U.S. gov't's USAID site still telling Blair's lie about 400,000 bodies

[gristy]

in mass graves in Iraq. Go to http://www.usaid.gov/iraq/ and click on Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves and you'll read this:

"We've already discovered just so far the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair on November 20 in London. The United Nations, the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) all estimate that Saddam Hussein's regime murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. "Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been 'disappeared' by the Iraqi government over the past two decades," said the group in a statement in May. "Many of these 'disappeared' are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves all over Iraq."

But as most of us know, this 400,000 number which Blair stated a number of times is pure fiction. Here's a Guardian article that sets the record fairly straight: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1263901,00.html

PM admits graves claim 'untrue'

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday July 18, 2004
The Observer

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.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: 'The remains of 400,000 human beings already found in mass graves.'
<snip>

Downing Street's admission comes amid growing questions over precisely how many perished under Saddam's three decades of terror, and the location of the bodies of the dead

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So the question is this: Why is USAID, an organization created by John F. Kennedy in 1961, propagating thoroughly debunked lies on its Iraq web page? If you want to try to get an answer, try writing its director:

Andrew S. Natsios
Administrator
U.S. Agency for International Development
Ronald Reagan Building
Washington, D.C. 20523-1000

Finally, (and this is the important part), send a copy to the editor of your local newspaper (and be sure to indicate you are doing this with a cc: on your letter to Natsios)