geni
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Last UK elections on the other hand were dead on.
Lancet-1 study vindicated by NEJM/WHO study?
- Thread starter FireGarden
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Last UK elections on the other hand were dead on.
BeAChooser
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The new NEJM/WHO study concludes that ONE-FOURTH as many died of violent death between March 2003 and June 2006 as was claimed in the 2006 John Hopkin's study. And that's using the same study procedure which is still arguably flawed. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/109/1
And now we learn that half the cost of the 2006 study was paid by Soros. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3177653.ece So not only were the lead researchers (such as Les Roberts) openly anti war, not only were the folks who ran the study in Iraq openly anti-American, not only was the journal that published the results openly anti-Bush, but even the man who funded the study was a hardcore anti-Bush leftist. No wonder the John Hopkin's researchers wouldn't provide access to their raw data. It was a FRAUD. http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm
By the way in the thread's source article Les Roberts dishonestly tries to defend the John Hopkin's study. For example, he states "We confirmed our deaths with death certificates." Well, 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.
There is one more possibility. That Les Roberts is LYING and given the fact that his group still refuses to release the raw data and provide proof of those death certificates, I'd hazard that's the reality.
And now we learn that half the cost of the 2006 study was paid by Soros. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3177653.ece So not only were the lead researchers (such as Les Roberts) openly anti war, not only were the folks who ran the study in Iraq openly anti-American, not only was the journal that published the results openly anti-Bush, but even the man who funded the study was a hardcore anti-Bush leftist. No wonder the John Hopkin's researchers wouldn't provide access to their raw data. It was a FRAUD. http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm
By the way in the thread's source article Les Roberts dishonestly tries to defend the John Hopkin's study. For example, he states "We confirmed our deaths with death certificates." Well, 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.
There is one more possibility. That Les Roberts is LYING and given the fact that his group still refuses to release the raw data and provide proof of those death certificates, I'd hazard that's the reality.
FireGarden
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The main point of difference between NEJM and Lancet-2 is the violent deaths. NEJM implies total excess deaths of about 400,000 (but that wasn't the focus of the study.) NEJM couldn't visit some of the areas they chose because those areas were too violent. Most of those areas were in Anbar province, where Lancet-2 found the highest rates of violent death. NEJM then used IBC data to fill the gaps in their own survey.
And, whichever study you choose to accept, the death toll is huge.
NEJM agrees almost exactly with Lancet-1, btw. How do you explain that?
Soros funded MIT.
MIT funded Burnham et al (Lancet-2).
They did provide access to their data. Not to everybody. The NEJM report says they used Lancet-2 data: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMsa0707782
And I don't think that was the first time, either.
Not so far as I can see. There may have been a systematic error that led to too many deaths being classified as violent. But Lancet-2 checked death certificates. Did NEJM?
But NEJM implies 3 times as many deaths, just for violence.
NEJM implies 400,000 deaths above and beyond the number of deaths implied by the death rate before the invasion. Then even more deaths when you count those that would have happened anyway without the invasion.
And the LA journos couldn't find 50,000 death certificates?
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec06/iraq_10-11.html
Not even with their journo lie-detectors!
Death certificates are issued by doctors. Then a copy is supposed to be sent someplace and counted. Doctors have to issue death certificates because the relatives need them for insurance, inheritance, etc. So the doctors will be asked for death certificates until one is issued. The government counts the deaths reported to them. And such a system tends to under-estimate deaths in war-zones.
NEJM also implies a large undercount in death certificates.
I don't see it as ridiculous. Counting death certificates has always led to underestimating deaths in war-zones. It's what you should expect to happen.
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BeAChooser
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That alone is enough to question the motives of those who funded, ran, surveyed, were surveyed and reported Lancet 2. NEJM said ONE-FOURTH as many died violent deaths as Lancet-2 over the same period. That's a difference of 450,000 people. That tells one that either the people they surveyed lied to them or the surveyors lied about their results ... or both.
And Lancet 2 claimed there were about 655,000 excess deaths during the same period. That's not an insignificant delta either.
You are being deceptive. The NEJM study was far more precise than the Lancet 2 study, even where Anbar is concerned. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMsa0707782 states that NEJM sampled 10,080 households (compared to 1849 households in Lancet 2) grouped into a total of 1086 clusters (compared to 47 in Lancet 2). The link further states that in arriving at that sample size, NEJM increased the number of clusters by 100 percent in Anbar (from 54 to 108 clusters) to compensate for the expected difficulty in visiting some of the clusters. As it turned out 71 Anbar clusters could not be visited, leaving 37 that were visited. Now in comparison, the Lancet 1 study had only ONE cluster in Anbar. And the Lancet 2 study had a total of THREE in Anbar. And given the expressed anti-American/anti-war feelings of the researchers and survey staff in the Lancet studies, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they made sure those clusters were particularly unfriendly to Americans so that the results would be highly skewed to the high side both in terms of deaths and cause.
You make it sound like they used the raw IBC numbers for the missing clusters. They did not. They only used IBC data to develop ratios they could apply to death rates in areas they could visit in order to obtain death rates for those they could not.
The death toll was huge even before the war and would have continued to be huge even without a war. The NEJM study asked those surveyed to identify the cause of death. Diseases, road accidents, murders, unintentional deaths were listed categories. They computed death rates from those results. They came up with a total pre-war death rate from all causes before the invasion of 3.07 per 1000 per year to 3.19 per 1000 per year depending on the region of Iraq. Their post invasion rate varies from 3.68 per 1000 per year (in Kurdistan) to 6.36 per 1000 per year (in southern and central Iraq).
Now it is interesting to compare those estimate with other estimates made before the war. The UN and WHO both did extensive pre-war studies and came up with estimates of 7-8 per 1000 per year. And those studies were peer reviewed and applauded by the Lancet. And had there been no invasion, there is no guarantee things would have improved in Iraq. Saddam was deliberately keeping needed infrastructure repairs and improvements (in water, sewage treatment, power) from those groups he felt were a threat. In other words, Saddam was still waging war against certain ethnic blocks inside his country with dire consequences for the majority of people in Iraq. In fact, it is suspicious that the NEJM pre-war death rate varies so little between regions that were predominately friendly to Saddam and those that were actively hostile (and thus were being deprived of funds to provide good water, sewage treatment, food and medicine).
And we now know that Saddam had every intention of rearming with WMD of all types once the sanctions ended (and the end to sanctions was a foregone conclusion had we not invaded). Many of the deaths suffered by the Iraqi people are likely due to the carelessness with which Saddam's regime treated the materials used to make WMD and the materials resulting from the manufacture of those weapons. For example, do you know that inspectors even found chemical weapon and nuclear waste dumps INSIDE Baghdad city limits?
And how many might have died in Saddam's next military adventure? Keep in mind how many died in Iran and Kuwait or in suppressing Iraqis in Northern and Eastern Iraq. Iraq might not have had a half million extra dead (assuming it's even that much) but a million or two extra dead.
First of all, it doesn't agree "almost exactly" ... as I've already adequately demonstrated. It's not even close, neither in raw numbers or the causes of mortality. And second, there are other significant differences and questions. For example, the Lancet 2 pre-war death rate was found to be 5.5 per 1000 per year compared to NEJM's 3 per 1000 per year. Both were supposedly based on the internal surveys. Now I ask you ... why would that number change so radically? And why would it move in a direction even farther away from other pre-war studies? Keep in mind that even a small error in this number could greatly reduce the number of "excess" deaths in the NEJM study.
And many at MIT have been openly hostile to the war. MIT may claim they played no role in the study design, implementation, analysis or writing of the Lancet report, but the buck still stops with them. It was their money. They commissioned the study. They helped get it published. And they could have asked (and should have asked) that the authors correct some of the glaring errors and obvious biases in their work. But they didn't. Perhaps because MIT's funding authority (John Tirman) also had an agenda.
Before picking the John Hopkin's group to do a second study (Lancet 2), he should have first asked whether the first study was any good. And the answer to that was rather obvious. No. And when that second study was complete, he then led an "education" campaign to promote the results ... again, never listening to any of the criticism being leveled against both Lancet efforts ... never asking himself whether the results made any sense.
Tilman's response to the public disclosure that Soros funded half the second study is illuminating as to his feelings on the war and his politics. He recently published an article titled "Right-Wingers Can’t Cover Up Iraq’s Death Toll Catastrophe". "Right Wingers"? I think that's a clear indication as to his politics.
And in his article, Tilman claims that "virtually every competent person agreed that the study (Lancet 2)provided the best estimate we have." "every competent person"? Funny how none of those competent persons bothered to ask any of the competent questions that have been raised since about the methodology and results. Hey ... maybe Tilman can tell us where the missing death certificates and bodies went?
Tilman goes on to defend the MIT funded Lancet 2 report in this way: "The Lancet then took weeks to peer review. It was released when ready. There was no political agenda; there didn’t need to be. The results spoke for themselves." Well, that's pure garbage ... and here is why.
First, the Lancet not only failed to ask important questions during its *peer* review (like some of those I've raised on this forum from time to time), its editors had admitted that they greatly abbreviated the peer review process for the Lancet 1 report so the results could be published in time to influence the 2004 election. Peer review normally takes more than 2 weeks. They also reported on their own website in 2004, that the deaths estimated by John Hopkins in the first study were comprised solely of civilians. That led to headlines in newspapers around the world that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the war. But the study made no such claim. In fact, it clearly stated that the investigators did NOT ask those interviewed if the dead were civilians, Saddam military or insurgents. Which leads one to wonder if the Lancet actually read the report they claimed to review in those two weeks they had available.
Then on top of that, when journalists would repeat the falsehood that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died during interviews with the study's authors, the study's authors wouldn't correct the journalists. They let the lie stand ... because it fit their agenda. In fact, here's a article written by Les Roberts and published under MIT's logo (http://web.mit.edu/cis/pdf/Audit_6_05_Roberts.pdf ) in which he openly LIES about the results of the first study. In it he states "The resulting report, published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, estimated around 100,000 and possibly far more civilians have died because of the invasion." That's an outright lie and that is typical of the dishonesty of Roberts and the willingness of MIT to ignore his dishonesty. Obviously, they never bothered to actually read the report that Roberts wrote either. Because if they did, then they knowingly let him publish a lie.
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 too is a LIE since the first study (which is what he was talking about) indicated they only confirmed 7% of the deaths. And Les Roberts did the exact same thing in another interview.
Les Roberts, had publically stated he disliked Bush (not unexpected given that he was an active democRAT) and the war (he even ran for office during the second study as an anti-war candidate) prior to Tilman funding the second study. Roberts had admitted that he released the first study when he did to negatively influence the election against Bush and the GOP. Yet Tilman chose the same group of people (with a minor shuffling of who was called the lead researcher) to do the second study. He chose that group despite their having already admitted that most of those hired to conduct the study in Iraq "HATED" (that was Roberts' wording) the Americans. None of that is a good basis for conducting a non-partisan study. And it should have been a red flag to anyone hoping for an unbiased study. But then, I don't think Tilman was hoping for an unbiased look at Iraqi mortality.
And finally, note that the Lancet and John Hopkin's authors have steadfastly REFUSED to release their raw data so that others could verify their results. Because the results do not speak for themselves.
False. Your link does not say NEJM were given access to the raw data. They simply reference a published John Hopkins report on mortality to get comparison rates of death. That's not raw data.
This source written by a statistician (http://lancetiraq.blogspot.com/ ), while noting that SOME data has been released to SOME people, has some very interesting observations about the unwillingness of the John Hopkin's researchers to release their raw data and the suspicious nature of the data when they actually do release some. For example ...
10,000 to 1 ... in favor of a fraudulent study.
ROTFLOL! Their claims about checking death certificates are actually a major reason to be totally suspicious about their results. Because as I said previously, if that claim is true and the study is statistically valid, then 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 turned up anywhere near that number of death certificates. It should be a red flag to you. And note that to date, John Hopkins has not released a single example of these claimed death certificates. Name ONE doctor from Iraq who has come forward to say he wrote hundreds of death certificates and didn't report them to the Ministry of Health. Go ahead...
Here is what IBC had to say about this (and they aren't friendly to the Bush administration or pro-war):
**********
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.
************
It's time you woke up and stop letting yourself be deceived.
Well maybe it's too high too? Where are the bodies? Surely with so many people being slaughtered there would be places that anti-war, anti-bush, anti-American journalists could be taken to see them buried in mass graves or stacked like cord wood. Maybe NEJM's pre-war mortality figure is wrong and the UN and WHO's pre-war estimates were closer to the truth? But in any case, I have no trouble if the number is a factor of 2 or 3 higher than 50,000. There is uncertainty. But the fact remains that the ONLY way that the John Hopkins (Lancet) researchers could have arrived at their 655,000 estimate was through fraud.
Name ONE Iraqi doctor who said he issued hundreds of death certificates and then didn't report them to government officials for recording. Just one.
But not to this extent. Not in a system that was so engrained to meticulous record keeping, as were the Iraqis. And if the doctors went to the trouble of providing relatives with a death certificate, then the act of passing that certificate on to higher authorities would have been the easy step in the process. Sorry, but you are clinging to straws. Why don't you just admit that the John Hopkins studies were bogus from the outset. You'll sleep better at night.
FireGarden
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If their own survey of Anbar was so good, then why did they use IBC data to fill in the gaps? They could have used their own data to extrapolate to the rest of Anbar.
And then you imply that Lancet-2 picked dangerous areas in Anbar to make Bush look bad -- as if the current figures (which you accept?) don't make Bush look bad. What a coincidence, then, that the places Lancet-2 picked for their deception ended up being the places NEJM couldn't visit.
It wasn't my intention to imply anything else.
And the CIA listed yet another figure.
Both Lancet-2 and NEJM give an approximate doubling of the death rate after the invasion.
Saddam was a bad man, and America should never have supported him. Rumsfeld should not have shaken his hand -- twice! -- while Saddam was killing Kurds and Iranians with chemical weapons.
Do you know what America used to say about WMDs and the justification for war?
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/
The hypocrisy! It burns!
Stubborn Iran did not realise that they had no authority to call for regime change in the country that had attacked them. Even if that regime was led by a crazed, WMD using war-monger. (Note: that was USING -- not merely owning or wanting to own -- WMDs).
Yet another conspiracy against Bush. Something should be done to help the powerless leader of the free world!
See above.
You're all spin.
You're talking about Lancet-2 not Lancet-1.
The match with Lancet-1 is very close.
The conspiracy is huge. I bet even you are anti-Bush and anti-war. Everything that lives and breaths.
But you don't seem to have noticed what this thread is about. It was started to compare Lancet-1 and NEJM -- not Lancet-2 and NEJM.
"we were able to confirm most of the deaths we investigated".
So if they investigated 7% of the deaths, they confimred most of the deaths they investigated. Assuming they picked at random from among all the deaths reported, then that says something.
But then you go on to show that data has been released. The Lancet study haven't released the addresses they visited. But their statistical data is available.
You mean David Kane?
The same David Kane that did a 'statistical' analysis of Lancet-1 and asked for it to be reviewed by the experts at Deltoid:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/07/david_kane_on_lancet_confidenc.php
He even acknowledges, in the comments, Tim and dsquared's expertise. But they disagree with him. The experts David Kane asked to review his work disagreed with him.
His argument, in the main, was that if Lancet-1 included the data from Fallujah then the confidence intervals would widen so much that maybe the death rate in Iraq was lower than before the invasion.
I found this comment to be useful:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/07/lancet_debunking_cargo_cult.php#comment-515429
"Here’s what I hope is a simple explanation. Suppose you are counting the average occupancy of cars on a freeway. You look at many cars as they pass and count the occupants and divide by the number of cars. You happen to do this on a weekday during rush hour. You can get the average number of occupants and the variance around that average, from which you can make an estimate of the average occupancy of all cars. No problemo.
You repeat that experiment on a weekend day, and there are more families in cars so the average occupancy happens to go up. However, just by chance, a bus comes by filled with weekend tourists.
The bus is Falluja. The Roberts team made two estimates, one including the bus, and one excluding the bus, and concentrated on the one excluding the bus; then concluded that even if you exclude the bus the average occupancy on weekends went up.
David Kane argues that, according to a model that treats the bus as if it were a car you find two things: 1) the average occupancy on weekends goes up, but 2) the variance goes up so fast that you can no longer exclude the possibility that the average occupancy during weekends went down even though all of your observations went up. In fact, David Kane’s model is so weird that it does not exclude the possibility that the average occupancy of all weekend cars is negative.
Most of us are saying that a model that allows for negative average occupancy is not a good model and should not be used to estimate the difference between the average occupancy on weekdays and weekends. But here’s the kicker: David Kane isn’t just saying that the Roberts team should have included the bus. He’s charging that the Roberts team excluded the bus (i.e., Falluja) because they wanted to hide the fact that, using his weird model that they didn’t use, you couldn’t exclude the possibility that the average car occupancy on weekends dropped."
Another conspiracy, maybe? Or just really bad karma on the behalf of the Bush admin: bad luck in all surveys?
Just a moment ago you were talking about the difficulty of finding a pre-war death rate. How does this difficulty arise if the Iraqis were so meticulous in keeping records?
Says who?
And why wasn't it easy in other warzones?
Why does a central count of issued death certificates always under-count the number of deaths in war-zones?
Sorry, but you are clinging to straws. Why don't you just admit that the John Hopkins studies were bogus from the outset. You'll sleep better at night.
Because then the NEJM would have to be bogus too. It agrees with Lancet-1.
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Beerina
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"War causes casualties. News at 11."
However fumble-fingered it may be, it is nevertheless an attempt to free tens of millions of people.
George Washington shouldn't have done it. Think of all the excess people who died.
FDR and Ike shouldn't have done it. Think of all the excess people who died.
I'm sorry, but "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from this Earth".
While studies like this are useful to minimize things, and for practical considerations, to sit there in a free nation and wring your hands over whether you should do this based on this statistic alone is really unconscionable.
However fumble-fingered it may be, it is nevertheless an attempt to free tens of millions of people.
George Washington shouldn't have done it. Think of all the excess people who died.
FDR and Ike shouldn't have done it. Think of all the excess people who died.
I'm sorry, but "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from this Earth".
While studies like this are useful to minimize things, and for practical considerations, to sit there in a free nation and wring your hands over whether you should do this based on this statistic alone is really unconscionable.
BeAChooser
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I didn't say the NEJM survey was perfect. I just said it was statistically far better than either John Hopkins (Lancet) survey. By a large margin both in terms of number of clusters in Anbar and numbers of households surveyed. Which totally invalidates your suggestion that the reason the number of violent deaths in the NEJM study is so much smaller than in the Lancet studies is that they under-surveyed Anbar in comparison to the Lancet studies. That suggestion is just plain FALSE. Plus, the NEJM surveyors don't appear to have had an axe to grind against Bush, the military, the war and America. They haven't done what those associated with the Lancet reports did ... make politically charged public statements, misstate facts, campaign as democrats, etc.
They don't. Do you know the number of Iraqis the anti-Bush community insisted were dying in Iraq every year before we ever invaded? There are many estimates. But I think its CONSERVATIVE to conclude that under the policy of containment after the first Gulf War, at least 200,000 excess Iraqis died at the hands of the regime or as a direct consequence of its policies.
Prior to the war, the UN and WHO, in studies that were championed by the folks now on the anti-war side of this issue, said that Iraqis were dying at
the rate of many, many thousands a month, principally because they weren't getting the food, clean water, sanitation and medical treatment they needed ... things that the Coalition has worked hard to provide since Saddam was toppled. Make no mistake, Saddam deliberately held back billions of dollars in resources that could have saved many of those lives. He deliberately engaged in policies to increase the toll amongst certain ethnic groups ... both to solidify his hold on Iraq and use as a bargaining chip in trying to get the sanctions removed. In three years time, since the invasion, surely several hundred thousand more innocent people would have died regardless of whether we invaded or not. To think otherwise is purely delusional.
You cannot ignore what your side was saying before the invasion. The United Nations before the war conducted a large study (which was blessed by the Lancet, by the way) that found the overall death rate was well over 7 per 1000 per year. The World Health Organization said it was 8 per 1000 per year. Compared to the John Hopkin's claims of 5 and 5.5 per 1000. Compared to NEJM's claim that only 3 per 1000 were dying each year.
Even more persuasive are figures from UNICEF, which in a 2002 study of 24,000 households found the infant mortality rate in Iraq in 2002 was 102 deaths per 1000 infants. That compares to the John Hopkins study claim of 29 per 1000. This is a rate more than three times higher than the John Hopkin's surveys claimed. And even after the invasion, JH claimed rate is STILL less than UNICEFs. I have a hard time believing that after the war, with the billions of dollars in resources (medical, food, water, sanitation, etc) thrown at Iraq that the infant mortality rate didn't drop from what it was pre-war. That is far more logical than the left's current claim that it increased. But then logic never has been the left's strong point.
Go ahead. Prove that the 1 Anbar cluster in the Lancet 1 study or the 3 Anbar clusters in the Lancet 2 study were not visited in NEJM study ... which visited 37 clusters in Anbar. I bet you can't. You want to know why I know you can't? First, because the Anbar clusters in the both Lancet reports were located in Falluja, which almost certainly was surveyed by the NEJM study.
And do you know what the Lancet 1 researchers ended up doing with their one Falluja data point? They threw it out of their study results because it was such an obvious flyer. They didn't ask why ... or question whether the reasons it was a flyer might not have also influenced their other data points ... they just threw it out. So it turns out that they didn't even include Falluja data in the first Lancet study. The truth is that they just GUESSED a death rate for Anbar province in the Lancet 1 report. And obviously guessed VERY high, based on their own biases.
And curiously, the public Lancet 2 report gives no details as to the location of it's Anbar clusters. I did find this source, however ... http://cran.r-project.org/doc/vignettes/lancet.iraqmortality/mortality.pdf which states that "Cluster 51 was in Falluja. The other two Anbar clusters are 30 and 31. Burnham (2007) mentions that they sampled three clusters in Falluja (which is in the Anbar province) even though the plan called for only one cluster. They did this because the Falluja data from Roberts et al. (2004) was such an outlier that they wanted a better estimate for this violent city. Having interviewed in three clusters, the authors then selected one of the three randomly. The selected cluster was the least violent of the three. This was cluster 51. The other two clusters in Falluja were numbered 50 and 52. The authors have declined to release the data for these two clusters. Rather than picking one of the three clusters to use, averaging over all three would generate a more precise estimate of the change in mortality." So here again, John Hopkins only sampled in Falluja in Anbar and for some reason again played games with the data, treating two of the results as outliers.
And I'll bet you when they release the raw data we will learn that the NEJM survey, in addition to surveying Falluja also surveyed some other locations in Anbar. Again, a big improvement over the John Hopkins surveys.
Go ahead ... tell us the source of the CIA figure. Bet you can't.
So we should have just let the mullahs in Iran dominate the region? Is that going to be your party's foreign policy in the future too? We supported Stalin in WW2 even though we knew he was a "bad man". Are you suggesting we shouldn't have? The world is not neat and tidy like those on your side of the fence seem to believe. There are no black and whites. Yes, some of what we did with Saddam was a mistake ... but had we not invaded Iraq that "bad man" would still be in power killing hundreds of thousands of people. And right now he might have a reconstituted WMD program. And then what would you suggest? You need to live in the present and deal with present problems.
Your own source proves my point. Saddam was a very bad man, attacking not only other countries (Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) but his own people. And not just developing but using WMD on them. Do you know that they found tapes of him ordering his generals in the 1991 war to launch chemical weapon attacks on all major Israeli cities had we tried to topple his government? Israel was not even a combatant in that war. Allowing Saddam to remain in power and reconstitute his WMD arsenal (which even Bush's critics now admit he fully intended to do once the sanctions were gone and those sanctions would have soon been gone or ignored had we not invaded), would have undoubtedly led to far more Iraqi and foreign deaths than any number of Iraqis that have died since the invasion. Furthermore, a large number of those deaths, both due to direct violence and other causes, can be laid squarely at the feet of al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists who have been waging a war against the Iraqi people in Iraq since the invasion. Not just murdering tens of thousands but destroying the infrastructure needed to reduce the numbers dying due to living conditions. Plus, you overlook the fact that there is a wider war going on than just Iraq. And if those terrorists weren't killing innocents in Iraq, they'd be doing it somewhere else. There will be a battlefield SOMEWHERE. And clearly those terrorists fear Iraq becoming successful. That should give you and the rest of the America-bad/abandon-Iraq now movement a clue. But I guess that's asking too much.
NONSENSE. Lancet 1's results were no closer than Lancet 2's to the NEJM results. Lancet 1 claimed 100,000 died (mostly due to violence) over an 18 month period following the invasion. The NEJM results cover a 40 month period (they don't break it down by period), and in case you didn't notice, the Lancet 2 results claimed the most violent periods were AFTER the initial 18 month period. Or don't you agree with that assertion?
Is that why the linked article in the opening post discusses the Lancet 2 results rather than the Lancet 1 results?
Don't worry, I saw your calculation comparing NEJM to Lancet 1. You totally overlooked the fact that Lancet 1 said most of those (59%) were due to violence while NEJM concluded only about 15 percent were. The cause matters a great deal. And yes, I know you now don't want to talk about Lancet 2 which was touted to be an IMPROVED study over Lancet 1 ... by the John Hopkins researchers. But we will anyway. Is that new math?
Two points. The first is that Richard Garfield and Les Roberts were outright dishonest. They tried to make interviewers and their audience think that they confirmed ALL the deaths with death certificates. That is simply not true. And second, if the statistics are valid, why weren't anti-Bush sources like the LATimes able to confirm even 10 percent of the death certificates Roberts and Garfield claimed? Why have the Lancet researchers been unable to provide statements from doctors who wrote death certificates that weren't recorded? Why haven't copies of any of the death certificates they claim been shown to other researchers? In fact, how in the world could such a high percentage of those surveyed (over 90%) even manage to produce a death certificate in the 15 minute window that supposedly each one of these interviews took? And they were only asked about a death certificate at the very last moment. So they had mere minutes to locate and show it to the researchers. That sounds more than a little suspicious alone.
No, as the source I provided said, only a small portion of the Lancet 2 data has been released and only to non-critics ... and only recently after more than a year of trying to get any released. And if we're just talking about Lancet 1 then should I point out that Les Roberts has refused to release ANY raw data on that study?
ROTFLOL! Do you know that Burnham admitted that they may not even know all the names and addresses they visited?
That's how utterly sloppy their study was conducted.Maybe you'll find these to be useful too:
http://politicscentral.com/2006/10/11/jaccuse_iraq_the_model_respond.php "I am a sociologist who has been looking closely at the Lancet study and wanted to say that I find many of the comments useful here, as I craft a critique of the Lancet study. ... snip ... From what I know about this sampling, the gravest error was that they should have seperated Iraq into three regions and then sampled the same way within these regions: Kurdistan, Central Iraq, an Southern Iraq. They would have found virtually no excess death in Kurdistan (in fact, maybe even an overall improvement), in Central Iraq, probably something of the order of magnitude they actually did discover, and in Southern Iraq, much less than in Central Iraq. To have 25% of the sample be from Baghdad and extrapolate to, say, Kurdistan, is like taking the crime rate from Washington DC and extrapolating to Montana. This is very bad methodology ... "
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. In your heart, you know the reason.
http://politicscentral.com/2006/10/11/jaccuse_iraq_the_model_respond.php "At the very least, The Lancet should have asked the authors to acknowledge their bias in their conflict of interest statement. Unfortunately, the Editor of the journal, one Richard Horton, is a more outspoken critic of the Iraq War and what he calls the "axis of Anglo-American Imperialism" than even the authors of this political paper. And so he let slide the journal's policy of full disclosure of potential conflicts of interest." And so did MIT.
http://www.iq.undp.org/ILCS/PDF/Analytical Report-English.pdf 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 on what Dr Pedersen thinks about the John Hopkins work: http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/...-with-jon-pedersen-on-iraq-mortality-studies/
Debarati Guha-Sapir (director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels) was quoted in an interview for Nature saying that Burnham's team have published "inflated" numbers that "discredit" the process of estimating death counts. (http://www.prwatch.org/node/5339 And according to another interviewer, "She has some methodological concerns about the paper, including the use of local people — who might have opposed the occupation — as interviewers. She also points out that the result does not fit with any she has recorded in 15 years of studying conflict zones. Even in Darfur, where armed groups have wiped out whole villages, she says that researchers have not recorded the 500 predominately violent deaths per day that the Johns Hopkins team estimates are occurring in Iraq."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/314/5798/396 Madelyn Hicks, a psychiatrist and public health researcher at King's College London in the U.K., says she "simply cannot believe" the paper's claim that 40 consecutive houses were surveyed in a single day. "There is simply not enough time in the day," she says, "so I have to conclude that something else is going on for at least some of these interviews." Households may have been "prepared by someone, made ready for rapid reporting," she says, which "raises the issue of bias being introduced." Dr. Hicks published (http://www.hicn.org/research_design/rdn3.pdf ) a clarification of these concerns titled "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Were valid and ethical field methods used in this survey?", which concluded that, "In view of the significant questions that remain unanswered about the feasibility of their study’s methods as practiced at the level of field interviews, it is necessary that Burnham and his co-authors provide detailed, data-based evidence that all reported interviews were indeed carried out, and how this was done in a valid manner. In addition, they need to explain and to demonstrate to what degree their published methodology was adhered to or departed from across interviews, and to demonstrate convincingly that interviews were done in accordance with the standards of ethical research. If the authors choose not to provide this further analysis of their data, they should provide their raw data so that these aspects can be examined by others. Even in surveys on the sensitive and potentially risky subject of community violence, adequately anonymized data are expected to be sufficient for subsequent reanalysis and to be available for review. In the case of studies accepted for publication by the Lancet, all studies are expected to be able to provide their raw data." But as I noted, they haven't or can't.
Beth Daponte, senior research scholar at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, after reading the Lancet article told Fred Kaplan "It attests to the difficulty of doing this sort of survey work during a war. … No one can come up with any credible estimates yet, at least not through the sorts of methods used here." http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/1818 "So the pre-war CDR that the two Lancet studies yield seems too low. It may not be wrong, but the authors should provide a credible explanation of why their pre-war CDR is nearly half that of the UN Population Division. If the pre-war mortality rate was too low and/or if the population estimates were too high – because, for example, they ignored outflows of refugees from Iraq – the resulting estimates of the number of Iraqi "excess deaths" would be inflated."
Professor Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway's Economics Department, and physicists Professor Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley of Oxford University published a highly detailed paper ("http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Economics/Research/conflict-analysis/iraq-mortality/BiasPaper.html ). They claim (http://www.rhul.ac.uk/messages/press/message.asp?ref_no=367 ) the John Hopkin "study’s methodology is fundamentally flawed and will result in an over-estimation of the death toll in Iraq. The study suffers from "main street bias" by only surveying houses that are located on cross streets next to main roads or on the main road itself. However many Iraqi households do not satisfy this strict criterion and had no chance of being surveyed. Main street bias inflates casualty estimates since conflict events such as car bombs, drive-by shootings, artillery strikes on insurgent positions, and market place explosions gravitate toward the same neighbourhood types that the researchers surveyed." More on their work can be found here: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Economics/Research/conflict-analysis/iraq-mortality/index.html .
And then there's an article in Science magazine by John Bohannon which describes some of the above professors criticisms, as well as the response from Gilbert Burnham. Burnham claimed that such streets were included and that the methods section of the published paper is oversimplified. Bohannon says that Burnham told Science that he does not know exactly how the Iraqi team conducted its survey; and that the details about neighborhoods surveyed were destroyed "in
case they fell into the wrong hands and could increase the risks to residents." Michael Spagat says the scientific community should call for an in-depth investigation into the researchers' procedures. "It is almost a crime to let it go unchallenged," says Johnson. In a letter to Science, the John Hopkins authors claim that Bohannon misquoted Burnham. Bohannon defended his comments as accurate, citing Burnham saying, in response to questions about why details of selecting "residential streets that that did not cross the main avenues" that "in trying to shorten the paper from its original very large size, this bit got chopped, unfortunately." Apparently, the details which were destroyed refer to the "scraps" of paper on which streets and addresses were written to "randomly" choose households". Such a well conducted survey. ROTFLOL!
http://magicstatistics.com/2006/10/...aths-is-statistically-unsound-and-unreliable/ "By StatGuy ... snip ... I put on my professional statistician's hat and had a good long look at the study. In my opinion, it is statistically unsound and unreliable. The study violates the basic principle of good statistical practice by relying on a non-random sample survey. Also, the article's description of survey operations raises reliability, and perhaps even credibility, questions." Read the rest of that article ... it's just full of questions about the validity of the John Hopkins work. And here's another article by the same author you might like to read: http://magicstatistics.com/2006/10/18/lancet-researchers-ignored-superior-study-on-iraqi-deaths/ "Lancet researchers ignored superior study on Iraqi deaths" . And another: http://magicstatistics.com/2006/10/22/main-street-bias-in-lancet-study/ "'Main street bias' in Lancet study".
And how about some of the members of Iraq Body Count? How about John Sloboda or Joshua Dougherty (AKA joshd)? They've made pretty strong criticisms of the John Hopkins' work. Want to try an smear them too?
Give it up. The John Hopkins studies on Iraq mortality are BOGUS.
There was no difficulty before the war. The UN, WHO and UNICEF conducted large studies in Iraq, using Iraqi records, no doubt. And found rates that are starkly at odds with those found by a method where surveyors (who were openly anti-American and anti-war) depended on honesty from folks who likely were hostile to the US and toppling of Saddam.
Again, provide us with the name ONE Iraqi doctor who says he wrote out hundreds of death certificates (because each Iraqi doctor would have had to do given the numbers that the John Hopkins researchers claimed) and did not report those deaths to the hospitals, morgues or the health ministry. And where are the bodies, FireGarden? Were are the mass graves?
By 90%? Prove that's the case.
No, it does not. But nice try at rewriting history. I leave you with this;
http://www.seixon.com/blog/archives/2006/10/science_exit_le.html
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
I am always amazed how right they are. IIRC, they are always correct to about 10%. That accuracy makes the death toll high either way.
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
Is it up to you to decide for them what they want and how they should get it?
FireGarden
Philosopher
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I agree it's better. But they themselves know that the data they collected wasn't sufficient. Which is why they tried to fill the gap using IBC data.
As I've said in other threads,
I'll wait for the experts to decide whether the way in which NEJM filled the gaps was sound.
That's not being denied.
But you don't seem to understand what excess death means. You seem to think it means 'avoidable deaths'. They are deaths above and beyond the previous rate.
And, with all these different numbers, you still have it in you claim fraud regarding the Lancet studies. The Lancet numbers were close to those quoted by the CIA: 6.02 per 1000 per year
http://www.bondtalk.com/factbook2002/geos/iz.html
I don't know who the CIA's source was. Maybe you should accuse them of fraud.
On infant mortality, let's wait for the new study to release its findings.
1. The city of Fallujah is too big to be a single cluster.
2. I searched a pdf of the NEJM report for 'Fallujah' -- no occurrence.
3. My point was to your suggestion that Lancet-2 deliberatley picked a dangerous place to make Bush look bad: "I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they made sure those clusters were particularly unfriendly to Americans so that the results would be highly skewed to the high side both in terms of deaths and cause."
It was an outlier. Read the traffic example I posted. What do you suggest they do with the data? If you agree with David Kane, then go discuss it on Deltoid because that's just to weird for me.
So it turns out that they didn't even include Falluja data in the first Lancet study. The truth is that they just GUESSED a death rate for Anbar province in the Lancet 1 report. And obviously guessed VERY high, based on their own biases.
No they did not just guess. If you leave the Fallujah data in: you get a higher number of deaths. Read the traffic example -- again. The only reason Kane wants it left in is so the confidence interval is widened.
You do realise that the average of 3 data points is not going to be lower than the lowest of 3 data points?
Try it: 56, 45, 87
Is the average less than 45?
(No calculators)
I might if I tried, but what would be the point? Are you accusing the CIA of being in league with Burham et al?
I'm pointing out the hypocrisy.
You supported Saddam in favour of the Iranians, even though Saddam was worse. Just like America supported Pinochet, the Shah and others.
A just foreign policy would support democracy. America does not support democracy. America supports America. If you think that is a good thing, then say so. But don't pretend you are in Iraq for the sake of Iraqis.
That should give you and the rest of the America-bad/abandon-Iraq now movement a clue. But I guess that's asking too much.
Once bitten, twice shy.
(Unless you fail to learn from history).
NEJM does break it down by period. See table 4.
The numbers in my opening post are from Deltoid -- where professionals debate. (And David Kane also posts).
Is that why the linked article in the opening post discusses the Lancet 2 results rather than the Lancet 1 results?
The article is linked because it's the source of the quote. Sorry if that was confusing.
How does saying that Lancet-1 "labelled most as being violent" overlook that most of the deaths were reported as violent? And NEJM estimates a third of deaths were due to violence, if memory serves.
And yes, I know you now don't want to talk about Lancet 2 which was touted to be an IMPROVED study over Lancet 1 ... by the John Hopkins researchers. But we will anyway.
I've talked about it in at least 3 other threads. This was supposed to be a new thread.
It's reading comprehension. They did not claim to investigate every death. They made a claim about the deaths they investigated.
No, as the source I provided said, only a small portion of the Lancet 2 data has been released and only to non-critics ... and only recently after more than a year of trying to get any released. And if we're just talking about Lancet 1 then should I point out that Les Roberts has refused to release ANY raw data on that study?
Lancet-2 data released in April 2007:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/04/lancet_data_released.php
The data from Lancet was also released. Search deltoid for references to it.
Not if they're the standard of David Kane.
Did you read the traffic example? Read it again.
http://www.odihpn.org/report.asp?id=2838
But it's all part of the conspiracy.
Elind
Philosopher
What's your point? Is this the fault of the US perhaps?
Better to have a dictatorship that has summary executions and gassing of villages, or invading neighbors so as to keep street crime under control?
This kind of "study", based on estimates from interviews as much as anything, has one purpose. Politics.
Iraq Has a Lower Violent Death Rate Than Washington, Baltimore or Atlanta
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1633429/posts
"Venezuela has undeniably become one of the most violent countries in the world,"
http://www.freeserbia.net/Articles/2006/DonChavez.html
http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/murder.html
TOP TEN COUNTRIES FOR HOMICIDE, 2003
COUNTRY
PER 100,000
(1) Colombia 63 (2) South Africa 51 (3) Jamaica 32 (4) Venezuela 32 (5) Russia 19 (6) Mexico 13 (7) Lithuania 10 (8) Estonia 10 (9) Latvia 10 (10) Belarus 9
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
One guiding principle could be "First, do no harm".
Elind
Philosopher
That may also be the last thing you don't do. Get real.
Mycroft
High Priest of Ed
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Here is a source that puts Iraq's pre-war death rate at 6.02 per 1000.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/factbook/geos/iz.html
Todays CIA factbook puts the death rate for the United States at 8.26 per 1000
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
So what am I missing?
FireGarden
Philosopher
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It's somewhat academic now, what with Lancet-1 being so old. I just wanted some input on how the numbers add up between that study and the new one published in NEJM.
Yes, it's politically important. Which is why there have been so many threads in the politics section.
Better to have democracy, which is why it would be better for America to stop supporting dictators. It's still doing so with Mubarak, Musharaff and the Saudis.
"the violent death rate in Iraq is 25.71 per 100,000"
That's .2571 per 1000
Which is less than the figure given by the NEJM study:
1.1 per 1000 (from memory)
or 110 per 100,000
Last edited:
FireGarden
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I missed the same thing a few months back. I'd noticed the age reference, but hadn't bothered to actually take a look at how extremely young the Iraqi population is:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93395
Almost 40% of Iraqis are under 15
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iraq
Which is why places like Jordan (0-14 years: 33.8%) have a lower death rate than places like Italy (0-14 years: 14.8%)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Jordan
Jordan -- 2.68 deaths/1,000 population (2007 est.)
Italy -- 10.5 deaths/1,000 population (2007 est.)
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2066.html
Iraq's death rate is double that of Jordan, then.
Mind you, the CIA reckons that the death rate in Iraq has dropped compared to 2002. I don't know of any survey which has suggested that. So I'm still missing something.
BeAChooser
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But you were trying to claim that the reason NEJM's numbers are lower than John Hopkins is that they didn't sample Anbar as well. And that is simply not true. NEJM did a better job of sampling Anbar and elsewhere. They also did a better job of estimating those areas that weren't visited whereas JH just guessed based presumably on their own personal dislike of Bush, the war and Americans.
Wrong. I do understand what excess death means. Which is why the pre-war mortality number is so very, very important. Why are the poll based ones so starkly different from those based on UN, WHO and UNICEF studies before the war when records could have been examined? Some of the higher pre-war numbers were even developed by Lancet researchers.
I asked you before to tell me the actual source of the CIA numbers.
Then how can you give them any credibility?
Irrelevant. That doesn't counteract any of the points I made. BOTH Lancet studies only sampled Falluja in Anbar and both threw out some or all of their results for that city as fliers.
So what? The report doesn't actually identify the locations of it's 1000+ clusters. But we know that Falluja at the time the study was done was safe to visit. NEJM said they didn't visit places because they weren't safe. So do you want to bet that NEJM didn't visit Falluja?
And why wouldn't they, if their underlying motivation was a dislike of Bush and the war? We already know they are willing to LIE about their results in public interviews and articles. That MIT article is an example. In it Roberts states that 100,000 CIVILIANS died. But his own report states that they didn't even ask if the dead were civilians, insurgents, Iraqi military, etc.
But WHY was it an outlier? They didn't really try to understand that question or wonder whether the same factors causing it to be an outlier might also have affected their other results.
Yes, they did just guess. Even though they dropped the Falluja data point as a flyer, they still made an estimate for the number of people killed in the Anbar province. They didn't just not include Anbar in their estimate. They guessed.
But WHY did they drop the two most violent data points if they were trying to be more precise? Again, they made no real attempt to understand why the data was seemingly a flyer. And because they didn't do that, we can't know if the data point they did use wasn't itself influenced by those same factors ... to the high side. Or that other data points in the two studies weren't similarly affected. Perhaps the underlying reason the data points were high is Riyadh Lafta, one of the authors and the Iraqi who was hired to run both field surveys. In Falluja, Lafta recorded 52 deaths ... that is 71 percent of the violent in the entire study. That number was equivalent to 50000 - 70000 dead for a city that size. And that was before the US marines were sent in and drove the terrorists out. NOONE other than the researchers believe that number. http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm "Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center and a past president of the American Statistical Association, said, 'They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication.' The weakest part of the Lancet surveys is their reliance on an unsupervised Iraqi survey team, contended Scheuren, who has recently trained survey workers in Iraq."
The point is that an unsourced data point is meaningless. You know NOTHING about it yet you accept it blindly.
So am I.
Really? The Iranians forced 9 and 10 year old boys into Iraqi mine fields in order to clear them for their soldiers. And who do you think has been behind many of bombings against civilian targets in Iraq and other terrorist attacks around the world?
Just curious. What country are you posting from?
Well Table 2 in the NEJM article ("Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006, January 31, 2008) shows the percentage of deaths after invasion for all ages and indicates that deaths due to injuries (i.e., the sum of intentional, armed conflict, road accidents and unintentional) comprise 23.2 percent of the deaths. Intentional and armed conflict comprised 60.4 percent of the 23.2 percent total. That works out to 14 percent of all deaths being due to intentional violence. Compared to Lancet 1's claimed 59 percent. As I said.
"Science 20 April 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5823, p. 355 "Iraq Mortality Study Authors Release Data, but Only to Some, Jocelyn Kaiser"
As one person commented at your link: "I don't recall ever seeing a release agreement quite like this. Serious analytic credentials, I can see. No second-party release, I can see. Written request on organizational letterhead with signed agreement, I can see. I've done all of that before. I've never seen
'The data will be provided to organizations or groups without publicly stated views that would cause doubt about their objectivity in analyzing the data.'"
And according to your link, they actually were refusing to release their data to certain critics. That condition on release is a joke (but not a funny one) given the totally non-objective behavior demonstrated by John Hopkins researchers both before, during and after the study in terms of making politically charged statements and actively working on democrat party causes, one being to end the war. And you should read through the rest of the comments at that link. There are many just like that one.
Well I'll have to take your word that Lancet 1 data was released because I can't find any announcement of that. And it's not totally clear that Lancet 2 data has actually been released ... or at least whether what they released was trustworthy. http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm from January 4th of this year notes concerns like this:
"The surveyors said that 1.7 percent of households -- fewer than one in 50 -- were unoccupied or uncooperative, even though questioners visited each house only once on one day; that answers were taken only from the household's husband or wife, not from in-laws or adult children; and that householders had reason to fear that their participation would expose them to threats from armed groups. To Kane (BAC - a statistician and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Statistics at Harvard University) , the study's reported response rate of more than 98 percent "makes no sense," if only because many male heads of households would be at work or elsewhere during the day and Iraqi women would likely refuse to participate."
"The survey teams failed to collect the fraud-preventing demographic data that pollsters routinely gather."
"The survey teams said they confirmed most deaths by examining government-issued death certificates, but they took no photographs of those certificates. "Confirmation of deaths through death certificates is a linchpin for their story," Spagat told NJ. "But they didn't record (or won't provide) information about these death certificates that would make them traceable."
"the authors did release a disk of the surveyors' collated data, including tables showing how often the survey teams said they requested to see, and saw, the death certificates. But those tables are suspicious, in part, because they show data-heaping, critics said. For example, the database reveals that 22 death certificates for victims of violence and 23 certificates for other deaths were declared by surveyors and households to be missing or lost. That similarity looks reasonable, but Spagat noticed that the 23 missing certificates for nonviolent deaths were distributed throughout eight of the 16 surveyed provinces, while all 22 missing certificates for violent deaths were inexplicably heaped in the single province of Nineveh. That means the surveyors reported zero missing or lost certificates for 180 violent deaths in 15 provinces outside Nineveh. The odds against such perfection are at least 10,000 to 1, Spagat told NJ."
"Lafta's team reported 24 car bomb deaths in early July, as well as one nonviolent death, in "Cluster 33" in Baghdad. ... snip ... According to a data table reviewed by Spagat and Kane, the team recorded the violent deaths as taking place in early July and did not explain why they failed to see death certificates for any of the 24 victims. The surveyors did remember, however, to ask for the death certificate of the one person who had died peacefully in that cluster. The Cluster 33 data is curious for other reasons as well. The 24 Iraqis who died violently were neatly divided among 18 houses -- 12 houses reported one death, and six houses reported two deaths, according to the authors' data. This means, Spagat said, that the survey team found a line of 40 households that neatly shared almost half of the deaths suffered when a marketplace bomb exploded among a crowd of people drawn from throughout the broader neighborhood."
That source say nothing about the percentage of death certificates handed out by doctors and not reported to higher authorities.
Well if you consider IBC part of the conspiracy ...
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/reality-checks/
BeAChooser
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We invaded Europe in WW2 knowing that tens of thousands of innocent civilians would be killed during the invasion. Should we not have invaded?
BeAChooser
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BeAChooser
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No matter how many times you claim that, it won't be true.
And how are you going to get that democracy ... by running from Iraq? By abandoning Israel? By not helping the others against the efforts of al-Qaeda? Do you honestly think that Iran and al-Qaeda will install democracies in any country they manage to overthrow? Is that what you think Afghanistan was prior to the Taliban's overthrow ... a democracy? Sometimes you have to deal with things as they are and get to where you are going one step at a time ... gradually. You won't see democracies spring up around the world if you allow islamo-fanatics to win this conflict. Whether you admit it or not, America and what it has done time and time again when it comes to totalitarian nations is still the world's best hope. If it were up to you, Saddam would still be in power. How about the Taliban? Would you have invaded there? Would you have even stopped Saddam in 1991 when he invaded Kuwait and Saudi-Arabia? Would you have not supported Stalin against Hitler? How far do your convictions lead you?