PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that
'400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000
corpses have so far been uncovered.

If rest of the known mass graves would yeald as much bodies at average, then the
whole number of bodies in known mass graves would be about 25 000. Huge number
still. Of course, most likely not all mass graves are known and some bodies may
have been either deliberately destroyed, but still... Well, now the same people who
cried about the "exaggeration" of the number of victims in Jenin - even when the
too high numbers came from the Israeli military - will claim that in this case,
exaggeration was the right cause to take.

And killing 25 000 human beings is a terrible thing, but it don´t put Saddam Hussein
in the same league with Pol Pot, Idi Amin or Francisco Franco. It puts him in the
same league with the members of the military junta that ruled Argentina between
1976-85. The million Iran and Iraqi victims of the 1980-88 Persian Gulf war were
victims of an illegal and unjust war, but if Hussein would be convicted of that, then
George W. Bush and Tony Blair have to be brought to trial and convicted too. And
I would like to see this to happen to all of them.

USAID´s lack of knowledge of the history of the 20th century is appalling. With
400 000 murdered people you wouldn´t be even near the top of the list. Surprisingly
USAID has forgotten with the mass murders committed by America´s friends also
many committed by the states and regimes antagonistic to the US - and many
done by neutral regimes.