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Lancet's Iraq body count debunked

Abdul Alhazred

Philosopher
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Data Bomb (National Journal)

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Each death recorded by the Hopkins surveyors in 2006 extrapolated to 2,000 deaths in the Iraqi population.

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I suppose prostituting your institutional reputation is worth it if you can save lives that way. Of course it's a trick that cannot be repeated.
 
BenBurch said:
So what? Why does this matter? And surely this is a political topic?
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The subjective assumptions underlying a statistical survey by your assertion, do not matter. The issue is merely political.

See if the moderators move the thread, then.

Is statistics science?
 
I have no objection to moving the thread to 'Politics'.

Indeed that emphasizes the nature of Lancet's claims.
 
Abdul Alhazred said:
Data Bomb (National Journal)



I suppose prostituting your institutional reputation is worth it if you can save lives that way. Of course it's a trick that cannot be repeated.
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Err if you think that quote debunks the study you've just claimed to debunk the entire area of opinion polling.
 
Abdul Alhazred said:
I have no objection to moving the thread to 'Politics'. Indeed that emphasizes the nature of Lancet's claims.
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It really crosses both politics and science. The issue relevant to science is the general one of fraud in peer reviewed journals. The presence of such highly polarizing issues should increase the skepticism of both editors and reviewers in a science journal not normally subjected to such forces. Apparently it did not.
 
Abdul Alhazred said:
Data Bomb (National Journal)



I suppose prostituting your institutional reputation is worth it if you can save lives that way. Of course it's a trick that cannot be repeated.
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It debunks nothing.

Some critics have wondered whether the Iraqi researchers engaged in a practice known as "curb-stoning," sitting on a curb and filling out the forms to reach a desired result. Another possibility is that the teams went primarily into neighborhoods controlled by anti-American militias and were steered to homes that would provide information about the "crimes" committed by the Americans.
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I'm wondering what the lottery numbers are. That's not going to give them to me. The survey used a standard procedure used in other areas of the world. In those other surveys, no-one has questioned the figures. Sampling populations is done all the time, and has been shown to be amazingly accurate.

Let's be generous, and assume a huge error margin. 300,000 people have died. Still sounds like a lot to me.
 
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marting said:
It really crosses both politics and science. The issue relevant to science is the general one of fraud in peer reviewed journals. The presence of such highly polarizing issues should increase the skepticism of both editors and reviewers in a science journal not normally subjected to such forces. Apparently it did not.
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It pretty much looks like a straight accusation of fraud, if I got the reading of the links correctly. Wonder what the response will have to say....
 
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a_unique_person said:
Let's be generous, and assume a huge error margin. 300,000 people have died. Still sounds like a lot to me.
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Well, but you are forgetting that it is out of line with other studies by an order of magnitude. Even if you are sympathetic, that fact alone should raise an eyebrow. The reductio ad absurdum critique by the people who do the Iraq Body Count is pretty damning. And then there's the inclusion of the car bomb event killing 60 which occurred after the end date of the survey. A big whopper if true, since small variations of the input data had significant impact on the result.

I think the burden of proof rests on their end.
 
geni said:
Err if you think that quote debunks the study you've just claimed to debunk the entire area of opinion polling.
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Exactly.

article said:
This stunning toll was more than 10 times the number of deaths estimated by the Iraqi or U.S. governments, or by any human-rights group.
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That's not unusual for warzones. [eta: I'm assuming that, by Human rights group, they mean Iraq Body Count -- who have not conducted a survey, they just read news reports]
Under-reporting of deaths happens in warzones. The more violent the warzone, the bigger the discrepancy. Surveys give more accurate figures. That has been the experience of past warzones.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm

a memo by the MoD's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, on 13 October, states: "The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to "best practice" in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq."
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Les Roberts, one of the co-authors, has conducted many surveys. He says deaths are often under-counted in war-zones, and by a large degree.

He also gives a method whereby his data can be easily refuted. Lancet-2 recorded 547 post-war deaths, about 300 of them violent. (Amongst 12,801 people in the survey). So more than half died a violent death.

What percentage of people die in the categories of old age, sickness, accident or violence? If the violent deaths don't account for quite a few, then Lancet-2 is wrong. Isn't it about time we had a few jounalists visit a few morgues? Last time I checked, I couldn't find such data.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33521

Before the war this morgue located at Bab al-Mu'atham near the city centre received only about 200 to 300 bodies a month, Dr Kais Hassan who has worked at the morgue said.

[...] "Most of those brought dead here have been tortured by beating, electricity, acid, drills, and by other horrible ways," said an Iraqi who refused to give his name. "When any Iraqi is arrested by police now it means we will find his dead body in Baghdad's streets after some days. Because of all this killing, this morgue is not enough."

[...] "A week earlier they brought more than 100 bodies in one day from al-Taji north of Baghdad, and another day they brought just 20 bodies. There is an average of 50 to 60 bodies everyday."
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But that morgue might specialise in violent deaths, so the proportion given may not be meaningful. And other morgues may have closed, so the numbers given might not indicate an increase in death rates. But I can't find jounalism on morgues in Iraq that give the answers needed.


Here's the old thread from the science forum, http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93461
there was another in politics.
 
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Move to politics.

This is an old, old, story. I mean, this controversy was hot almost two years ago.

The Lancet figure was quoted was for the excess of civilian deaths from
*all* violent causes, not just those killed by US and coalition forces.

See:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/10/lancet_report_was_the_prewar_death_rate_assumption.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6045112.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm

Another 2007 story that didn't get much coverage concerns the British
Government response to the Lancet story. Freedom of Information actions
by the BBC revealed this:

"Following a Freedom of Information request, BBC World Service Newshour
has learnt that a senior British Government official advised ministers
to show "caution" about publicly criticising a report published last
October in the Lancet, which estimated that 655,000 Iraqis have died as
a result of the war in Iraq.

If the Lancet survey is correct, two-and-a-half per cent of the Iraqi
population - an average of more than 500 people a day - have been killed
since the start of the war.

The Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Ministry of Defence
described the methods used by the Lancet survey as "close to best
practice" adding that the "study design is robust."

A statistician at the Department of International Development said the
method used in the survey was "tried and tested" and, if anything, could
lead to an underestimate of the number of deaths.

The Lancet published the survey in October 2006.

It was conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and
compared mortality rates before and after the invasion by surveying 47
randomly chosen areas across 16 provinces in Iraq.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2007/03_march/26/iraq.shtml




None of this goes to show that the Lancet figures are right, but only that they are the best we have so far. That it is so hard to get more accurate figures is in itself an indictment of the chaos of Iraq. (And to some extent, the indifference of the coalition to Iraqi civilian weal.)

Trying to fob this off a a scientific 'controversy' is ridiculous. I vote for a move to politics.
 
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blutoski said:
The Lancet figure was quoted was for the excess of civilian deaths from *all* violent causes, not just those killed by US and coalition forces.
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The article linked in the OP addresses this.
 
It is going to be some time before anyone gets a real feel for what has happened in Iraq. With something like 20% of the population having fled the country and a further hefty percentage dislocated within the country there can be no easy way to determine what who is dead, who is missing and who has fled. The complete failure to prevent widespread looting of the hospitals and the subsequent difficulty of obtaining even simple medical care has resulted in an increase of "natural" but preventable deaths too.

In short the whole Iraq adventure was badly thought through and and badly enacted. Fighting the war and kicking Saddam out was the easy bit. Running the place afterwards has been expensive and fraught with corruption and mismanagement. However, I guess there is little point in crying over spilt milk now. The people responsible are all becoming political history. The Coalition will continue to pick up the tab and it is questionable whether we have a safer more friendly Iraq as a result but what is done is done.
 
My point would be that even one murder of an innocent in a needless, stupidly planned and executed invasion is blood on our hands. No amount of piling-on makes matters worse; We are all still murderers for having allowed this.
 
BenBurch said:
My point would be that even one murder of an innocent in a needless, stupidly planned and executed invasion is blood on our hands. No amount of piling-on makes matters worse; We are all still murderers for having allowed this.
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Wars inevitably end up killing innocent people, and mistakes are always made in the course of waging them. Following your logic, we should never go to war. The alternative might get more people killed, but as long as their deaths can't be blamed on us then everything is fine. This leads one place: pacifism. But pacifism isn't moral, it's immoral.
 
Ziggurat said:
Wars inevitably end up killing innocent people, and mistakes are always made in the course of waging them. Following your logic, we should never go to war. The alternative might get more people killed, but as long as their deaths can't be blamed on us then everything is fine. This leads one place: pacifism. But pacifism isn't moral, it's immoral.
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No, we would never begin wars of aggression aimed at financial looting of another nation's resources. As we absolutely did in this case. (And even worse, managed not to acquire even one dime, and bankrupted ourselves.)
 
BenBurch said:
No, we would never begin wars of aggression aimed at financial looting of another nation's resources. As we absolutely did in this case. (And even worse, managed not to acquire even one dime, and bankrupted ourselves.)
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If we didn't even acquire one dime, where's your evidence that we were ever trying to loot Iraq?
 
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