See other Pious Perverts Articles
Title: BeAChooser Bozo Count at 40 Plus and Counting - A Possible Site Record
Source:
Minerva
URL Source: http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=45820&Disp=409#C409
Published: Feb 19, 2007
Author: Minerva
Post Date: 2007-02-19 21:59:28 by Minerva
Keywords: None
Views: 27159
Comments: 375
Last night I took a guess at Beachy's bozo count. Today he spilled the beans and indicated that the number I guessed, between 40 and 50, was substantially correct. What does this mean? Well .... it means he is a piss poor excuse for excuse for an advocate. Nobody takes him serious. This is probably why Goldi booted him.
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#153. To: christine, innieway, ALL (#146)
Guess christine missed my post #145. That's what happens when you bozo yourself. And I'm equally certain she missed my side of the conversation in discussions with innieway. She sure has a lot of faith in innieway. ROTFLOL!
Which link on this thread is dead, Ricky? I'd be happy to fix it if you only point out specifically which link is dead. You can do that, can't you? So Ricky, do you think your logic is sound when you say the ten thousand plus structural engineers, demolition experts and macro-world physicists in the world who have missed the fact that the WTC towers were brought down by explosives (and that would be virtually all of them) are "morons"? ROTFLOL!
Ah, so you didn't bozo yourself after all. ROTFLOL!
And for that I thank you. But I would like to see specifically how you worded the question you ask him, since you claimed to have passed on MY questions. Maybe you could just pass on this, and see what he has to say: ****************** 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 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. So why are FD4UMers so voraciously defending JH's estimates? 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 largers 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. 3. A recent UN Development Program study, http://www.iq.undp.org/ILCS/PDF/Analytical%20Report%20-%20English.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. Why is there no mention of this study in the lastest John Hopkin's report (which claims its results verify the first JH report)? Why was this discrepancy not addressed by the Lancet *peer* reviewers? 4. According to the latest John Hopkins report, 92 percent of those who claimed deaths in their families (501 out of 545) were able to provide death certificates to prove it. 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. Even if that investigation were off a factor of two, there is still a huge discrepancy. 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. 5. A principle author of both John Hopkins studies, Les Roberts, has publically stated he disliked Bush (not unexpected given that he is an active democRAT) and the war. He has admitted that he released the study when he did to negatively influence the election against Bush and the GOP. And he has admitted that most of those he hired to conduct the study in Iraq "HATE" (that was his word) the Americans. None of that is a good basis for conducting a non-partisan study. 6. Nor is the behavior of the Lancet. They've not only failed to ask important questions during their *peer* reviews, they admit they greatly abbreviated that peer review process for the 2004 report so the results could be published in time to influence the 2004 election. They also reported on their own website in 2004, that the deaths estimated by John Hopkins were comprised solely of civilians. But the study made no such claim. In fact, it clearly states 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. 7. 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 only confirmed 7% of the deaths. And Les Roberts did the exact same thing in another interview. 8. 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 is 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? 9. 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 address this disparity? 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 review of Les Roberts' study? 10. There is NO physical evidence whatsoever to support the claim that 655,000 Iraqis were killed 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 is NO physical evidence. 11. Dahr Jamail is an example of the above. He is viralently anti-American. He has close ties to the insurgents and arabs. So 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 when he first started reporting from Iraq, which was during the period covered by not only the second but the first John Hopkins study. You won't find any indication. 12. Last year was arguably the most violent since the invasion. Yet even the Iraqis reported the number killed was on the order of 16,000 in that year ... 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. 13. But the discrepancy is even worse than that. As noted by the author of this blog, 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?" 14. 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." Then why didn't they keep the Fallujah data point? 15. 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 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 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 entire 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 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? **************** He can number his responses to match the numbering above. But do we believe what is just another claim? Does he have any documentary proof of it? For example, did he verify that the doctors who supposedly signed the death certificates provided as proof did indeed sign them? I have no interest at all in your personal and professional information. I just ask you to post the text of the email you sent to "Les" so we can see exactly what he was responding to in his email to you. Now why would you have a problem doing that?
Lets not forget: ROTFLOL... We've all had this response from him without "discussing the issue" which was posed, or answering the legitimate question.
No matter how noble the objectives of a government; if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion - it is an EVIL government. Eric Hoffer
FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES. EVERYONE GO TO MY POST #143, THEN TO THE 2 LINKS IN THAT POST. THEY CAN JUDGE FOR THEMSELVES IF YOU MADE ANY EFFORT WHATSOEVER TO DISCUSS ANYTHING I POSED.
No matter how noble the objectives of a government; if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion - it is an EVIL government. Eric Hoffer
True.
Israel is getting US into WWIII.
a. It's Dr. Roberts to you, oozer, not Les. Please refer to Dr. Roberts with the respect and courtesy that his academic credentials demand. b. I told you what I asked him and I cut and pasted his reply in message #142. What do you think he was responding to, but the question I asked him ie. about death certificates and why his team's numbers differed from that of the LA Times. Do Dr. Roberts' remarks seem like he was responding to a question about his hair color or shoe size? c. You know what oozer, I'm not your servant, that's my "problem" with doing anything further for you. So no, I'm not going back into my email folder to cut and paste the exact wording of my message to Dr. Roberts. And no, I am not going to make a pest of myself by contacting Dr. Roberts yet again with more of your idiotic questions. Buy a clue, BAC, you are not worth his time and attention, nor mine either, frankly. You have worn out my patience reserves. I can barely be civil to you now. I have responded to you thusfar only because I hated to see you throw dust on the credibility of the JH's study and also because a significant number of 4um posters, whose opinions I respect, have expended THEIR energies and time on rebutting you on this particular thread. Get it, BAC? It's for THEIR benefit, not yours, that I contacted Dr. Roberts the first time. d. BAC, you have buried yourself. In the course of this discussion thread you have revealed yourself to be a sad little specimen of troll. Didn't they teach you at Troll School to keep your questions simple and few in number and your posts short? e. However, while on the subject of other 4um posters' benefit, here's the link to an 8 minute audio clip of a Randi Rhodes' interview with Dr. Roberts. It is excellent and I recommend it to all for your listening pleaure. Randi Rhodes starts off the interview with a sound bite from the doofusinchief about his take on findings of the JH's study. Then the interview moves on to the internationally respected credentialed professional, Dr. Roberts. Once you hear this interview, I guarantee there will be no question in your minds as to the crediblity of Dr. Roberts in contrast to the vacuousness of the other side. Enjoy! http://www.info rmationclearinghouse.info/article15275.htm "Randi Rhodes Interviews Dr. Les Roberts; co-author of the Johns Hopkins Iraq Mortality Study" 10/11/06
That is worth repeating. Thanks for your efforts in posting the truth concerning this important matter.
That is worth repeating. Thanks for your efforts in posting the truth concerning this important matter. I second that.
Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is. ~George W. Bush YES, it WILL matter in the long run!!! This is the first truly intelligent thing I've EVER known you to say!!! It will matter because: The cronies you LOVE to support made an illegal invasion of another country, based upon lies, with a "benefit" in mind all along. And your support of them makes you implicit in the crime. There have been MANY of "these little ones" offended (I would certainly called maimed, orphaned, or killed as being "offended"), and in the judgment, YOU WILL GET WHAT YOU DESERVE!!!
No matter how noble the objectives of a government; if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion - it is an EVIL government. Eric Hoffer
i listened. the comment at the beginning by the Liar in Chief was impressive. not.
BAC:What I object to is your claim that those five were setup to videotape "the first impact". You have NO PROOF whatsoever of that, honway. In case anyone needed confirmation of the sad little specimen of a troll description: The Record New Jersey News Five men detained as suspected conspirators By PAULO LIMA Staff Writer However, sources close to the investigation said they found other evidence linking the men to the bombing plot. "There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted," the source said. "It looked like they're hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park." Sources also said that bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if they had detected explosives, although officers were unable to find anything. The FBI seized the van for further testing, authorities said. Sources said the van was stopped as it headed east on Route 3, between the Hackensack River bridge and the Sheraton hotel. As a precaution, police shut down Route 3 traffic in both directions after the stop and evacuated a small roadside motel near the Sheraton. Sources close to the investigation said the men said they were Israeli tourists, but police had not been able to confirm their identities. Authorities would not release their names. East Rutherford officers stopped the van after the FBI's Newark Field Office broadcast an alert asking surrounding police departments to look for a white Chevrolet van, police said. "We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side," said Bergen County Police Chief John Schmidig. "Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down." The East Rutherford officers summoned the county police bomb squad, New Jersey state troopers, and FBI agents, who waited alongside the van as prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office tried to obtain a warrant to search the van late Tuesday, Schmidig said. By 10 p.m., members of the bomb squad were picking through the van and X- raying packages found inside, Schmidig said. Sources said the FBI alert, known as a BOLO or "Be On Lookout," was sent out at 3:31 p.m. It read: "Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center. "Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.
Hey, FM. What's up? Long time no read...
How many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died?
well done, honway. see this is the kind of information which is being exposed because of the sad little specimen of a troll. ;)
Some more of those pesky facts BAC hopes we'll forget.
"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may know peace." -Thomas Paine In a CorporoFascist capitalist society, there is no money in peace, freedom, or a healthy population, and therefore, no incentive to achieve these. sources close to the investigation said they found other evidence linking the men to the bombing plot. "There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted," the source said. "It looked like they're hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park." ---------------------------------------------------------- It does not get any clearer than that,imo.
WTC 7: Silverstein's "Pull It" Explanation Examined (#426) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-26 13:51:15 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL WTC 7: Silverstein's "Pull It" Explanation Examined (#414) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-25 17:34:13 From: BeAChooser To: Red Jones, critter, innieway, all WTC 7: Silverstein's "Pull It" Explanation Examined (#412) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-25 17:29:25 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, Kamala, ALL 9/11 Truth: Steven Jones on WTC 7 and Controlled Demolition (#190) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-23 18:58:50 From: BeAChooser To: Diana, RickyJ, innieway, ALL 9/11 Truth: Steven Jones on WTC 7 and Controlled Demolition (#171) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-23 12:53:53 From: BeAChooser To: innieway 9/11 Truth: Steven Jones on WTC 7 and Controlled Demolition (#132) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-22 19:46:37 From: BeAChooser To: RickyJ, innieway, ALL 9/11 Truth: Steven Jones on WTC 7 and Controlled Demolition (#130) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-22 19:43:08 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL 9/11 Truth: Steven Jones on WTC 7 and Controlled Demolition (#129) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-22 19:38:35 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL 9/11 Truth: Steven Jones on WTC 7 and Controlled Demolition (#126) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-22 19:16:29 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL 9/11 Truth: Steven Jones on WTC 7 and Controlled Demolition (#71) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-22 14:32:06 From: BeAChooser To: intotheabyss, innieway, robin, ALL 9/11 Truth: Steven Jones on WTC 7 and Controlled Demolition (#69) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-22 14:22:21 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 (#199) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-15 13:50:10 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 (#191) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-15 10:46:45 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 (#172) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-14 13:39:26 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 (#164) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-14 12:38:16 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, Diana, ALL An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 (#105) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-13 15:03:49 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 (#64) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-12 21:45:55 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 (#63) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-12 21:44:24 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11 (#39) [Full Thread] Post Date: 2007-02-11 17:52:32 From: BeAChooser To: innieway, ALL
There were other MSM reported and verified stories of other Israeli "movers" caught on country roads at night in TN and elesewhere who were stopped for speeding, threw strange liquid vials out the window and the locals were forced by the feds to release them. Dogs even alerted to explosives on the trucks. TheStateInc KNOWS and they're 100% complicit and is actively attempting to cover it up..i.e. help these Israeli spies and agent provateurs.
"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may know peace." -Thomas Paine In a CorporoFascist capitalist society, there is no money in peace, freedom, or a healthy population, and therefore, no incentive to achieve these. Good choice. I'm can't understand why someone would spend so much time and energy at a site where no one is the least interested in his point of view. Furthermore it would be quite easy for him/her to email Les Roberts him/her self. However that would mean that Roberts would also have an email where the questions are coming from....
Prove it. And prove they issued anything close to 550,000 death certificates (the number missing). It's been proven, little troll, by someone who actually took the time and trouble to contact the author of the study instead of attacking him behind his back. a) only ~40,000 deaths were recorded by the system in 2002. Thus, we think it was only about 30% complete before the war and what would make us think it would become more complete during the war? b) As my Iraqi colleagues describe it, many doctors can issue death certificates.....thus it is not as if most bodies are going to morgues. Especially in the smaller cities, people just need a certificate to put a body in a grave yard and just want that form from any doctor.
I understand the John Hopkins researchers went into Iraq and asked people if their relatives had died, and if they had death certificates that could have been issued by doctors, hospitals, or morgues. And I understand the LA Times stayed in the Green Zone in Baghdad, and asked the Iraqi government how many records of death certificates by hosptials and morgues only - no doctors - while acknowledging the Iraqi government's records "grossly undercounted" the real numbers. How 'bout you, boy? Indirectly, they have. Directly, about one third of that. They've suffered well over 30,000 killed or seriously wounded. If they haven't killed 100,000 of the enemy, they're spending more than $10 million for each death they have caused and barely inflicting more damage than they've received. And if they have, they've had to have committed countless war crimes to be able to do it. It's a no-win situation. You of course know that, which is why you aren't over there yourself.
Does a liar deserve respect? Because I think that's what *Dr* Roberts may really be where this issue is concerned ... a liar who fabricated a result to fit a pre-conceived agenda. Or who at least allowed others to fabricate claims because they happened to fit his pre-conceived agenda. Does a democRAT deserve respect? (Les Roberts ran as a Democrat for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006 in New York's 24th Congressional District.) Then he chose to basically ignore the issue. Because what he did amounts to nothing more than waving his hand and expect it all to go away. But it's not going to go away, scrapper. Offer some PROOF that Iraqi doctors operate/operated in the way he and you now claim explains the missing death certificates. The bottom line is that NONE of the explanations offered by AGAviator, you or *Dr* Roberts deals satisfactorily with the suspicious fact that 92 percent of Roberts' supposedly *random* sample were able to provide death certificates when death certificates seem to be in terribly short supply in Iraq when others look at the issue. The bottom line is that you have offered NO PROOF that the death rate throughout Iraq is at the levels claimed. It is simply absurd to claim that a slaughter has occurred in Iraq on a greater scale than occurred in even Nazi Germany during the allied bombing campaign of WW2, yet today's liberal US media, foreign media and insurgent media have all simply missed documenting it. It is absurd to claim we've killed as many Iraqis as died in Japan during WW2 ... when we firebombed and nuked Japanese cities with total impunity and without ANY concern for civilian lives. The bottom line is that it is simply absurd to claim a coverup of this proportion amongst those who are or have served in the US military in Iraq ... in this day and age where secrets can hardly be kept by half a dozen much less half a million. This assertion is just as silly as claiming thousands and thousands of structural engineers, demolition experts and other professionals with training and experience in steel, impact, fire, concrete, buckling, seismology and macro-world physics from around the world are "morons" who have missed what a theologian, philosopher or poet claims is OBVIOUSLY a controlled demolition. The bottom line is that you folks have so far chosen to simply ignore the many other contrary facts and logic problems I listed about the studies. For example, why do the pre-war mortality rates computed by equally reputable sources in larger studies differ so markedly from those obtained by John Hopkins in their studies? That difference alone could explain the disparity between JH's ridiculous estimates and those of everyone else who has estimated deaths during the conflict. The bottom line is that you folks can't explain why the mainstream media (who by all appearances is not friendly to this war, Bush or the GOP) recently blasted the news across the airwaves that a 100 were tragically dying a day in Iraq as if that had never happened before yet ignored the 550 Iraqis that Les Roberts and his group now claim have been dying on average every single day since day one of the invasion? How can the media have simply ignored the 10,000 Iraqis that statistically had to have died in a given day many times during that period if the John Hopkins' study is to be credible? The bottom line is that the mainstream media has been woefully derelict (due to rank partisanship) in asking Roberts and the other John Hopkins researchers to explain these tough questions about what looks to me and many others like a partisan hack job. Just like they were woefully derelict in pursuing the many crimes committed by the Clinton administration. But you are certainly free to be taken in by Roberts and the mainstream media. Randi Rhodes of Air America. You have to be kidding, scrapper. ROTFLOL! Go to Randi's website (http://www.therandirhodesshow.com/live/ )and you will find this statement: "The only real scientific study of civilian casualties in Iraq is at 654,965 as of July 2006." You see the problem? It's a LIE. After interviewing Les Roberts, how can Randi Rhodes be unaware that the John Hopkins researchers did not say the 654,965 dead were all civilians? And the title of the article linked to that statement ... "Updated Iraq Survey Affirms Earlier Mortality Estimates" is also a deception. Because the only earlier study affirmed by the lastest study is the earlier one done also by Les Roberts, which had its own serious problems (not the least of which was claims about death certificates). What is not mentioned is that the latest estimate is wildly at variance with half a dozen or so OTHER estimates. Sorry ... but clearly neither Randi Rhodes or John Hopkins is interested in spreading truth. They BOTH have an agenda. Folks, here's a very telling statement by Les Roberts during an interview with Joseph Choonara in 2005: "As far as I’m concerned the exact number of dead is not so important. It is many tens of thousands. Whether it’s 80,000 or 140,000 dead, it’s just not acceptable." Those aren't the word of a scientist sure of his figures. Those are the words of someone with an agenda. Turns out he's a democRAT with an agenda. Not to be trusted. Here is some more vacuousness for you to ignore, scrapper. ************ http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr14/0.php Iraq Body Count Press Release 16 October 2006 Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates Introduction There has been enormous interest and debate over the newly published Lancet Iraqi mortality estimate of 655,000 excess deaths since the invasion, 601,000 of them from violence (and including combatants with civilians). Even the latter estimate is some 12 times larger than the IBC count of violent civilian deaths reported in the international news media, which stands at something under 50,000 for the same period (although the IBC figure for this period is likely to considerably increase with the addition of as yet unprocessed data). The new Lancet estimate is also almost the same degree higher than any official records from Iraq. This contrast has provoked numerous requests for comment, and these are our first observations. The researchers, and in particular their Iraqi colleagues who carried out the survey, should be commended for undertaking it under dangerous circumstances and with minimal resources. Efforts like theirs have consistently highlighted that much more could be done by official bodies, such as the US and UK governments, to assess the human suffering that has resulted from the invasion and occupation of Iraq. However, our view is that there is considerable cause for scepticism regarding the estimates in the latest study, not least because of a very different conclusion reached by another random household survey, the ILCS, using a comparable method but a considerably better-distributed and much larger sample. This latter study gave a much lower estimate for violent deaths up until April 2004, despite that period being associated with the smallest number of observed deaths in the latest Lancet study. Additionally, claims that the two Lancet studies confirm each other's estimates are overstated. Both the violent and non-violent post-invasion death estimates are actually quite different in the two studies. What emerges most clearly from this study is that a multi-methodological approach and much better resourced work is required. Substantially more deaths have occurred than have been recorded so far, but their number still remains highly uncertain. We also take the view that far more recognition should be accorded the many other courageous people in Iraq, be they Iraqi or international journalists, hospital, morgue, and other officials, or relief workers, who are endeavouring to keep the world informed on the country's plight. Far too many have had to pay the highest possible price for their efforts. Ignorance of this catastrophic war would be far less endemic if their day-by-day contribution were consistently given the exposure it merits. The daily toll on civilian lives resulting from the Iraq war should be front-page news in the countries that instigated it, not inside-page news. The Lancet estimate In October 2004 the Lancet published a random cluster sample survey estimating that 98,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the invasion up to that point (an 18-month period), and that 57,600 of these deaths were from violence. The October 2006 study comes from the same research team and provides an estimate for the 40-month period from March 2003 to June 2006 of 655,000 excess deaths, 601,000 of them from violence. The data presented do not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths. Since IBC's work is confined to violent civilian deaths, we make no further comment on Lancet's non-violent death estimates. The Lancet researchers visited 47 neighbourhoods and conducted interviews in 40 adjoining households in each neighbourhood. About 1,800 households containing 12,000 Iraqis were surveyed. These households reported a total of 302 violent deaths, each of which has been multiplied by two thousand to provide an estimate of how many of Iraq's estimated 26,000,000 population would have died if this proportion of deaths were representative of the country as a whole. The study's central estimate of 601,000 violent deaths is exceptionally high. Even its lower bound 95% confidence interval of 426,000 violent deaths is shockingly large. If numbers of this magnitude are anywhere near the truth, then they reveal a disaster far greater than most could have conceived, and one which appears inconsistent with a considerable amount of other information that has emerged over the last three and a half years. Before any firm conclusions are drawn on the basis of this study, five important (and extremely anomalous) implications of the data presented by the Lancet authors require examination. ************ http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr14/1.php Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates Implication one: 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. Between January and June 2006, there were 91 violent deaths recorded by the Lancet survey. This would correspond to over 180,000 deaths in the first 6 months of 2006, and an average rate of 1,000 per day. The daily death rate over the same period based on UN reports (which sum Baghdad morgue and Ministry of Health data) is 80 violent deaths per day. Cumulated media reports provide a somewhat lower figure. If the Lancet extrapolation is sound, this would imply a further 920 violent deaths every day (1000 minus 80) which have been recorded by neither officials nor the media. As these are averages, some days would see many more deaths, and others substantially fewer, but in either case, all of them would remain unnoticed. If we consider the Lancet's June 2005 – June 2006 period, whose violent toll it estimates at 330,000, then daily estimates become lower but would still require 768 unrecorded violent deaths for every 67 that are recorded. The IBC database shows that the average number of people killed in any one violent attack is five. Therefore it would require about 150 unreported, average-size, violent assaults per day to account for 768 deaths. It is unlikely that incidents of this scale would be so consistently missed by the various media in Iraq. Although IBC technically requires only two sources for every corroborated death in its database, we actually collect, archive and analyse every unique report we can find about each incident before it is added to our database. For larger incidents the number of reports can run into the dozens, including news published in English in the original and others, mostly the Iraqi press, published in translation. In IBC's news archive for August 2006 the average-size attack leaving 5 civilians killed has a median number of 6 reports on it. If, as our data suggest, smaller incidents are the ones that are most likely to be under-reported, then the number of "hidden" assaults implied by this study could be far greater. For instance, if the average number of people killed in each such assault were two, then the number of unreported deadly assaults would have to rise to 380 per day. One possible way of explaining such a very large number of small-scale unreported assaults is to suppose that many of these are the result of "secret" killings which have resulted from abduction, execution by gunfire, or beheading. But 42% of the 330,000 Lancet-estimated violent deaths in this final 13-month period are ascribed to "explosives/ordnance", car bombs, or air strikes, all of which carry a fairly heavy and hardly 'secret' toll (and will generally create at least 3 times as many wounded). The Lancet's 2005-2006 data generates an Iraqi average daily death toll of 350 from these explosions and air strikes, of which deaths only a small fraction are officially recorded or reported. More specifically, Lancet data suggests large numbers of deadly car bombings occurring on a daily basis, of which only a small fraction are ever reported (and whose victims, including injured, fail to be recorded by hospitals). Lancet estimates 150 people to have died from car bombs alone, on average, every day during June 2005-June 2006. IBC's database of deadly car bomb incidents shows they kill 7-8 people on average. Lancet's estimate corresponds to about 20 car bombs per day, all but one or two of which fail to be reported by the media. Yet car bombs fall well within the earlier-mentioned category of incidents which average 6 unique reports on them. 'Baghdad-weighting' of media reports, even if applicable to car bombs, is unlikely to account for this level of under-reporting, as half of the car bombs IBC has recorded have been outside Baghdad. The Pentagon, which has every reason to highlight the lethality of car bombs to Iraqis, records, on average, two to three car-bombings per day throughout Iraq, including those hitting only its own forces or causing no casualties, for the period in question. ************ http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr14/2.php Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates Implication two: 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. It may be argued that deaths often fail to be reported to authorities or registered by them (although information supplied by the Lancet authors themselves casts doubt on this argument - see Implication four below). However, people suffering injuries usually make strenuous efforts to receive appropriate treatment, or if they are severely incapacitated, others see to it that they do so. It is a long-established finding that around three times as many people are injured in modern wars as are killed in them. This is borne out in Iraq in statistics gathered by the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MoH). Their casualty monitoring centre was set up in Spring 2004 to allow the Ministry to allocate resources in response to conflict-related violence across Iraq (excluding the Kurdish-administered regions). The system is claimed to be manned 24 hours a day, with hospitals phoning the Ministry in Baghdad on a daily basis (when necessary) to report on dead and wounded from conflict-related violence, The MoH has reported 2.9 wounded for each person killed in the period from mid-2004 to mid-2006. An almost identical ratio was confirmed in IBC's independent analysis of media-derived data for the first two years after the invasion. If 600,000 people have died violent deaths, then the 3:1 ratio implies that 1,800,000 Iraqis have by now been wounded. This would correspond to 1 in every 15 Iraqis. Of course, death/injury ratios vary according to the weapons being used. Bombs and air strikes leave more wounded than does gunfire, but even the latter may cause widespread injury when it is indiscriminate, as it often is in gun-battles or in "defensive" fire by US troops who come under attack. By far the lowest proportion of injured are produced in the execution of captives, whether by guns or other means. We might therefore calculate a much more conservative estimate of wounded associated with the Lancet findings, based on the different proportions of weaponry reported in Table 4 of the Lancet paper. We assume 3 wounded for every explosive- or air strike-caused death, but only 1 wounded for every 2 gunfire deaths, and no wounded from the "unknown" and "accident" categories. This yields a revised Lancet-based estimate of 800,000 wounded over the equivalent period for which the MoH has been collecting this information centrally. In that same two-year period the official total of wounded treated in Iraqi hospitals is recorded as 59,372. Whether hospitals can provide a comprehensive tally of violent deaths or not, their knowledge of seriously injured should be much more complete. Accepting the Lancet estimate would entail concluding that at least 740,000 wounded Iraqis (90% of the total) were not treated or, if treated, not recorded in any way, throughout a 2-year period beginning in mid-2004. It may be that many injured anti-occupation combatants have avoided hospitals to prevent identification or arrest, but they are hardly likely to account for more than a small fraction of this discrepancy. It would further imply that approaching 90% of Lancet's deaths are also of combatants. In fact, even if one considers only the victims of car bombs as estimated in Lancet (who are a relatively small subset, and would have no reason to avoid - if they even had the capacity to do so - detection by authorities), then the 220,000 injured which would credibly accompany Lancet's estimates would far outstrip the 60,000 whom hospitals have recorded treating for injuries from all causes. This would be despite the existence of an ongoing, albeit imperfect, monitoring system specifically designed for such war-related casualty monitoring, one which emergency health service providers should have strong interest in maintaining in order to receive the necessary resources from the Health Ministry. ************* http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr14/3.php Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates Implication three: 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. Of the 287 violent post-invasion deaths recorded by the Lancet authors where the age and sex was known, 235 (82%) were adult males between 15 and 59 years old. Extrapolating to the population as a whole would mean that around 470,000 men in this age group have been killed violently, i.e. one in 15 (7%) of adult males aged 15 to 59. But that figure, horrific enough on its own, is only the national average. According to all accounts, including Lancet's, the intensity of violence differs widely across Iraq. The Lancet authors estimate at least a 5-fold difference in levels of violence between the lowest and the highest of the 16 Iraqi provinces sampled. In the provinces containing the highest violence - with a total population of 6.4 million – the Lancet-derived proportion of men killed would begin at one in 10, and rise from there (the study did not publish sufficient data to deduce what the maxima might be). This level of adult male decimation would not just apply to a few badly affected areas, but vast swathes of central Iraq representing around a quarter of the Iraq's population. *************** http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr14/4.php Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates Implication four: Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued. In 87% of cases where deaths were reported, the survey team asked to see death certificates, leading to the Lancet authors' statement that "92% of households had death certificates for deaths they reported". Assuming, as the authors do, that this is representative of the population as a whole, would imply that officials in Iraq have issued approximately 550,000 death certificates for violent deaths (92% of 601,000). Yet in June 2006, the total figure of post-war violent deaths known to the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MoH), combined with the Baghdad morgue, was approximately 50,000. If the Lancet estimate is correct then it follows that either (a) 500,000 documented violent deaths, for which certificates were issued, have somehow managed to completely disappear without a trace to Iraqi officials or the international media or (b) there is a vast, elaborate, and very successful, cover up of this massive number of bodies and their associated paper trail being carried out in Iraq. A "suspicion" of option (b) is offered as one possible explanation in the supplementary notes to the Lancet report, but is not addressed in any detail. Option (a), however, is argued for explicitly. The authors write that: The above statement provides the sole evidentiary basis for the Lancet authors to dismiss as "expected" the factor-of-ten discrepancy between their estimates and statistics collected by the official monitoring system as it exists in Iraq. No one argues that Iraq's official figures are complete, including its officials. But could their coverage be so bad as to amount to no more than a small fraction of deaths, as suggested above? Two points need to be made here. First, despite the confidence with which the Lancet authors make the assertion, the natural death rate of 5/1,000/year is not an established fact for Iraq in 2002. It is one estimate, a projection or extrapolation from some smaller set of known data. It may be correct, or it may not be, and there can be considerable room for debate on the matter. Second, the figure of 40,000 claimed as the number of deaths recorded by the MoH in 2002 is false. No specific citation is offered by the Lancet authors for this figure other than a vague attribution to "informed sources in Iraq". But official Iraqi figures for 2002, forwarded to IBC courtesy of the Los Angeles Times, show that the Ministry registered 84,025 deaths from all causes in that year. This excluded deaths in the Kurdish-administered regions, which contain 12% or more of the population. Thus, the actual MoH figure for 2002, even while excluding Kurdistan, stands at 70% of the estimate of 120,000 that, per the Lancet authors, "should have been recorded" nation-wide in 2002. It may (or may not, given its post-2004 casualty monitoring system) be true that the "ministry's numbers are not likely to be more complete or accurate today". But if their completeness is even remotely similar to 2002 (the Ministry's equivalent 2005 figures record 115,785 deaths, an average of 320 per day), then we are still left with a vast and completely unexplained chasm between the actual official figures, what may reasonably be assumed about their past completeness based on documentary evidence, and the violent death estimate offered in this new Lancet report. *********** http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr14/5.php Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates Implication five: 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. According to Lancet calculations, Coalition forces killed 32,000 Iraqis from late March 2003 to the end of April 2004. This is a period that included the large-scale invasion in which 20,000 air strikes rained 30,000 bombs on a largely urbanized country along with an untold quantity of artillery, as well as an additional 240,000 cluster bombs. This type of assault was then repeated on a smaller but still significant scale in Falluja. All available evidence points to a significant and progressive reduction in Coalition military operations overall since the first year of the invasion. Yet, according to Lancet estimates, the number of Iraqis killed by the Coalition rose to 70,000 in year two (May 2004 – May 2005), and rose yet again in the third year (June 2005 – June 2006) to 86,000, nearly three times more than in year 1. When looking at US air strikes, the picture becomes even more puzzling. This data is comprised of 40 deaths: * 1 killed in January 2002-March 2003 (estimate: 2,000 killed); Those who keenly recall the reported carnage associated with the invasion in 2003 will scarcely credit the notion that similar events but of a much greater scale and extent have continued unremarked and unrecorded, including by locals, in a nation at the level of education and urbanisation of Iraq. Iraq is not an undeveloped society where tiny, self-sufficient communities live in isolation and ignorance of each other. Six thousand civilians were reported killed by Coalition forces in the first three weeks of the invasion, i.e., 285 per day. The Lancet estimate of 86,000 Iraqis killed by Coalition forces in the 13 months from 2005-2006 averages 217 per day over a much longer, relentlessly sustained period. And as shocking as such a secret toll would be, it is claimed to constitute only 26% of the even greater carnage inflicted by anti-Coalition or unattributable bombs and bullets, which it is claimed killed 330,000 Iraqis in this period, also almost always without being noticed by anyone but the victims. ****************** http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr14/6.php Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates Concluding remarks Could five such shocking implications be true? If they were true, they would need to be the result of a combination of the following factors: We would hope that, before accepting such extreme notions, serious consideration is given to the possibility that the population estimates derived from the Lancet study are flawed. The most likely source of such a flaw is some bias in the sampling methodology such that violent deaths were vastly over-represented in the sample. The precise potential nature of such bias is not clear at this point (it could, for example, involve problems in the application of a statistical method originally designed for studying the spread of disease in a population to direct and ongoing violence-related phenomena). But to dismiss the possibility of such bias out of hand is surely both irresponsible and unwise. All that has been firmly documented as a result of the Lancet study is that some 300 post-invasion violent deaths occurred among the members of the households interviewed. This information, and the demographic and causative breakdowns presented in the study, are significant additions to the detailed knowledge that is painstakingly being accumulated about the individual victims of this conflict, and the tragedies that have befallen them. These 300 may be added to the roster of some 50,000 others for whom this level of detailed knowledge is available. In some - but still far too few - cases we know the name, ages, occupation, and exact circumstances of death. Information presented at this level of detail is the only way to arrive at once-for-all certainty, in a way that does justice to the victims, honours their memory, and provides the closure that only a full list, or census, can do satisfactorily. Do the American people need to believe that 600,000 Iraqis have been killed before they can turn to their leaders and say "enough is enough"? The number of certain civilian deaths that has been documented to a basic standard of corroboration by "passive surveillance methods" surely already provides all the necessary evidence to deem this invasion and occupation an utter failure at all levels. On 9/11 3,000 people were violently killed in attacks on the USA. Those events etched themselves into the soul of every American, and reverberated around the world. In December 2005 President George Bush acknowledged 30,000 known Iraqi violent deaths in a country one tenth the size of the USA. That is already a death toll 100 times greater in its impact on the Iraqi nation than 9/11 was on the USA. That there are more deaths that have not yet come to light is certain, but if a change in policy is needed, the catastrophic roll-call of the already known dead is more than ample justification for that change. Note for press and media. The Lancet researchers documented 300 violent deaths. Iraq has reached such a sorry state that IBC records 300 deaths every few days. Although comment of the sort offered here is sometimes necessary, it diverts our energies away from the main work to which we are committed, and to which still far too few are contributing. In light of this we regret that, at the current time, we have extremely limited capacity to undertake interviews with individual members of the press or media, and may be unable to deal with urgent requests. Full permission is granted to cite from this release, with appropriate attribution. ***************** Give it up, folks. The John Hopkins' report is CLEARLY bogus.
Odd that the ONLY witness that has ever been named or quoted explicitly stated that she didn't start watching until AFTER the first impact and in her statement even says she noticed the men in the van after the impactS. By all means, honway, provide us with the name of the witnesses who called the authorities and said the men were set up and filming at the time of the first impact. I'll be waiting...
Ping to #176. Let's see if you have a pithy response to that post, cheerleader.
Pay special attention to Implication Four in post #176. Roberts was deceiving you. That's not proof. It is an unsubstantiated CLAIM. And must I point out again that those Iraqi colleagues are the ones that Roberts himself said "HATE AMERICANS". My suspicion is they LIED to Roberts or he's making it up.
You have NO PROOF they stayed in the Green Zone and didn't interview doctors. Why must you misrepresent what you know, AGAviator? Here's another interesting article by the LATimes. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0518-02.htm It's on Baghdad's death toll and dates from May of 2003. It states that "meticulous record-keeping was the norm in Hussein's Iraq, which for decades sustained an overblown bureaucracy. Iraqi death certificates, to be filled out in quadruplicate, require detailed personal information about the deceased and the manner of death. But even an ingrained national habit of careful documentation couldn't stand up entirely to war's chaos. Some hospitals ran out of death certificates. Exhausted doctors, lurching from one maimed patient to the next, sometimes had time for little more than a quick notation. "We were working day and night," said Dr. Abbas Timimi, director of Abu Ghraib General Hospital on the city's western outskirts. "With so many people so badly hurt, we felt so much pressure to be treating patients instead of filling out forms. But we'd always scribble something." Later on it states "Obtaining a death certificate is crucial for establishing property ownership and inheritance rights. So grieving families are braving the difficult bureaucratic process of obtaining the paperwork for what in many cases are all but unidentifiable sets of remains." And it indicates quite clearly that the LATimes writers were out of the Green Zone, visited hospitals and doctors.
One War Crime death is too much, BAC, you asshole!
The bottom line is that even if there's only been 50,000 civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan combined - that's more than the combined deaths from all terrorist events WORDLWIDE SINCE 1968. Source: http://www.tkb.org/IncidentRegionModule.jsp Think about that one. How is this justified??? ESPECIALLY given that we have NO PROOF that the invasion of Iraq was justified for any reason, as there is NO PROOF of WMD's or that they were implicit in 9/11. And the MANY unanswered questions concerning 9/11 point to an "inside job". You mentioned the casualties in WW2... Seems to me that governments are responsible for more civilian deaths than "terrorists"... So who are the real terrorists??? Smirk is a Satanist asshole, and if you want to pledge your allegiance to him, you certainly have that right. Silly serf. Go back and reread my post # 163, then watch this... And this... Matthew 7:15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. 16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. BAC, THE BOTTOM LINE IS I'm not putting you on BOZO, BUT "I'M DONE WITH YOUR SATANIST ASS (as evidenced by your fruits)... I WILL NOT REPLY TO YOU AGAIN.
No matter how noble the objectives of a government; if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion - it is an EVIL government. Eric Hoffer
Good decision. It's not productive to feed the troll.
b. Because I think that's what *Dr* Roberts may really be where this issue is concerned ... a liar who fabricated a result to fit a pre-conceived agenda. Or who at least allowed others to fabricate claims because they happened to fit his pre-conceived agenda. c. Does a democRAT deserve respect? (Les Roberts ran as a Democrat for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006 in New York's 24th Congressional District.) d. Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates a. I don't respect liars but you clearly do - for example, you adore goofyinchief, you quote a lyingneoconwhore like Kagan. You are the one who pays homage to liars, not me. b. Then put your claims in writing and send your letter to the President of Columbia U where Dr. Roberts is currently employed. Btw, if you admitted to being a lunatic ( you'll get no argument from any of us in that regard), it might be a defense against the libel lawsuit that is subsequently lodged against you by Dr. Roberts. c. How does Dr. Roberts running for office as a Democrat exclude the validity of the JH's study or its findings, whose data btw was collected by a "team" of medical professionals and whose findings were "peer reviewed" before being published in the notable medical journal called Lancet. I will explain peer review to you, BAC, in case a trailer park high school drop out like yourself has never come across that phrase in your Gun Digest reading. Peer review is defined as follows: "Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a process of subjecting an author's scholarly work or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the field." In other words other MEDICAL EXPERTS double checked the JH's study before publication. As for not trusting someone just because he's a Democrat - golly gee - our President is trusting and implementing some of the findings and recommendations of the Iraq Study Group report that was co-written by LEE HAMILTON, a high profile Democrat. Democrats can't be that untrustworthy if our President is listening to them. BAC, you do trust GWB's judgement, don't you? d. "Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates"...Here's something you may have missed BAC in your reading: http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/the-iraq-deaths-study-was-valid-and- correct/2006/10/20/1160851135985.html "The Iraq deaths study was valid and correct" 10/21/06 Uh...here's the bottom line, BAC, 26 medical field professionals signed a petition attesting to the validity of the JH's study. So 26 credentialed medical professionals put their reputations on the line to support Dr. Roberts and Dr. Burnham.
ROTFLOL!
Peer reviewed? By an organization that failed to address the issues of the pre-invasion mortality rates (keep in mind that the Lancet had previously blessed the UN and WHO rates that are day and night different than JH's)? By an organization that failed to address the discrepancies in death certificates evident even after the first study was published? By an organization that admitted it fast tracked the review process in order to get the paper into print before an election to influence it against the war? By an organization that published the first report under a heading on its own website that said 100,000 CIVILIANS killed in Iraq (when the report specifically says it didn't ask those surveyed whether the claimed dead were civilians or not)? By reviewers who didn't bother to even ask why there was NO physical evidence or documentary evidence to support a claim of mass genocide? And one more thing, the data was not collected by a team of medical professionals. The Iraqis hire to conduct Roberts first study most certainly weren't doctors or statisticians and Roberts admitted they HATED Americans. Why that's guaranteed to get good results. ROTFLOL! Actually, no. I stopped trusting him when he "moved on" where the Clinton Administration crimes are concerned. Did any of them address the issues I've mentioned? Wonder if they are all democRATS. ****************** From http://www.aqoul.com/archives/2006/10/iraq_the_mortal.php ... snip ... If the Lancet study is true, something like 9 out of 10 Iraqi war deaths over the past few years simply missed the press. In one of the most well-covered conflicts in history. Deaths equal to or more than that induced by entire firepower among frontline combatants through the whole US civil war, and it made less sound than the proverbial tree in the forest. Car bombs have been slaughtering countless times and no one went to the hospital, but they did get their death certificates! About 3-5 Hiroshimas have happened and it failed to make the press. Darn that MSM-Fox News-Al Jazeera conspiracy. ... snip ... A better argument is to ask how in less than half the time, Iraq has experienced violent war death, mostly civilian, at a rate close to the high-end range of deaths for BOTH SIDES in the Iran-Iraq war, including all front-line troops? (It's actually a much higher rate than it first appears because you have to view that long war's casualty figure as a proportion of both Iraq and Iran's populations and the high-end war deaths from that war are therefore quite a lower rate per affected population than that alleged in the Lancet study to Iraq alone.)" A good clue about the bad smell, aside from political orientation or biases is that in the first study, the raw data showed 2/3 of an estimated 100,000 deaths occurring in Fallujah alone. ("Two-thirds of all violent deaths [March 2003-September 2004] were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja. ") 60,000 dead in one place by the numbers publicized with that study. They then simply dismissed the Falluja figure as an "outlier"; instead they should have revisited the entire study for obvious fundamental flaws. Now in this study today, a death toll equal to up to about 10 American attacks on Fallujah is bandied about but it must have gone by simply unnoticed by all real time observers of Iraq. ... snip ... Meanwhile let Iraq Body count have its say (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. ... snip ... And let's let some experts have their say, if you like that sort of thing, and in the New York Times: "Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy. . said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country. Donald Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was even more troubled by the study, which he said had “a tone of accuracy that’s just inappropriate.”" UPDATE: A commentary in the Wall Street Journal Online by Steve Moore goes into substantive issues. I suspect he may have a point. "I contacted Johns Hopkins University and was referred to Les Roberts, one of the primary authors of the study. Dr. Roberts defended his 47 cluster points, saying that this was standard. I'm not sure whose standards these are. Appendix A of the Johns Hopkins survey, for example, cites several other studies of mortality in war zones, and uses the citations to validate the group's use of cluster sampling. One study is by the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which used 750 cluster points. Harvard's School of Public Health, in a 1992 survey of Iraq, used 271 cluster points. Another study in Kosovo cites the use of 50 cluster points, but this was for a population of just 1.6 million, compared to Iraq's 27 million. When I pointed out these numbers to Dr. Roberts, he said that the appendices were written by a student and should be ignored. Which led me to wonder what other sections of the survey should be ignored." ... snip ... ******************
Who do you trust, BAC? a. You don't trust Dr. Roberts because he is a Democrat. We don't know the political affiliations of Dr. Birnham, the co-author, or the JH's research team as a whole who worked on the research team. Do you think they are all "Democrats?" b. You don't trust the Lancet or the Lancet peer review committee of medical experts who reviewed the methodology and findings of the JH's study. c. You don't trust the 26 independent medical professionals who signed a petition in support of Dr. Roberts and Dr. Burnham, dramatically/pointedly putting their own considerable reputations on the line. d. Finally, you don't trust President George W Bush anymore. So I guess it means you don't trust our President's words when GWB says the findings of the JH's study have been discredited? http://www.info rmationclearinghouse.info/article15275.htm "Randi Rhodes Interviews Dr. Les Roberts; co-author of the Johns Hopkins Iraq Mortality Study" Broadcast : 10/11/06 Air America - Audio- Runtime 8 Minutes e. On that last point you and I finally come to full agreement. When an untrustworthy guy like GWB claims the results of the JH's study are not to be believed, indeed, that's the best endorsement of the study's validity. Cheers, BAC! I'll drink to that.
Good for you (putting him on bozo). Dump his Zionist, blood dancing ass.
HOLOCAUST DEATH TOTALS OVERESTIMATED, SAYS HITLER DRESDEN FIREBOMBING NOT SO BAD, SAYS ROOSEVELT HIROSHIMA DEATH TOLL OVERBLOWN, SAYS TRUMAN IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS NOT QUITE AS HIGH AS WE'D LIKE, SAYS BUSH
right on
it's actually enjoyable to read everyone else's posts with BeAChooser bozo'd. ;)
HOLOCAUST DEATH TOTALS OVERESTIMATED, SAYS HITLER DRESDEN FIREBOMBING NOT SO BAD, SAYS ROOSEVELT HIROSHIMA DEATH TOLL OVERBLOWN, SAYS TRUMAN IRAQI CIVILIAN DEATHS NOT QUITE AS HIGH AS WE'D LIKE, SAYS BUSH Bump. Exquisite, leveller!
Actually, that's Gilbert Burnham, and yes we do know his political affiliation. He's a democRAT too. Burnham gave $900 to Roberts' Congressional run. According to http://www.postwatchblog.com/2006/10/if_you_liked_ou.html, Gil Burnham stated in an interview with The World Today before the study even began that, "we wouldn't go to the effort of doing something like this if we didn't feel that here was a situation that was egregious and, you know, there really needs to be some attention to what we can do to better protect the civilians." In other words, he had already decided on the conclusion. That source goes on to note "The political intent of the paper is also clear from a statement that "Coalition forces have been reported as targeting all men of military age," referring to two newspaper articles, one of them about a single soldier. Apart from bizarrely citing a newspaper article as a source in a supposedly reputable journal, the authors are not only saying that there are "reports"--they are implying that these reports tie the coalition forces to execution-style killings and assassinations. At the end of the article, the authors go on to suggest that the coalition is in violation of the Geneva Conventions without making any references. It is rare to detect political passion in a scientific publication." ********** http://www.seixon.com/blog/archives/2006/10/science_exit_le.html#more "Just using Occam's Razor here, you can believe either: 1. A small team of researchers, two of which are American Democrats who oppose the war in Iraq, have stated for the record that they wished to influence a US election, who carried out a survey in Iraq only under their own supervision; and a vast conspiracy by Iraqi authorities to hide 500,000 death certificates. 2. That the small team of researchers either deliberately made up data, cooked the methodology to ensure urban areas were overrepresented, calculated their numbers incorrectly, and willingly misled the Lancet peer reviewers and the world public; and have confidence in the thousands of people working for the Iraqi government in morgues and government offices all over the country of Iraq. Occam's Razor says #2. Sorry guys. I'm not into believing the whole "vast government conspiracy conducted by thousands of individuals and miraculously kept secret" type of thing. I'm more into believing the "small group of political partisans conduct a sham of a study to influence world opinion and a US Congressional election". ************** Well, I can't imagine the Iraqis who actually collected the data are democRATS although they (according to Roberts) HATE Americans. But here are the other members of the team, starting with the authors listed in the first JH study (the 100,000 one), in addition to Roberts and Burnham: Riyadh Lafta - He's an Iraqi, therefore unlikely a democRAT. He's the one Roberts relied on to recruit the Iraqi interviewers on the team ... the ones Roberts later said mostly HATE Americans. Given that, I somehow doubt Riyadh likes us either. Richard Garfield - I don't know his political affiliation but in this interview about the first study ( http://www.epic-usa.org/Default.aspx?tabid=440) he said "And here you see that deaths recorded in the Baghdad morgue were, for a long period, around 200 per month." Isn't he a little surprised to learn they were dying at the rate of 550 a day throughout Iraq and no one noticed? He said "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." He's either unfamiliar with his own study or he's being sloppy because only 2 out of 30 households in each cluster were even asked to provide certificates in the first study (they didn't ask the ones they thought were hostile to the US and who might have the most reason to lie). Oh and by the way, Richard Garfield is one of those who advocated infant mortality statistics before the war that are widely divergent from those derived using the John Hopkins interviews. So why doesn't he ask Roberts for explanation regarding this disparity? Jamal Khudhairi - You tell me. I can't find anything about him. That goes for the authors listed in the second study (the 655,000 one): Shannon Doocy and Elizabeth Dzeng. But I bet the odds are better than 2 to 1 that all three are liberal leaning. Not only that, many of those who have been quoted praising the studies are also democRATS. For example, Ronald Waldman (an epidemiologist at Columbia University), who was quoted in the WP praising the study, gave $3000 to John Kerry's campaign. He gave another $1000 to Les Roberts' campaign (http://www.thepoliticalpitbull.com/2006/10/report_65500_iraqi_civilians_h.php ). No, I don't and I told you exactly why. My complaints probably have something to do with the influence of Lancet Editor Richard Horton, who wrote the fervent "Commentary" to the article and whose anti-Iraq war views are, if anything, MORE strident than those of Burnham and Roberts. Yes, they have. I wonder if they will come to regret it. **************** Lancet study of Iraqi deaths is statistically unsound and unreliable By StatGuy Earlier this week, British medical journal The Lancet published a study estimating that, since the US-led invasion in March 2003, almost 655,000 Iraqis have died who would not have died had the invasion not occurred. That estimate is far above previous estimates of post-invasion Iraqi deaths, which generally range between 40,000 and 120,000. Immediately, the study received widespread attention and generated a great deal of controversy in the media, in the halls of government, and around the blogosphere. The article is entitled “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey” by Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts. Drs Burnham, Doocy, and Roberts are affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, and Dr Lafta with the Mustansiriya University, Baghdad. The full text is available here in html, and here as a pdf document. (All page references to the study in this post refer to the pdf version.) 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. The study is based on a sample survey conducted between May and July of this year utilising a cluster sample methodology. Cluster sampling is a multi-stage procedure to select sample respondents. In the first stage, clusters, or small areas, of the region (in this case, Iraq) to be surveyed are selected. Within the clusters, neighbourhoods are selected, and then main streets; finally, particular residences are chosen and surveyed. (More details are given below.) Forty-seven clusters were selected in proportion to the population of 16 of the country's 18 Governorates. (Originally, 50 clusters were to be surveyed representing all Governorates, but operational problems necessitated omission of three.) Within each of the clusters, administrative units and main streets were chosen at random in proportion to population; then particular residential streets were chosen at random where households were surveyed. The plan was to interview forty households per cluster but, due to the vagaries of field operations under potentially dangerous conditions, fewer than 40 households were surveyed in some clusters. Thus, a sample of 1849 households with an average of 6.9 persons per household were surveyed, comprising a total of 12,801 individuals. Here arises a problem with the purported randomness of the cluster selection. According to the methodology as just outlined, all of the 47 clusters were located in urban areas. Rural areas do not have “streets or blocks” as such, nor do they have residential streets with 40 adjacent households. According to the study’s own documentation, every cluster was located in an urban area; none was selected in a rural area. According to the UN's 2004 Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS), however, 7,132,000 of Iraq's total population of 27,132,000 live in rural areas. (See Table 1.6 on page 22 [numbered 21] of this pdf document.) Some 26% of Iraq's population live in rural areas, but not one of the 47 clusters was located in a rural area. The probability that, if a true random selection were made, all 47 clusters would be chosen from urban areas is 74% raised to the 47th power—a very small number indeed. It would appear that an a priori decision was made to exclude rural areas from consideration as cluster sites. In that case, the selection of sample respondents was not random. There are, I would think, good reasons for believing that armed conflict in urban areas is likely to kill more people than armed conflict in rural areas, other things being equal. It is therefore probable that the Lancet survey, because it includes only urban residents, is biased toward producing an overestimate of deaths. Serious questions are also raised by the description of field operations, according to which the survey went smoother than any survey I’ve ever heard of. There were two survey teams, each consisting of two female and two male interviewers, and one supervising field manager. The survey was in the field between 20 May and 10 July 2006. Survey respondents were chosen according to the procedure outlined above. Once a particular residential street was selected within an administrative unit within a cluster, a start household on the street was chosen at random. Beginning with that household, the interview team proceeded to survey adjacent households until forty were done. Here’s an outline of the survey content. Now check this summary of field operations: The interview team went to 1849 households in urban areas of Iraq and encountered only 15 refusals and only 16 residences where neither the head of the household nor a spouse was in. Don’t forget that they only went to each household once: there was no follow-up whatever. If I ran a door-to-door survey with a response rate of 98.3% on the first go-round, I’d think I’d died and gone to statisticians’ heaven. That is nothing short of miraculous. That response rate implies that family heads in urban Iraq are virtually always at home. Don’t heads of households and their spouses in urban Iraq have jobs? Don't they go out to meet friends? Do they never visit relatives in other neighbourhoods or towns? Do they not engage in any activities outside their homes? Are they never in the middle of a family meal and don’t want to be interrupted by unknown visitors asking intrusive personal questions? Never out shopping for groceries or passing the time of day at a local coffee shop or dropping off the family car at the mechanic’s? Do they just stay around the house all day every day? In short, do those folks living in urban Iraq have any semblance of normal lives? I realise that armed conflict would impel most people to huddle in their homes behind locked doors (in which case they would be unlikely to open the door to strangers), but that possibility doesn’t enter into it because the locations selected for interview were altered if they appeared unsafe. Admittedly, I have no personal experience of daily life in Iraq. Nevertheless, the 98.3% initial response rate is foreign, not just to my experience, but to any real-world survey situation imaginable. Here's another strange remark about this survey's field operations: According to the summary of the survey content, quoted above, there’s a lot of ground to cover in each interview. Locate the head of household or spouse (fortunately, 99.1% of ‘em were at home when the interviewers showed up), and obtain oral consent. List by age and sex everyone living there now and everyone who lived there on a particular date over four years ago. Find out what happened to each of them and when, and write it all down. Focus on the ones who had died: find out the cause and circumstances of death; then ask to see the death certificate. If they have one (as 92% did), have them dig it out so the interviewer can take a good look at it. If there’s a discrepancy between the official cause of death and the one reported by the interviewee, hash that out. (The more I think about all that, the more unlikely that 0.8% refusal rate seems.) Suppose each survey team is working 10-hour days. Even that’s pushing it because survey operations must be conducted with a view to finding respondents at home and willing to talk. (But apparently that's not a problem in urban Iraq.) That’s an average of four surveys per hour, i.e., one every fifteen minutes. Granted some interviews would be short: a husband and wife living alone for the past five years would only take a few minutes. Since the average household has over six members, however, interviews are much more likely to be lengthy. Also, the interviewers need meal and other breaks. The assertion that 40 households could be interviewed in one day strains credibility. Another discrepancy in the article’s description of operations raises the disturbing possibility that the survey could have been tainted by surveyor bias. Here’s the methodological description of the selection of respondent households. An administrative unit within the cluster was chosen at random, a main street within the administrative unit was chosen at random, a residential street crossing the main street was chosen at random, and a start household on the residential street was chosen at random. The interview team has no discretion whatever in the selection of survey respondents, with one exception (as already cited above): The article doesn’t say how often the interview team exercised its discretion to change to an alternate location. To me, that is a serious omission, unless we are to understand that this never, or rarely, happened. In any case, no instances are reported of interviewers coming under fire or other threat, so that would appear to have been a very unusual circumstance. Why then does this statement appear in the article? How could interviewers be “drawn” to particular houses if the selection of households was driven by a completely random process, except when interviewers felt insecure or otherwise at risk? The quoted statement doesn’t make sense in the context of what is supposed to be random choice of particular streets and households. It only raises further serious doubts about the sample selection process. There are many other problems with the Lancet study that could be discussed. What I’ve presented here, however, is more than sufficient to demonstrate that the survey behind the estimate of “excess” deaths was statistically unsound because biased by non-random selection of interview respondents. Moreover, the article’s description of survey field operations is, in the absence of further supporting documentation, highly problematic. In my judgment, the estimate of 655,000 deaths lacks solid foundation and therefore should not be relied upon. **************** http://magicstatistics.com/2006/10/18/lancet-researchers-ignored-superior-study-on-iraqi-deaths/ Lancet researchers ignored superior study on Iraqi deaths By StatGuy The Lancet article published online 11 October replicated, with a somewhat larger sample size, a 2004 study, also published in The Lancet and also done by researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Medical School. Yet the researchers ignored a United Nations survey of Iraqis, conducted about the same time as the first Lancet survey, that found very different results. The 2004 Lancet article estimated that, between the US-led invasion of March 2003 and September 2004, 98,000 Iraqis died who would not have died had the invasion not occurred. The estimate had a 95% confidence interval of 8,000 - 194,000 deaths and was based on a cluster sample made up of 33 clusters of 30 households each for a total sample size of 988 households. (In one or two clusters, the full complement of households was not surveyed.) The United Nations conducted its Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS) between April and August 2004. As its name implies, the survey was aimed at gathering data on a broad spectrum of indicators of living conditions about one year after Saddam Hussein was deposed. Measures surveyed related to housing, infrastructure, demographics, child health, nutrition, education, condition of women, labour market activity, income and wealth, etc. Because the ILCS was a much more comprehensive survey, its findings were not published until March 2005, several months after the 2004 Lancet article. The ILCS also produced an estimate of deaths since the invasion, but it was much lower than that published in the 2004 Lancet article. The estimate is discussed on p. 55 of the Analytical Report of the ILCS (pdf). Although the ILCS estimate of 24,000 is far below the 2004 Lancet estimate of 98,000, there is a statistical sense in which they are not inconsistent, for the huge confidence interval of the Lancet estimate (8,000 - 194,000) easily encompasses the ILCS estimate's confidence interval (18,000 - 29,000). Statistically, however, one would conclude that the ILCS estimate is to be preferred because of its much smaller confidence interval, other things being equal. The reason the confidence intervals differ so much in width is because the two estimates are based on different sample sizes. Both surveys used a cluster methodology of sample selection, but with different numbers of clusters and different number of households surveyed within each cluster. The Lancet survey selected 33 clusters from all of Iraq and then surveyed 30 households within each cluster. In the event, a total of 988 households were sampled. The ILCS selected 110 clusters from 17 of Iraq's 18 Governorates, with an additional 330 clusters from the remaining Governorate of Baghdad. Within each of the 2200 clusters, 10 households were surveyed. After removing six clusters due to operational considerations, the total sample size was 21,940 households. The ILCS used over 66 times as many clusters and surveyed over 22 times as many households as did the Lancet survey. No wonder the ILCS's confidence interval was much more precise. Based on the accompanying documentation, the ILCS was far superior to the Lancet survey across the whole gamut of survey operations. I won't go into details here, but those interested are referred to "Appendix 2: Technical Characteristics of the Living Conditions Survey Sample", found on pages 169-170 of the ILCS Analytical Report. Despite the obvious superiority of the ILCS to the 2004 Lancet survey, the 2006 Lancet article contains no discussion of the ILCS or its estimate of Iraqi deaths between March 2003 and August 2004. This I found odd. Articles in academic and professional journals that address topics of controversy generally include references to previously published studies and discuss the perspective the current article takes vis-à-vis the views and findings of those earlier studies. That is how scientific knowledge advances—by critically engaging published findings of other scholars and specialists. The authors of the 2006 Lancet article, however, appear uninterested in critical engagement with the ILCS estimate of Iraqi deaths. Yet we know that the Lancet researchers are aware of the ILCS, for they refer to it twice in their footnotes. The first page mentions "surveys that assessed the burden of conflict on the population" and the fact that "insufficient water supplies, non-functional sewerage, and restricted electricity supply . . . create health hazards", and for these the ILCS is footnoted. But as for critical discussion of the enormous difference between the ILCS estimate of deaths and the estimates generated from both Lancet surveys, the authors don't want to touch that. They don't even acknowledge its existence. As I said, in my experience scientific knowledge is not built up by ignoring previous relevant studies, especially ones that differ so radically from one’s own study. That the researchers behind the 2006 Lancet article did so reinforces the belief that their real agenda is not scientific knowledge but advocacy. *************** http://magicstatistics.com/2006/10/22/main-street-bias-in-lancet-study/ “Main street bias” in Lancet study By StatGuy One of the joys of blogging for me is interacting with people I'd never have met otherwise. My posts on the Lancet study of Iraqi deaths (background here) have afforded many opportunities for that. One in particular prompts this post. On Friday I received an e-mail from Sean Gourley, a physicist at the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London, who has just co-authored a critical review of the Lancet study. He has graciously allowed me to report on his findings. His fellow researchers on this project are Neil Johnson, also in the Oxford Dept of Physics, and Michael Spagat of the Dept. of Economics, Royal Holloway, University of London. As I pointed out in this post, the Lancet survey included only residents of urban areas, thus introducing significant bias into the results. Mr Gourley and his co-researchers argue that the survey methodology also excludes many urban residents, making bias problems even worse. The problem is what they call “main street bias”. The Lancet surveyors selected clusters by randomly choosing administrative units within Iraq’s Governorates in proportion to population. Then: Only residential streets crossing a “main street” were eligible for selection. Urban areas typically contain residential streets that do not cross a main street; but the methodology ruled them out. Such streets could never be selected for surveying. The map below, sent by Mr Gourley, shows a section of Oxford, UK. (The traffic circle near the top left corner is just across a short bridge from Magdalen College at the end of High Street, so it is only a few minutes’ walk from the centre of Oxford.) Three main streets are marked by the three black arrows; each street that does not cross one of them is marked by a red arrow. So, if the Lancet methodology were to be implemented in this section of Oxford, there would appear to be hundreds of households who could never be selected for surveying. Generally speaking, armed conflict is more common in or near main streets than in side streets. Certainly, given typical traffic patterns, conflict on main streets is likely to endanger more people. So, excluding streets that do not cross main streets would tend to result in overestimation of casualties. Thus, "main street bias". The crucial question becomes: How exactly did the Lancet surveyors define main streets? That question was put to lead author Gilbert Burnham, epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, by the Oxford-Royal Holloway researchers. According to an article in Science (behind a subscriber wall, but Sean Gourley sent me a copy), Prof Burnham had two different, and apparently contradictory, answers. Every time I read a Lancet co-author defend that article, it just gets worse. If Prof Burnham doesn’t “know exactly how the Iraqi team conducted its survey”, how can he know whether the methodological description is oversimplified or not? Not only that, he admits that data have already been destroyed. To call this bad statistical practice is putting it mildly. Statisticians I know could be reprimanded or even lose their jobs if they destroyed data only a few months after a survey, especially one they knew ahead of time would generate public controversy. In my experience, it is standard procedure to store all survey materials in a secure location for an absolute minimum of three years—and, in practice, usually longer. Speaking of secure locations, it sounds like the Iraqi surveyors didn’t have one. If they really had no safe place to store completed surveys, they should not have gone out and gathered the data—and not just because of the potential consequences for interviewees if confidential information is leaked. No: the real issue here is the professionalism of the surveyors. Professional surveyors and statisticians take whatever steps are necessary ahead of time to ensure that confidentiality will be protected. If they couldn’t do that, they had no business going into the field in the first place. Now that essential information has been destroyed, there is no way of verifying Burnham’s claim that all streets, not only those crossing main streets, were included in the sample frame. Failing to ensure that data, analysis, and results can be independently verified is another indication of unprofessional statistical practice. I’m not the only one who’s irritated that the controversy over the Lancet article’s methodology has turned into a circus. Fred Kaplan at Slate has also had difficulty getting a straight answer from Gilbert Burnham about his study. Mr Kaplan concludes: I, too, would be very happy to see a thorough evaluation by independent experts—including statistical methodologists, not just the epidemiologists who seem to be running this little show. The only problem is that essential background information has been destroyed—or was never collected in the first place—so it may already be too late for that. ****************** Give it up, scrapper. The John Hopkins studies on Iraq mortality are BOGUS.
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Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest correct. only he himself thinks he "won." endurance he does have though. gotta give him that.
#154. To: RickyJ, ALL (#147)
Dead links are not sourced facts.
If your logic was sound you would sway more people and fewer would bozo you.
#155. To: christine, ALL (#149)
blah, blah, blah. all i have to do is read one of your posts and i've read them all. it's the same crap you've posted for years.
#156. To: scrapper2, Les Roberts, ALL (#152)
I cut and pasted Dr. Roberts' email response to me in message #142.
The grave yard death certificate procedure is addressed in his point b.
.S. Let me make this very clear to you, oozer, and I'll do so in no uncertain terms - my personal and professional information is confidential,
#157. To: angle, ALL (#139)
4. Use a straw man. Find or create a seeming element of your opponent's argument which you can easily knock down to make yourself look good and the opponent to look bad. Either make up an issue you may safely imply exists based on your interpretation of the opponent/opponent arguments/situation, or select the weakest aspect of the weakest charges. Amplify their significance and destroy them in a way which appears to debunk all the charges, real and fabricated alike, while actually avoiding discussion of the real issues.
18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'
#158. To: BeAChooser, ALL (#153)
Guess christine missed my post #145. That's what happens when you bozo yourself. And I'm equally certain she missed my side of the conversation in discussions with innieway.
#159. To: christine (#133)
he elicits good educational (and often witty) posts from everyone else. that's the only value he contributes
#160. To: BeAChooser, AGAviator, angle, randge, christine, Minerva, innieway, SKYDRIFTER, Diana, Red Jones, Indie TX, BeALoser, Critter, Kamala, critter, Ricky J, Jethro Tull, robin, Honway, aristeides, bluedogtxn, leveller, Burkeman1, All (#156)
(Edited)
I have no interest at all in your personal and professional information. I just ask you to post the text of the email you sent to "Les" so we can see exactly what he was responding to in his email to you. Now why would you have a problem doing that?
#161. To: scrapper2 (#160)
. BAC, you have buried yourself. In the course of this discussion thread you have revealed yourself to be a sad little specimen of troll.
#162. To: honway, scrapper2 (#161)
. BAC, you have buried yourself. In the course of this discussion thread you have revealed yourself to be a sad little specimen of troll.
(About the quote: Speaking on the war in Kosovo.)
#163. To: BeAChooser (#104)
For one, it totally over looks the positive financial benefits of invading and winning in Iraq. It is NET cost/benefit that will matter in the long run.
Luke 17:1 Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe [unto him], through whom they come! 2 It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.
#164. To: scrapper2 (#160)
I guarantee there will be no question in your minds as to the crediblity of Dr. Roberts in contrast to the vacuousness of the other side.
#165. To: robin, all (#162)
. In the course of this discussion thread you have revealed yourself to be a sad little specimen of troll.
#166. To: Ferret Mike (#11)
#167. To: scrapper2 (#160)
Has BAC no dignity? With the ass kicking you've given him, I'd think he'd be in hiding.
#168. To: honway (#165)
#169. To: honway (#165)
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
- - IndieTX
#170. To: IndieTX (#169)
#171. To: innieway, ALL (#158)
FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES. EVERYONE GO TO MY POST #143, THEN TO THE 2 LINKS IN THAT POST. THEY CAN JUDGE FOR THEMSELVES IF YOU MADE ANY EFFORT WHATSOEVER TO DISCUSS ANYTHING I POSED.
#172. To: honway (#170)
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
- - IndieTX
#173. To: scrapper2 (#152)
P.S. Let me make this very clear to you, oozer, and I'll do so in no uncertain terms - my personal and professional information is confidential, strictly off limits, especially to a self-revealed lunatic like yourself so don't try to "trick" me into revealing my email address or my name or whatever you are sniffing around for. I told you what I
#174. To: BeAChooser, scrapper2 (#137)
Physicians in Iraq can also issue death certificates in addition to governmental agencies.
#175. To: BeAChooser (#136)
You want to play word games, that's ok with me x 9
Looser's getting punch-drunk. Right. All you do with your word games is demonstrate that you don't understand survey statistics and the meaning of a representative sample.
But truth be told, you aren't claiming they killed 100,000. You are claiming they have killed more than 655,000.
You see, your word games will get you nowhere, AGAviator
#176. To: scrapper2, AGAviator, honway, christine, robin, innieway, wbales, IndieTX, ALL (#160)
Please refer to Dr. Roberts with the respect and courtesy that his academic credentials demand.
b. I told you what I asked him and I cut and pasted his reply in message #142.
Randi Rhodes' interview with Dr. Roberts.
Once you hear this interview, I guarantee there will be no question in your minds as to the crediblity of Dr. Roberts in contrast to the vacuousness of the other side.
"Even with the death certificate system, only about one-third of deaths were captured by the government's surveillance system in the years before the current war, according to informed sources in Iraq. At a death rate of 5/1,000/year, in a population of 24 million, the government should have reported 120,000 deaths annually. In 2002, the government documented less than 40,000 from all sources. The ministry's numbers are not likely to be more complete or accurate today."
* 6 killed in March 2003-April 2004 (estimate: 12,000 killed);
* 13 killed in May 2004-May 2005 (estimate: 26,000 killed);
* 20 killed in June 2005-June 2006 (estimate: 40,000 killed).
* 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.
#177. To: honway, ALL (#165)
"Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center.
"Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.
#178. To: Jethro Tull, ALL (#167)
Jethro Tull to scrapper2 - Has BAC no dignity? With the ass kicking you've given him, I'd think he'd be in hiding.
#179. To: AGAviator, ALL (#174)
a) only ~40,000 deaths were recorded by the system in 2002. Thus, we think it was only about 30% complete before the war and what would make us think it would become more complete during the war?
b) As my Iraqi colleagues describe it, many doctors can issue death certificates.....thus it is not as if most bodies are going to morgues. Especially in the smaller cities, people just need a certificate to put a body in a grave yard and just want that form from any doctor.
#180. To: AGAviator, ALL (#175)
And I understand the LA Times stayed in the Green Zone in Baghdad, and asked the Iraqi government how many records of death certificates by hosptials and morgues only - no doctors
#181. To: beachooser, Critter, Christine, Brian S, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#180)
#182. To: BeAChooser, scrapper2, AGAviator, honway, christine, robin, wbales, IndieTX, angle, randge, Diana, Red Jones, SKYDRIFTER, critter, Ricky J, Jethro Tull, bluedogtxn, leveller, Burkeman1, aristeides, Noone222, ALL (#176)
The bottom line is that
#183. To: innieway (#182)
#184. To: BeAChooser, AGAviator (#176)
(Edited)
a. Does a liar deserve respect?
#185. To: innieway, ALL (#182)
BAC, THE BOTTOM LINE IS I'm not putting you on BOZO, BUT "I'M DONE WITH YOUR SATANIST ASS (as evidenced by your fruits)... I WILL NOT REPLY TO YOU AGAIN.
#186. To: scrapper2, ALL (#184)
How does Dr. Roberts running for office as a Democrat exclude the validity of the JH's study or its findings, whose data btw was collected by a "team" of medical professionals and whose findings were "peer reviewed"
As for not trusting someone just because he's a Democrat - golly gee - our President is trusting and implementing some of the findings and recommendations of the Iraq Study Group report that was co-written by LEE HAMILTON, a high profile Democrat. Democrats can't be that untrustworthy if our President is listening to them. BAC, you do trust GWB's judgement, don't you?
So 26 credentialed medical professionals put their reputations on the line to support Dr. Roberts and Dr. Burnham.
#187. To: BeAChooser, AGAviator, robin, christine, All (#186)
(Edited)
Actually, no. I stopped trusting him [ President GWB] when he "moved on" where the Clinton Administration crimes are concerned.
#188. To: innieway (#182)
ESPECIALLY given that we have NO PROOF that the invasion of Iraq was justified for any reason
#189. To: innieway, BeAChooser, scrapper2, AGAviator, honway, christine, robin, wbales, IndieTX, angle, randge, Diana, Red Jones, SKYDRIFTER, critter, Ricky J, Jethro Tull, bluedogtxn, Burkeman1, aristeides, Noone222, ALL (#182)
The bottom line is that even if there's only been 50,000 civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan combined - that's more than the combined deaths from all terrorist events WORDLWIDE SINCE 1968
#190. To: innieway (#182)
BAC, THE BOTTOM LINE IS I'm not putting you on BOZO, BUT "I'M DONE WITH YOUR SATANIST ASS (as evidenced by your fruits)... I WILL NOT REPLY TO YOU AGAIN.
#191. To: innieway, SKYDRIFTER, Jethro Tull, scrapper2, AGAviator, Kamala, Diana, leveller (#182)
#192. To: leveller, All (#189)
"The bottom line is that even if there's only been 50,000 civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan combined - that's more than the combined deaths from all terrorist events WORDLWIDE SINCE 1968"
#193. To: scrapper2, AGAviator, robin, christine, All (#187)
We don't know the political affiliations of Dr. Birnham, the co-author,
or the JH's research team as a whole who worked on the research team. Do you think they are all "Democrats?"
b. You don't trust the Lancet or the Lancet peer review committee of medical experts who reviewed the methodology and findings of the JH's study.
c. You don't trust the 26 independent medical professionals who signed a petition in support of Dr. Roberts and Dr. Burnham, dramatically/pointedly putting their own considerable reputations on the line.
[S]election of survey sites was by random numbers applied to streets or blocks . . . [p. 2]
The survey purpose was explained to the head of household or spouse, and oral consent was obtained. Participants were assured that no unique identifiers would be gathered. No incentives were provided. The survey listed current household members by sex, and asked who had lived in this household on January 1, 2002. The interviewers then asked about births, deaths, and in-migration and out-migration, and confirmed that the reported inflow and exit of residents explained the differences in composition between the start and end of the recall period. Separation of combatant from non-combatant deaths during interviews was not attempted, since such information would probably be concealed by household informants, and to ask about this could put interviewers at risk. Deaths were recorded only if the decedent had lived in the household continuously for 3 months before the event. Additional probing was done to establish the cause and circumstances of deaths to the extent feasible, taking into account family sensitivities. At the conclusion of household interviews where deaths were reported, surveyors requested to see a copy of any death certificate and its presence was recorded. Where differences between the household account and the cause mentioned on the certificate existed, further discussions were sometimes needed to establish the primary cause of death. [p. 2]
In 16 (0·9%) dwellings, residents were absent; 15 (0·8%) households refused to participate. [p. 4]
Decisions on sampling sites were made by the field manager. The interview team were given the responsibility and authority to change to an alternate location if they perceived the level of insecurity or risk to be unacceptable. [p. 2]
One team could typically complete a cluster of 40 households in 1 day. [p. 4]
The third stage consisted of random selection of a main street within the administrative unit from a list of all main streets. A residential street was then randomly selected from a list of residential streets crossing the main street. On the residential street, houses were numbered and a start household was randomly selected. From this start household, the team proceeded to the adjacent residence until 40 households were surveyed. For this study, a household was defined as a unit that ate together, and had a separate entrance from the street or a separate apartment entrance. [p. 2]
The interview team were given the responsibility and authority to change to an alternate location if they perceived the level of insecurity or risk to be unacceptable. [p. 2]
Although interviewers used a robust process for identifying clusters, the potential exists for interviewers to be drawn to especially affected houses through conscious or unconscious processes. Although evidence of this bias does not exist, its potential cannot be dismissed. [p. 7, footnote omitted]
The number of deaths of civilians and military personnel in Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion is another set of figures that have raised controversy. The ILCS data indicates 24,000 deaths, with a 95 percent confidence interval from 18,000 to 29,000 deaths.
The third stage consisted of random selection of a main street within the administrative unit from a list of all main streets. A residential street was then randomly selected from a list of residential streets crossing the main street. On the residential street, houses were numbered and a start household was randomly selected. From this start household, the team proceeded to the adjacent residence until 40 households were surveyed.
Burnham counters that such streets were included and that the methods section of the published paper is oversimplified. He also told Science that he does not know exactly how the Iraqi team conducted its survey; the details about neighborhoods surveyed were destroyed “in case they fell into the wrong hands and could increase the risks to residents.”
Michael Spagat, an economist at Royal Holloway, University of London, who specializes in civil conflicts, 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,” adds [Neil] Johnson.
It sounds as if he's saying he didn't destroy the data because they never existed in the first place. If that's the case, how does Burnham know whether his instructions on methodology were followed at all? How can anyone verify the findings? And this is a peer-reviewed article. Who were these peers? And what did they review?
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