Despite earlier claims that 400,000 bodies have been discovered in mass graves in Iraq, the actual number is slightly different and closer to 5,000. This isn't meant to minimize the deaths of those people, but once again it weakens a justification for this war. I recall the story of mass graves being pushed hard last year as Bush and Blair started to take heat for a lack of WMDs in Iraq. One by one, every story that they spin to justify the war turns out to be a lie.
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.
The USAID website, which quotes Blair's 400,000 assertion, states: 'If these numbers prove accurate, they represent a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot's Cambodian killing fields in the 1970s, and the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.'
'Local people would tell us of 10,000s of people buried at single grave sites and when we would get there they would be in multiple hundreds.'
