Exagerating the numbers


Refuting the Lancet claims
I hadn't responded to the Lancet claims of over 650,000 deaths because I knew of no direct way to refute that number.

Tim Blair came up with some amazing indirect methods though.

Let’s put Lancet’s number in perspective:

* It is larger than the total number of Americans killed during combat in every major conflict, from the Revolutionary War to the first Gulf War.

* It is more than double the combined number of civilians killed in the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

* It is a larger number than were killed in Germany during five years (and 955,044 tons) of WWII bombing.

Does this mean that the 650,000 deaths is not correct?

Judge for yourself. But don't skip this article from Investor's Business Daily. Emphasis added.

A study by a group led by Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to be published Thursday on the Web site of the Lancet, a British medical journal, will claim that about 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began.

Burnham writes, "Deaths are occurring in Iraq at a rate more than three times that before the invasion of March 2003."

One wonders how he knows that since Hussein, Uday and Qusay did not invite researchers to observe their burying of people alive or stuffing them feet first into tree shredders. Those who disappeared, disappeared. Those who talked about it also disappeared.

This study is an update of an earlier Johns Hopkins study, one released just before the 2004 presidential elections. The lead researcher on that study, Les Roberts, admitted that the timing was deliberate.

The earlier study, published in the Lancet in October 2004, was a calculated attempt to influence the election, with the claim that nearly 100,000 deaths had resulted from the U.S. liberation of Iraq.

That effort failed, but the 100,000 figure, like the "3 million homeless" of an earlier era, has taken on a life of its own, endlessly repeated and always included in any litany of U.S. "mistakes" and charges of human rights violations.

As pointed out by Michael Fumento, former IBD reporter and now senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, the first Lancet "study" did not involve counting actual bodies or death certificates, but rather sending teams to interview 998 families in 33 allegedly randomly selected communities in Iraq and extrapolating the "results" to Iraq as a whole.

These families were asked how many people had died in each household and of what. It just took their word for it, without factoring in religious or political affiliation or whether respondents might be former regime supporters or members of a terrorist cell.

That sample was so small that the researchers estimated the number of deaths throughout Iraq at anywhere from 8,000 to 194,000. So Roberts and friends used the scientific method, split the difference and came up with the 100,000 number, which they called "conservative." A better word would be "worthless."

They used a methodology known as "cluster sampling," which can be valid if using real data and not anecdotal reporting. Most of the original Lancet clusters reported no deaths at all, with the journal admitting, "two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Fallujah." Fallujah? Hello?

Remember, it is the political season. These numbers were goosed to influence an election. Imagine outrage if someone had done this to give an edge to Republicans.

Does this mean that I support all of the Bush Administration's claims of what is happening in Iraq? Of course not.

I just oppose falsifying data, even if it is in a "good" cause. Frankly, if you have to lie to prove your point, then your point isn't worth anything.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - October 13, 2006 at 04:31 AM  Tag


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