"American Woman Travels Door to Door to Count Iraqi Casualties"

ABC Nightline ^ | 5/28/03 | David Wright

[lonewacko_dot_com]

Marla Ruzicka, 26, from the San Francisco Bay Area, has been in Baghdad since the day Saddam's statue fell in the city center. She has been doing a headcount of the Iraqi injured and the dead. She's found more than she expected.

She has formed her own nonprofit organization, called the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or CIVIC. She has organized 150 surveyors to fan out across Iraq. So far, they say they have documented 620 civilian deaths in Baghdad, 256 in Najaf, 425 in Karbala and as many as 1,100 in Nasiriyah. It is only a preliminary count.

"Somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 people died in this conflict," Ruzicka said...

Ruzicka does not represent the U.S. government. She's not affiliated with any big relief agency. She is a lone peace activist who has taken it upon herself to help the civilian victims of war.

[...more tearjerking lionization deleted...]

Commentary: Apparently they don't have google in Iraq, otherwise the author of this piece would have been able to do a bit of research on Marla Ruzicka's past "efforts:"

On his site, The Politburo, blogger Michael Moynihan noted that the Times' source for the toll of 812 dead was Marla Ruzicka, identified as a field worker in Afghanistan for Global Exchange, "an American organization." What the Times didn't say, Moynihan wrote, is that Global Exchange is a "far-left" group that opposes globalization and the U.S. military. Ruzicka, he said, is a fan of Fidel Castro's Cuba and the winner of an award from "the Marxist group Refuse and Resist."

You can contact Nightline from this page, and the article linked above contains the email addresses for the story's author and for Ruzicka.

[DPB101]

Fast work. Excellent. The left just doesn't get it. 20, even 10 years ago, they could get away with this. No more.

[DeepDish]

This sounds like a leftie who is adding dead technicals
to the list of civilian dead. Nice way to inflate the
stats but I'm not buying it.

[Terridan]

I wonder why none of these idiot activists haven't gone door to door in and around New York, to count exactly how many victems and lives were impacted on 9/11??? Now that would be newsworthy and important. But no, we have to hear about this crapola. Unbelievable!

[zarf]

Here's a gal who's willing to put her money where her mouth is. a leftist, yeah....but, one who is in the field living up to what she aspouses.

She has more honor than the asswipes spewing their anti-American bile in the streets of Seattle or SF.

[lavaroise]

Odd she does not visit the children jail wards of Saddam....

[mass55th]

Too bad she wasn't interested in counting the people murdered by Saddam's regime these past 30 years. More than likely she can't count that high though.

[mewzilla]

She has more honor than the asswipes spewing their anti-American bile in the streets of Seattle or SF.

That's not saying much.

[verity]

Marla Ruzicka, 26, from the San Francisco Bay Area

Does SF render people strange or is SF simply an attraction for strange people?

[Becki]

I wonder if she is just counting the dead, or if she differentiates between the military and civilians.

Becki

[John O]

"Somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 people died in this conflict," Ruzicka said...

COOL! I expected the numbers to be much higher (anything up to about a half million or so would have been acceptable collateral damage in my book). Our guys did great in keeping the right targets dead and the ?innocent? alive.