Bloody New Year – Iraqi Civilian Body Count Hits 650,000: Study — Interview With Dr. Alan Northcutt, Pathologist

New Year’s Eve, in fact, was treated like any other day around the world by the powers-that-be in that war-torn country.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was hanged there in the middle of the night, despite Iraqi law stating that it would be illegal to do so on a high Islamic holy day.

The day also marked the death of the U.S. forces’ 3,000th casualty 22-year-old Specialist Dustin R- Donica of Spring, Texas. He reportedly died after assailants shot him on security duty in Karmah, Iraq. By the end of the next day, four more U.S. soldiers were added to the death toll.

In the United States, groups commemorated the U.S. military death toll with marches and rallies on New Year’s Day.

Several events took place in Texas.

In the Dallas suburb of Arlington, protestors held signs that read “Honk for Peace” and asked neighbors to sign a petition urging Congress to discontinue funding the occupation.

But the mourning didn’t stop with the American dead.

Activists also recognized the Iraqi civilian death toll recorded in a recent John Hopkins University study that was published in a prestigious medical journal called The Lancet. An estimated 650,000 Iraqis had died since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to the study.

This statistic was not lost during the 4th annual Waco Friends of Peace New Year’s Eve candlelight vigil at the Crawford Peace House on New Year’s Eve. There, Alan D. Northcutt, M.D., a board certified pathololgist in private practice in Waco, gave his thoughts about the study.

Nebeil Al-Oboudi, a U.S.-born Iraqi, said at the press conference that he accepted in the study, noting that conditions had deteriorated greatly there during his visit to Iraq in the past year. While the rich have already left the country, professionals are being targeted by militias, causing schools and hospitals to close, he said.

Prior to vigil in Crawford, the Iconoclast’s Nathan Diebenow spoke to Dr. Northcutt via telephone about the results of the John Hopkins study.

Here is that interview:

ICONOCLAST: What is your connection to the study?

DR. ALAN NORTHCUTT: My connection to it is being a physician and being a pathologist. I’m certainly involved with death evaluation with performing autopsies and that type of thing, so when I heard about this study which was just released in October of this year, I was stunned about it. I was amazed. It was a mortality study that Johns Hopkins University Medical School performed along with a medical school in Baghdad.

As you know the study has been pretty much kept under the