Debatable.
Study: War blamed for 655,000 Iraqi deaths
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/10/11/iraq.deaths/
There is absolutely NO physical evidence to support the claim of 655,000 dead at that time in the war. The study was organized and run by a small group of researchers who from the start admitted they were against the war and disliked Bush (one even ran as a democRAT for Congress in the last election and another supported his campaign), who hired a bunch of Iraqis to do the legwork in Iraq who the researchers acknowledge "hated" Americans, and who published their reports in a medical journal (the Lancet) of another country whose editors admitted they wanted to influence our election against the war. In order to do that, the editors of the Lancet rushed the peer review process of the first report and allowed their website to claim the report found that 100,000 Iraqi CIVILIANS were killed (when the report said no such thing). All the anti-war wooriors picked up that 100,000 Iraqi CIVILIANS dead claim and regurgitated it ad-nauseum.
Here are some more criticisms that the researchers, liberal media and anti-war movement members simply ignored about that study:
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1. The 655,000 estimate is many, many times larger than any other estimate out there (and there are about half a dozen others). Those other estimates were more like 50,000 (or less) at the time the John Hopkins study was published. Are they all wrong and only John Hopkins right? Even various anti-war groups such as Human Rights Watch and IraqBodyCount have indicated the John Hopkins' figures are outlandish.
2. The report and the peer reviewer of the report (the Lancet) ignored a major discrepancy between the pre-war mortality estimate derived by the John Hopkins team and the estimates derived by other organizations such as the UN and WHO. The UN and WHO, in larger studies, came up with rates between 7-8 per 1000 per year compared to the John Hopkins' rate of 5-5.5 per 1000 per year. And these larger rates were estimates that the Lancet had previously endorsed as accurate. This pre-war mortality number is one of the key numbers used in determining excess deaths. If it were as high as the UN and WHO found, then the number of excess deaths would be far less, perhaps a tenth as much. Why
didn't the researchers resolve the discrepancy?
3. A contemporary UN Development Program study,
http://www.iq.undp.org/ILCS/PDF/Analytical Report - English.pdf , states that there were 24,000 war-related deaths (18,000-29,000, with a 95% confidence level) during the time covered by the Hopkins report. This is approximately one-fourth the number of excess deaths that Les Roberts' 2004 John Hopkins study found. And the UN used similar techniques - clusters, etc. - but with a much larger data set than John Hopkins. Dr Jon Pedersen, who headed that study, is quoted in both the NYTimes and WaPO saying the Lancet numbers are "high, and probably way too high. I would accept something in the vicinity of 100,000 but 600,000 is too much." Here is more onwhat Dr Pedersen thinks about the John Hopkins work:
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/...-with-jon-pedersen-on-iraq-mortality-studies/.
4. According to the second John Hopkins report, 87 percent of those who claimed deaths were asked to prove it by providing death certificates. According to the researchers, they just forgot to ask the other 13 percent. And of those 87 percent, 92 percent (501 out of 545) were able to provide death certificates. Therefore, if the study is statistically valid, there should be death certificates available for about 92 percent of the total 655,000 estimated dead. But investigations by media sources that are not friendly to the Bush administration or the war have not found evidence of anywhere near that number. The Los Angeles Times, for example, in a comprehensive investigation found less than 50,000 certificates. Let me repeat what one of the authors of the LATimes story, Borzou Daragahi, said in an interview with PBS (
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec06/iraq_10-11.html): "the Los Angeles Times thinks these numbers are too large, depending on the extensive research we've done. Earlier this year, around June, the report was published at least in June, but the reporting was done over weeks earlier. We went to morgues, cemeteries, hospitals, health officials, and we gathered as many statistics as we could on the actual dead bodies, and the number we came up with around June was about at least 50,000. And that kind of jibed with some of the news report that were out there, the accumulation of news reports, in terms of the numbers kill. The U.N. says that there's about 3,000 a month being killed; that also fits in with our numbers and with morgue numbers. This number of 600,000 or more killed since the beginning of the war, it's way off our charts." So in order to take the Johns Hopkins' results seriously, you have to believe that the Iraqi government recorded deaths occurring since the invasion with an accuracy of 92 percent, but then suppressed the bulk of those deaths when releasing official figures, with no one blowing the whistle. And you have to believe that all those dead bodies went unnoticed by the mainstream media and everyone else trying to keep track of the war casualties. Alternatively, you have to believe that the Iraqi government only issues death certificates for a small percentage of deaths, but this random sample happened to get 92 percent by pure chance. Or you have to believe that doctors issued death certificates without telling any authorities when so far NOT ONE Iraqi doctor has come forward to say he did that. Every one of those possibilities is ridiculous.
5. When media interviewers of the lead researchers completely misrepresented the results (for example, calling all the dead "civilians"), those researchers (one being Les Robert) made no effort to correct those falsehoods. And they went on to lie, both directly and by omission, about the methodology they used. This is indisputable. For example, here is what another of the John Hopkins researchers, Richard Garfield, told an interviewer: "First of all, very few people refused or were unable to take part in the sample, to our surprise most people had death certificates and we were able to confirm most of the deaths we investigated." That is a LIE since the first study (which is what he was talking about) indicates they confirmed only 7% of the deaths. Les Roberts did the exact same thing in another interview. And so did Burnham, the second studies lead author.
6. In the Garfield interview mentioned above, he stated "And here you see that deaths recorded in the Baghdad morgue were, for a long period, around 200 per month." Let me repeat that figure ... 200 A MONTH, in one of the most populated and most violent regions in the country during the time in question. And now Les Roberts and Burnham are asking us to believe that 15,000 (on average) were dying each month in the country since the war began. How could Garfield not have questions about this new estimate given his previous statement?
7. Richard Garfield is another of those who advocated mortality statistics before the war that are widely divergent from those derived using the Les Roberts/John Hopkins interviews. In fact, Richard Garfield said the most probable number of deaths of under-five children from August 1991 to June 2002 would be about 400,000. His *expert* opinion was that the rate in 2002 would was 9-10 percent. That is compared to the Les Robert's estimate of 2.9 percent. So why didn't Roberts or Garfield or Burnham address this disparity in the latest report? And note that the Lancet blessed and championed the conclusions of Garfield back in 2002. So why did they ignore the discrepancy during their peer reviews?
8. There is NO physical evidence whatsoever to support the claim that 655,000 Iraqis died from the beginning of the war to mid 2006. There are no killing fields filled with bodies or mass graves. There are no photos of these mountains of bodies. There are no videos of this slaughter or the funerals afterwords. There are no reporters, of ANY nationality, saying they saw these bodies or the slaughter. There are no US or foreign soldiers providing evidence of such a slaughter. There are no contractors or folks from any third party providing evidence of this. There is NO physical evidence. And how can that be in a country which has according to the researchers has seen 2.5 percent of its population killed (a percentage greater than the percentage of Germany's and Japan's population killed in World War 2 where there was plenty of physical evidence that such a slaughter had occurred).
9. Dahr Jamail is a viralently anti-American *journalist*. He has close ties to the insurgents and arabs. But look on his website (
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/) for any indication that 500, much less 100 Iraqis were dying every single day on average back in 2003 and 2004 (which was during the period covered by not only the second but the first John Hopkins study) when he first started reporting from Iraq. You won't find any indication. Why not? He had access. They had cameras. Why not?
10. The last two years are arguably the most violent period since the invasion. Yet even the Iraqis reported the number killed in 2006 was on the order of 16,000 ... an average of 45 a day. That certainly stands in sharp constrast to the John Hopkins researchers (and their proponents) who claim that more than 500 a day have died every day on average since the invasion began. There are no news accounts of 500 dying in a day. How can this possibly be?
11. But the discrepancy is even worse than that. As noted in this source (
http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/2006_10_08_archive.html#116069912405842066 ), "The claim is 654,965 excess deaths caused by the war from March 2003 through July 2006. That's 40 months, or 1200 days, so an average of 546 deaths per day. To get an average of 546 deaths per day means that there must have been either many hundreds of days with 1000 or more deaths per day (example: 200 days with 1000 deaths = 200,000 dead leaves 1000 days with an average of 450 deaths), or tens of days with at least 10,000 or more deaths per day (example: 20 days with 10,000 deaths = 200,000 dead leaves 1180 days with an average of 381 deaths). So, where are the news accounts of tens of days with 10,000 or more deaths?" Yes ... where are the news accounts of the many days that should have seen more than a 1000 or even 10,000 deaths? They just don't exist and it's not because reporters weren't in Iraq or had no interest in showing such slaughter. You know the reason.
12. The number of dead the John Hopkins methodology gives in Fallujah is so staggering that even the John Hopkins researchers had to discard the data point. Yet in interviews, Les Roberts has responded as if the Fallujah data was accurate. For example, in an interview with Socialist Workers Online (note who he uses to get his message out), when asked why two thirds of all violent deaths were concentrated in this city, Les Roberts didn't respond "the data was wrong or atypical in Fallujah" as it states in his report. No, instead he answered the question as if he thought the data point was representative of what happened in Fallujah as a whole. He said "we think that our findings, if anything, underestimated the number of deaths because of the number of empty and destroyed houses." If true, then why didn't they stick to their guns and keep the Fallujah data point?
13. John Hopkins claims "We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654,965 (392,979 - 942,636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population in the study area. Of post-invasion deaths, 601,027 (426,369 - 793,663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gun fire." But as already mentioned, during World War II, the Allied air forces carpet bombed German cities, using high explosives and incendiaries, and according to The United States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report killed an estimated 305,000. So are we to believe that with gun fire (primarily) rather than bombs, twice as many Iraqis have been killed in the last 3 years as died in all Germany during WW2 due to strategic bombing of cities (which completely flattened cities)? Likewise, Japan had about 2 million citizens killed (about 2.7 percent of their population), both military and civilian. Many Japanese cities were firebombed during that war (for example, Tokyo had 100,000 people killed in just one raid). Two cities were attacked with nuclear weapons. And yet Les Roberts, Burnham and his crew want us to believe that just as large a percentage have died in Iraq ... where the Coalition has gone out of its way to avoid civilian deaths?
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Here's what IraqBodyCounts (not by any stretch of the imagination a pro-war or pro-Bush group) had to say about the John Hopkins' study:
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From
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14.php
A new study has been released by the Lancet medical journal estimating over 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq. The Iraqi mortality estimates published in the Lancet in October 2006 imply, among other things, that:
1. On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;
2. Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;
3. Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;
4. Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;
5. The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.
And this:
If these assertions are true, they further imply:
* incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;
* bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;
* the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;
* an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.
In the light of such extreme and improbable implications, a rational alternative conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from unrepresentative data. In addition, totals of the magnitude generated by this study are unnecessary to brand the invasion and occupation of Iraq a human and strategic tragedy.
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If you want to believe nonsense, no one can stop you. But that's what wooriors do.
