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In this FoxNews video report the author of the Lancet report freely admits that its release was timed to affect the elections, "out of concern for the humanitarian issues."
In this FoxNews video report the author of the Lancet report freely admits that its release was timed to affect the elections, "out of concern for the humanitarian issues."
Last edited by thumbelina; 10-13-2006 at 04:42 PM.
Iraqi Body Count Study Out Just In Time For Elections
Mind you, there's nothing political about this.
It's just a coincidence that these studies have come out just days before the last two elections.
The 2004 Lancet Study was considered so ridiculous it even garnered a Wikipedia entry in which we find this admission:Lancet surveys of mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq
Les Roberts stated "I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election. My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq. I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives."
This was posted by Omar, at IRAQ THE MODELOriginally Posted by thumbelina
Responding to the Lancet lies...
Pajamas invited us to respond to a study full of lies made by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that claimed 665,000 Iraqis were killed since 2003. The disgraceful study is expected to be published on the website of The Lancet, a medical journal today.The response was published last night on Pajamas, and here it is now in case you missed it.
To me their motives are clear, all they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do. And they shamelessly use lies to do this…when they did not find the death they wanted to see on the ground, they faked it on paper! They disgust me…
PRESIDENT OBAMA: We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.
Re: Lancet Survey
It's a cliche', but worth noting here: "Statistics don't lie... statisticians do."
This is absolutely JUNK data, complete BS. I read the "method" they used, and it's about as scientific as going door-to-door and asking a hundred people "how many stars do you think are in the sky?" After taking such empirical data as "oh, about a billion", and "a zillion", you can then print a "scientific" article that states "survey shows there are a billion kajillion stars in the universe".
You can use real, valid, statistical data to support an opinion. However, you cannot make statistical data from opinion.
Proud American Infidel
This week in the online edition of a British medical journal, the Lancet, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Baghdad's al-Mustansiriya University estimate that 655,000 more Iraqis died of various causes since the U.S. invasion in March 2003 than would have died in a comparable period were there not a war.
The demographers attributed 601,000 or so of the 655,000 deaths to acts of violence.
This means 15,000 violent deaths a month, 500 violent deaths everyday -- at that sustained level -- for more than three years between March 2003 and June 2006.
Compare this conclusion with a recent U.N. figure, 3,009 Iraqis killed in violence across the country in August, compiled from records of hospitals and morgues countrywide. The U.N. figures conclude a daily rate of about 100 deaths.
The U.N. numbers come from records of deaths; the Hopkins numbers comes from calculations derived from a random sample of 1,849 households in 47 neighborhood clusters across Iraq. In each household, the Iraqi surveyors who did the work asked how many people living in the household were born, died or moved in and out. The surveyors then attempted to verify the reporting through a death certificate (successful, the study author's say, in 90 percent of the cases), and they recorded the cause. The data were then projected onto the population of the entire country, about 26 million people.
The conclusion, based on this sample, is that 91.8 of the deaths were caused by violence. That's the 601,027 number.
Most of these deaths (59 percent), moreover, were reported to have occurred among young men between the ages of 15 and 44, a segment of fighting population that suggests validity.
Gunshots were the most common cause of death, the surveyors found (56 percent). Add in "airstrikes," car bombs, etc., and the number goes even higher.
But back to that U.N. number, 100 deaths a day in August. The Hopkins study suggests that the number of deaths not just this August, but every month since March 2003, is five times larger. Given that the level of violence we are witnessing today is at or near its peak, and given that for periods of time between May 2003 and April 2004, the violence had not yet gotten out of control, in order to get to the Hopkins numbers, one would have to see even significantly higher numbers in recent months than 500 daily deaths to "average" out to 500 deaths overall.
Is it possible that the U.N. is not seeing four out of every five Iraqis who is dying, even today?
It is possible. But it is not likely.
There are two numbers that need to be considered in coming to a conclusion about the Hopkins' study: The raw number of deaths, and the comparison to pre-war deaths, that is, what would have been expected were there not an invasion in 2003.
In the ways of sampling sizes, standard errors, reliability and validity, the John Hopkins team claims being 95 percent certain that their 600,000 number is right. The true number -- the margin of error -- ranges from 400,000 to 900,000 deaths overall.
"To put these numbers in context," one of the study's authors says, "deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003."
The Hopkins team calculated Iraq's mortality rate in the year before the invasion at 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people, comparing it with their post-invasion average of 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people a year. The difference between these two rates is the rate of "excess deaths;" the deaths occurring from violence is how they get to the 600,000 number.
The entire "context" then, hinges on the validity of the pre-war mortality rate. If you accept this number, then I'm told you accept that pre-war Iraq had a better mortality rate than any other country in the Middle East, even Israel.
Could 650,000 Iraqis really have died because of the invasion?H/TBody counts in conflict zones are assumed to be ballpark – hospitals, record offices and mortuaries rarely operate smoothly in war – but this was ten times any other estimate. Iraq Body Count, an antiwar web-based charity that monitors news sources, put the civilian death toll for the same period at just under 50,000, broadly similar to that estimated by the United Nations Development Agency.
The implication of the Lancet study, which involved Iraqi doctors knocking on doors and asking residents about recent deaths in the household, was that Iraqis were being killed on an horrific scale. The controversy has deepened rather than evaporated. Several academics have tried to find out how the Lancet study was conducted; none regards their queries as having been addressed satisfactorily. Researchers contacted by The Times talk of unreturned e-mails or phone calls, or of being sent information that raises fresh doubts.
More debunking of The Lancet... Data BombH/THow to explain the enormous discrepancy between The Lancet's estimation of Iraqi war deaths and those from studies that used other methodologies? For starters, the authors of the Lancet study followed a model that ensured that even minor components of the data, when extrapolated over the whole population, would yield huge differences in the death toll. Skeptical commentators have highlighted questionable assumptions, implausible data, and ideological leanings among the authors, Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts.
Some critics go so far as to suggest that the field research on which the study is based may have been performed improperly -- or not at all. The key person involved in collecting the data -- Lafta, the researcher who assembled the survey teams, deployed them throughout Iraq, and assembled the results -- has refused to answer questions about his methods.
Some of these questions could be resolved if other researchers had access to the surveyors' original field reports and response forms. The authors have released files of collated survey results but not the original survey reports, citing security concerns and the fact that some information was not recorded or preserved in the first place. This was a legitimate problem, and it underscored the difficulty of conducting research in a war zone.
Last edited by thumbelina; 01-04-2008 at 09:11 PM.
Discredited Lancet study gets even more discreditedThe British medical journal Lancet published a study of civilian casualties in 2006 that estimated Iraqi civilian deaths at more than 2% of Iraq’s pre-war population, around 655,000. Later studies produced numbers of less than a quarter of Lancet’s totals, and the authors of the study were largely discredited. Now a research association has publicly rebuked Gilbert Burnham for not disclosing his methodology, and Burnham may face action from his employer, Johns Hopkins...
Sounds like the Lancet people are just right for Obama's cabinet.....
Definitely in the tank for Barky...
Lookity-look:
Rahm’s Brother Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel: The Death Czar | Right Soup
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