BySTEPHANIE CONDONCBS NEWSJanuary 30, 2015, 4:31 PM

Michelle Obama weighs in on

"American Sniper"

First Lady Michelle Obama on Friday praised the recently-released movie "American Sniper," a film about a soldier in the Iraq War that's become a flashpoint between liberals and conservatives.

At an event with film industry leaders focused on expanding the public's understanding of veterans' issues, Mrs. Obama said she had a chance to watch "American Sniper" on Air Force One.

"While I know there have been critics, I felt that, more often than not, this film touches on many of the emotions and experiences that I've heard firsthand from military families over these past few years," she said. "This movie reflects those wrenching stories that I've heard -- the complex journeys that our men and women in uniform endure. The complicated moral decisions they are tasked with every day. The stresses of balancing love of family with a love of country. And the challenges of transitioning back home to their next mission in life."

Seth Rogen apologizes for "American Sniper" tweets

Mrs. Obama said her perspective on veterans' issues has been changed after meeting with veterans and military families personally. "But for all those folks in America who don't have these kinds of opportunities, films and TV are often the best way we have to share those stories," she said.

A largely partisan debate over the movie erupted after liberal filmmaker Michael Moore said that snipers shouldn't be held up as heroes, prompting some veterans and conservative pundits to lash out at him. Actor Seth Rogen also ended upwalking back a comment about the movie that some interpreted as a negative critique.

Last week, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, released a statement commending the movie as an "outstanding cinematic achievement honoring the life of a genuine American hero, Chris Kyle."

"This film depicts with subtlety and compassion those brave few who serve our nation in uniform, their experiences in the horror of war, the burdens they often bear upon returning home, and the untold sacrifices of their families," McCain said. "It is deeply regrettable that obsessive critics of U.S. foreign policy have sought to disparage this film and denigrate the memory of a noble American warrior."

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A new study rising from the ashes of a flawed old one estimates a half million Iraqis died as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

By Ashley Fantz, CNN

Updated 0849 GMT (1649 HKT) January 12, 2015

Millions turn out in show of French unity 02:02

Story highlights

NYPD and other U.S. law enforcement alerted to threat from ISIS
Massive crowd at anti-terrorism rally in Paris was the largest in French history, French Mission to U.N. says
Many world leaders present, but Obama, Kerry, Holder not at rally to represent U.S.

(CNN)At least 3.7 million people, including world leaders, marched in anti-terrorism rallies in Paris and elsewhere in France on Sunday, French officials said, calling the massive gathering in the nation's capital the largest in France's history.

The day was emotional and peaceful, a gesture of unity just days after Islamic extremists slaughtered 17 people.

World leaders joined French President Francois Hollande, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. The day also brought together an unlikely duo at the rally: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A photographer captured Merkel leaning her head gently on Hollande's shoulder.

The rally began with a march through Paris streets at 3 p.m., but a massive group of people stayed into the night. Among them was Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris and president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith.

One man in the crowd said the French people must not "give in to fear." Terrorists, he said, "will not win."

Others carried signs that echoed the now-famous phrase that honored slain journalists at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, "Je suis Charlie."

Zineb El Rhazoui, a journalist at the magazine, talked about the magazine's financial struggles and the difficulty of working under constant threats: "I am very happy for all this help, but for us, it was a heavy price to pay, and it is too much.

"It took 12 deaths for us to finally be a little bit understood after we have been hated and booed by everybody."

For the guards and police officers who lost their lives in last week's attacks in France, there were signs reading "We are all cops."

For Muslims in France who want to convey that the ideology embraced by the Muslim gunmen does not represent the whole of the faith, signs read "We are all Muslims."

For everyone, no matter their race, class or ethnic background, signs that said "We are all French" were held up with pride.

End to a bloody week

Sunday brought the end to a traumatic week in France.

Brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, the Charlie Hebdo gunmen, were killed Friday after one of two violent standoffs. Twelve people were slain at the satirical magazine offices on Wednesday.

In the other standoff, Amedy Coulibaly, suspected in the shooting death of a police officer, was killed by security forces Friday after he shot and killed four hostages during a siege at a kosher market.

French law enforcement officers were told to remove their social media presence and carry their weapons at all times, because terror sleeper cells had been activated over the past 24 hours in the country, a French police source who attended a briefing Saturday told CNN terror analyst Samuel Laurent.

Coulibaly had made several phone calls about targeting police officers in France, according to the source.

A video that appears to show Coulibaly pledging allegiance to terror group ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is being shared on Jihadist websites.

Brian Hale, the spokesman for the U.S. director of national intelligence, told CNN on Sunday that the U.S. intelligence community is "aware of the video and is reviewing it to determine its authenticity."

More threats

Threats against people outside of France, particularly against journalists, persisted Sunday.

The offices of Belgian newspaper Le Soir were evacuated Sunday after members of the newsroom received an anonymous phone call of a bomb threat, the newspaper reported. Police locked down the street where paper operates.

And officials in the New York City Police Department responded to a threat from ISIS after someone re-released a September 2014 message that tells followers to "rise up and kill intelligence officers, police officers, soldiers, and civilians," specifically naming the United States, France, Australia and Canada as targets.

NYPD employees were told to "remain alert and consider tactics at all times while on patrol," especially in light of the attacks in France last week, in an internal memo.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a similar bulletin to law enforcement. Both notices make clear that the threat is consistent with previous threats ISIS and others, including al Qaeda, have made.

'We are not terrorists'

As investigators worked leads, a sea of demonstrators in Paris broke into song, held hands, cheered and passionately denounced violence.

An imam and a number of Muslims were in the crowd. A young Muslim French woman held a sign that said, "I am a Jew." She told CNN's Frederik Pleitgen that she was horrified to hear of the killings, and the killers do not live according to the Islamic principles she's been taught.

"Our religion is the religion of love. ... Our religion loves Jews ... loves Christians. We are not terrorists," one Muslim man said, his voice rising.

He lifted his arm and gestured to many people around him who came to denounce violence: "We are all Muslim!"

French officials announced "exceptional measures" to protect the throngs gathered near the Place de la Republique in central Paris, and a who's who of foreign leaders at the rally -- a test of the security forces of a nation rocked by days of terrorist violence.

After the rally, Hollande arrived to huge applause and a cheering crowd at the Synagogue de la Victoire to show support for France's Jews. He was joined by Netanyahu.

The targeting of the kosher grocery store shook the nation's Jewish communities. Amid heightened security concerns, the synagogue was closed Saturday for the first time since World War II.

On Sunday, "Jerusalem of Gold" -- a popular song by Naomi Shemer that became an anthem during the Six-Day War in 1967 -- played in the place of worship.

World leaders -- but no Obama

It was just one of several gestures of solidarity Sunday among some of the world's most influential leaders.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Jordan's King Abdullah II and Queen Rania were at the rally.

Several people in the crowd and on social media wondered why U.S. President Barack Obama was not there; he was at the White House on Sunday.

CNN has asked for an explanation from the State Department and White House of his absence. There has been no response so far.

Secretary of State John Kerry was not at the rally either.

A senior State Department official told CNN that Kerry had committed a long time ago to be the lead speaker at Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's entrepreneurship and innovation summit in India. The official said that Kerry did not want to cancel that as he continues to work on the United States' relationship with the nation.

Attorney General Eric Holder was not at the rally but was in Paris this weekend to attend a security summit on combating terrorism. He recorded interviews that aired in the U.S. on Sunday.

Ambassador to France Jane Hartley represented the United States at the rally. She tweeted several images of the crowd.

Speaking on air with CNN's Jake Tapper, who was at the rally, "Global Public Square" host Fareed Zakaria tried to put Obama and other senior leaders' absence in context.

Zakaria called it a mistake.

France is the United States' "deepest ideological ally," he said, and it would have been a meaningful image to have a senior administration member, or the President, standing shoulder to shoulder with other leaders.

Tapper noted that security has been tenuous. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and other officials said 2,300 police officers, as well as paramilitary forces, would be deployed Sunday. The dignitaries and leaders were to be protected by special units.

Police snipers, plainclothes and anti-terror officers were deployed, and parking and transit restrictions were in place. The government planned to close large sections of the city to traffic, Cazeneuve said.

Zakaria observed that security concerns didn't dissuade Netanyahu or Abbas or other controversial leaders from showing up. The bright side, he said, is that Obama's absence showed that the struggle against radical Islam is "not all about America."

"Many people have tended to think that Islamic terrorism wouldn't exist without America," Zakaria said. "This is really a struggle between the civilized world and a band of extremists. Even if you take the U.S. out of it ... the civilized world is up in arms."

French investigators are still trying to piece connections between three terror suspects killed Friday and their suspected links to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and other terrorist groups. Security will remain heightened as the investigations continue, officials have said.

CNN's Evan Perez, Lorenzo Ferrigno, Laurie Segall, Pamela Brown, Kristina Sgueglia, Kevin Bohn, Ray Sanchez and Jim Sciutto contributed to this report.

A Better Stab at Estimating How Many Died in the Iraq War

A new study rising from the ashes of a flawed old one estimates a half million Iraqis died as a result of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

•

What has been the cost of the Iraq War? In strictly American terms,4,486 U.S. military personnel died there (plus another 318 from Coalition allies); the dollar tab for the war is reckoned in the trillions. And in Iraq—how many people died as a result of the American-led invasion? That’s a harder question than it might seem.

A new study with a controversial back story attempts to provide a good answer. Writing today in the journal PLOS Medicine, the University of Washington’s Amy Hagopian and 11 co-authors estimate that roughly 461,000 Iraqis died as either a direct or indirect cause of the war and subsequent military occupation. But reflecting the tortured effort both of getting good numbers from a war zone and the history of controversial past counts, by the time all their calculations had settled the researchers put their “confidence interval” for possible excess deaths between March 2003 and June 2011 at between 48,000 and 751,000.

For the survey, Iraqi medical doctors questioned members of 2,000 randomly selected households throughout the country, asking about any births or deaths in the household since 2001. Interviewers also asked if any of their siblings had died over the same period. When a household responded with a death they identified as related to the war, they were then asked how it occurred (gun, bomb, air strike) and who they thought the perpetrator was. As a check, the surveyors also asked to see any death certificates at the end of their interview sessions.

A better idea of the death toll going into a conflict might dissuade the participants from taking the ugly actions that make a count necessary.

Gathering these figures, the team extrapolated to reflect the whole population, then compared that figure to the number of deaths that would be expected without a war. (By including the two-year period before the war started, the researchers could set a baseline on expected death rates.) They arrived at 405,000 dead. That left out Iraq’s vast refugee population, which had its own deaths to report, so using outside sources they estimated 56,000 additional deaths. Remember, these figures include both those who died from violent acts and those whose deaths occurred because society was falling apart around them.

IEDs featured prominently in Allied coverage of the war, but especially between 2003 and 2008, the hottest years of the conflict, guns were far and away the most common killing machine. Firearms were responsible for 63 percent of violent deaths, while bombs were responsible for 21 percent. That gibes with other studies that identified gunshots—whether fired in combat or during impromptu executions—as the most common method of killing. Looking at non-violent exits, cardiovascular disease accounted for almost half, 47 percent, of those deaths.

Among perpetrators, coalition forces accounted for 35 percent of violent deaths, and militias for 32 percent.

All told, the Iraqi death rate was 50 percent higher during wartime. Adult men were three times more likely to die violently than before the war, adult women 70 percent more likely to. Looking just at Iraqis between the ages of 15 and 60, researchers estimate 132,000 died directly from war-related violence. That estimate falls in line with other efforts to count Iraq’s dead. The non-profit Iraq Body Count, whose ongoing mission is to count individual civilian deaths (as opposed to using a statistical approximations), estimates, for example, that there have beenabout 157,000 violent deaths in the same period.

These new figures using “cluster sampling” methodology are a dramatic recalculation of numbers published in 2006 in The Lancet, a paper that used similar methodology and an author, Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Gilbert Burnham, with the PLOS Medicine study. The Lancet paper arrived at a figure of 601,000 violent deaths for just the first three years of the war. Red-faced Coalition politicians squawked at that finding, but so did observers like IBC and the American Association for Public Opinion Research, who individually and jointly criticized the methodology, the smell-test-failing outcome, and the researchers’ lack of transparency. The resulting controversy even gets its own Wikipedia listing.

“This paper really seems to fix most of the methodological flaws of the 2006 paper,” said Michael Spagat, an economist at London’s Royal Holloway, University of London, “with a consequence being that the numbers plummet dramatically, probably by more than a factor of four.” Spagat, who has worked with Iraq Body Count (and written for PSmag.com), is a longtime critic of “mismeasures” of the conflict deaths in Iraq and of the 2006 Lancet paper in particular. He sees this paper as both a repudiation and a corrective to that past paper—and an endorsement of best practices.

“This is very interesting from a scientific or research point of view. There’s a lot written in, let’s say, somewhat obscure literature about survey methodology and best practices and surveys. This would seem to suggest that that stuff really matters. If you’re really sloppy with the methodology your estimates can be just hugely off.

“From a scientific view, there’s really a lot of meat in there,” he added, although he finds that huge confidence interval from the headline number a little off-putting. “Unfortunately, we don’t have, and it wouldn’t be possible to have, some sort of controlled experiment. In an ideal universe you’d like to do the survey 20 different times and change one of the methodological points each time and see how that moves the estimate. … Here you get all of the changes all at once, but the cumulative effect of all them is really huge.”

You might think “the authorities” would be putting these figures together. As Syria demonstrates now, that’s really difficult to do in a battle zone, especially one without clear-cut front lines. Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry has tracked violent deaths; the U.S. did not—officially. In a passage that also shows how fraught it can be to try and count individual deaths, Hagopian notes the U.S. sometimes did count civilian deaths:

Although the US military initially denied tracking civilian deaths, 2011 Wikileaks documents revealed that coalition forces did track some noncombatant deaths. The emergence of the Wikileaks ‘‘Iraq War Logs’’ reports in October 2010 prompted the Iraq Body Count team to add to its count, but a recent comparison of recorded incidents between the two databases revealed that the Iraq Body Count captured fewer than one in four of the Iraq War Logs deaths. One important reason for the discrepancy is that small incidents are often missed in press reports. For example, when asked why the assassination of a medical school dean in Baghdad did not merit reporting, Tim Arango (of the New York Times) stated in personal correspondence to AH in April 2011, “Unfortunately there are numerous assassinations every day, and we cannot cover them all.”

Ultimately, do body counts matter? I tried to answer that once, and I’ll quote myself:

But modern warfare also brings concern for, or at least lip service to, the fate of noncombatants, civilians hurt through privation, collateral damage or atrocity. Here, if there is a bag, no side wants to be the one left holding it.

Beyond the obvious concern in states where citizens are actually dying, the fate of innocents killed in warfare can have a powerful effect elsewhere, particularly in countries with free or free-ish media — as the United States and its NATO allies can attest in regard to the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and now Afghanistan and Pakistan. Oddly enough, while it’s the individual mangled bodies on this morning’s news that drive public opinion, it’s the actual body count that often drives policy. As a result, these counts — of civilians and soldiers alike — are often suspect and determined more by political considerations than actual corpses.

And so, perhaps knowing what’s gone before can spare us a little of what’s coming up, Stalin and Westmoreland be damned. A better idea of the death toll going into a conflict might dissuade the participants from taking the ugly actions that make a count necessary. In Iraq, casualty estimates made before the war—such as this intentionally alarmist one from MedAct—were generally lower than what actually occurred. (MedAct’s estimates came with the now-quaint caveat that if Iraq used its weapons of mass destruction the toll could reach almost four million.)

In a perspective appearing alongside Hagopian’s paper in PLOS Medicine, the World Health Organization’s Salman Rawaf makes that point, then let’s real life rudely intrude:

The findings of Amy Hagopian and colleagues may help some families feel that their loss has at least been recognised, but continued sectarian bombings and targeted killings are deepening the sense of insecurity that continues to gnaw away at Iraq. As a scientific community, yes, we want an accurate war tally that can be used as evidence against waging future wars, but people also want to live without fear of becoming a body counted by epidemiologists. In a region with escalating violence, sadly, this may be a distant dream.

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