.
"He collected the data, and of course we need to meet him and see the [children's cancer rate] data," Hagopian said.
The SI story is at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/...