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: 23884
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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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 374.
#7. To: Minerva, christine, zipporah (#0)
It is pretty fucking sad that this, of all forums, has come to this 'back and forth sniping tripe'.
Yea - Freeper like mentality by people who hate being exposed to anything not part of the echo chamber they want to live in. Anyone who places anyone on bozo for non harassment reasons on a forum is an intellectual coward.
There is no intellect present in an exceedingly dishonest poster with a very questionable agenda. You should know better than that. And his behavior IS a form of harassment, he twists the words of other posters, will not debate honestly, constantly infers others are stupid, etc. He's a classic narcissist, therefore impossible to reason with or get along with.
I don't think he can be reasoned with either. He hasn't posted for as long as he has to be swayed from his opinions of 9/11 just because someone finally posts something that should make him think, "hey, maybe these kooks are right after all about 9/11." I doubt that will ever happen. Nevertheless to leave his stuff posted without any rebuttal makes it look like he has won the argument to a lurker, which is not a good idea. Calling him names only helps his side of the argument for an impartial lurker.
This is a good example of how he operates.He said few Iraqis are dying because there is no hard evidence for all those killed (typical BAC spin/logic). I wrote this post to him after he made the claim that there are few photographs, videos or death certificates of dead Iraqis: ****** "Uh.... Perhaps you haven't heard, but often in wartime when people are killed, their deaths are not always documented by photograpshs, film, video or even by death certificates. In fact quite often they are killed and their bodies are quietly buried in mass graves where they aren't discovered until some time later. I'm surprised you aren't aware of this practice." ****** And this is what he wrote in response to that post: ****** "It appears that you are accusing the US military of doing that. It would take quite a few people to gather up and bury the roughly 600,000 bodies that are missing. For which there is absolutely no physical evidence of them dying. So how many US soldiers are you accusing of this atrocity, Diana? A thousand? Ten thousand? Surely by now ALL the soldiers in Iraq are aware this is going on. Do you accuse all our soldiers who are in Iraq and have served in Iraq of this genocide and coverup, Diana? Is that really your position?" ****** You see what he is doing here? If you go through his post carefully, you can see how many inflammatory accusations he is making. A person has to decide whether they are willing to put up with that kind of dishonest and potentially harmful behavior.
Les Roberts Answers Your Questions Juan Cole: 655,000 Dead in Iraq since Bush Invasion There is heavy fighting almost every day at Ramadi in al-Anbar province, among guerrillas, townspeople, tribes, Marines and Iraqi police and army. We almost never get a report of these skirmishes and we almost never are told about Iraqi casualties in Ramadi. Does 1 person a day die there of political violence? Is it more like 4? 10? What about Samarra? Tikrit? No one is saying. Since they aren't, on what basis do we say that the Lancet study is impossible? There are about 90 major towns and cities in Iraq. If we subtract Baghdad, where about 100 a day die, that still leaves 89. If an average of 4 or so are killed in each of those 89, then the study's results are correct. Of course, 4 is an average. Cities in areas dominated by the guerrilla movement will have more than 4 killed daily, sleepy Kurdish towns will have no one killed. If 470 were dying every day, what would that look like? Or let's take the city of Basra, which is also roughly 10% of the Iraqi population. Proportionally speaking, you'd expect on the order of 40 persons to be dying of political violence there every day. We don't see 40 persons from Basra reported dead in the wire services on a daily basis. But last May, the government authorities in Basra came out and admitted that security had collapsed in the city and that for the previous month, one person had been assassinated every hour. Now, that is 24 dead a day, just from political assassination. Apparently these persons were being killed in faction fighting among Shiite militias and Marsh Arab tribes. We never saw any of those 24 deaths a day reported in the Western press. And we never see any deaths from Basra reported in the wire services on a daily basis even now So if 24 Iraqis can be shot down every day in Basra for a month (or for many months?) and no one notices, the Lancet results are perfectly plausible.
Readers ... note that not one of the following verifiable facts and concerns about the Les Roberts study is addressed in Mr Coles article: ********************* 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? **************** Number 4 is particularly damning.
There are about 90 major towns and cities in Iraq. If we subtract Baghdad, where about 100 a day die, that still leaves 89. If an average of 4 or so are killed in each of those 89, then the study's results are correct. Of course, 4 is an average. Cities in areas dominated by the guerrilla movement will have more than 4 killed daily, sleepy Kurdish towns will have no one killed. If 470 were dying every day, what would that look like? West Baghdad is roughly 10% of the Iraqi population. It is certainly generating 47 dead a day. Same for Sadr City, same proportions. So to argue against the study you have to assume that Baquba, Hilla, Kirkuk, Kut, Amara, Samarra, etc., are not producing deaths at the same rate as the two halves of Baghad. But it is perfectly plausible that rough places like Kut and Amara, with their displaced Marsh Arab populations, are keeping up their end. Four dead a day in Kut or Amara at the hands of militiamen or politicized tribesmen? Is that really hard to believe? Have you been reading this column the last three years? The Los Angeles Times, for example, in a comprehensive investigation found less than 50,000 certificates. And since we've been over this many times already, you are intentionally trying to deceive and mislead.
Are the people in these 90 major towns and cities different than the people John Hopkins surveyed as being typical of them? Why didn't they go to morgues, hospitals and the health ministry to get a death certificate issued like the ones in the study? Or did they go but then ask those organizations to wipe their records of the fact? Please, resolve this question for me AGAviator since you seem so knowledgeable about the situation in Iraq. True, the LATimes article says "Iraqi officials involved in compiling the statistics say violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west." But somehow I doubt they meant their data was off by a factor of ten (or more). A factor of two or three, possibly ... but not a factor of ten. You would think that the LATimes would have mentioned something like that. Wouldn't you? If you read the John Hopkins report (you've done that, right?), you will find that it claims Al Anbar was surveyed with 3 clusters (compared to Baghdad's 12) out of a total of 47. If the number of clusters is representative of population (it should be), we can conclude that Baghdad has about 25 percent of the population. Anbar would have then 2.5 percent of the population. So now you must be claiming that hundreds of deaths (300?) have been occurring in Anbar every day, on average, since the war began. Let's look at the reasonableness of that. What is the population of Anbar? If Iraq is about 27 million total, Anbar must have had a population of about 680,000 (call it 700,000). Now 300 deaths a day for 39 months (the time between the beginning of the war and July of last year) would total about 351,000. Wow ... are you suggesting that HALF the population of Anbar died during that time?!!! And that's gone unnoticed by the media? ROTFLOL! Indeed, those are regions where officials probably don't like Americans or the Iraqi government. What better way to embarrass both than to report death of that magnitude? But they haven't done that, have they. Why not? Why are there no pictures or video of this slaughter coming out of those areas? We know the insurgents have photographic equipment and access to the media. Why aren't they using it? Showing this supposed slaughter would probably have more effect than any thousand successful bombings in getting the US out of the country. So why no pictures? Why no video?
There are some very good reasons for not going to morgues and hospitals: (1) You can get killed in the process of moving around the country, and (2) You can have your dead kin accused of being a terrorist which will result in some serious problems for you and your own surviving family. Furthermore, to answer your ghoulish preoccupation with "Where are the bodies, where are the death cerfificates" the Cole article cites a common practice of throwing corpses into the Tigris river and other bodies of water. It happens day in and day out. So do you expect the majority of bodies disposed of in the Tigris River to show up and get identified as bodies, and given a death certificate? No I don't. That is arm-waving and speculation on your part. Iraqi officials involved in compiling the statistics say violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west. Health workers there are unable to compile the data because of violence, security crackdowns, electrical shortages and failing telephone networks. The Health Ministry acknowledged the undercount. In addition, the ministry said its figures exclude the three northern provinces of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan because Kurdish officials do not provide death toll figures to the government in Baghdad... However, samples obtained from local health departments in other provinces show an undercount that brings the total well beyond 50,000. The figure also does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the invasion. The morgue records show a predominantly civilian toll; the hospital records gathered by the Health Ministry do not distinguish between civilians, combatants and security forces. ... "Everything has increased," said one official in the Health Ministry who didn't want to be identified for security reasons. "Bombings have increased, shootings have increased." ... So you intrepret "Many more," "serious lapses in reporting," "grossly undercounted," "exclude the three northern provinces," "does not include deaths outside Baghdad," "everything has increased," and "well beyond" as meaning "not more than double." Nobody else will.
Then why did all the folks in the John Hopkins study do that? Did John Hopkins *random* sample just happen to pick a group who did when most of the rest of the country didn't? Or are you suggesting that those who don' t go to morgues, etc can still get death certificates that John Hopkins would accept as legitimate proof? Who issues those death certificate? The LA Times didn't mention any other source for them other than morgues, hospitals and the health ministry. Perhaps the folks in the John Hopkins' study simply create their own? ROTFLOL! Really? You really think that the highly liberal, anti-Bush, anti-war LA Times wouldn't mention that the death toll is off by a factor of 10 if it were? Really? ROTFLOL! That doesn't help your case either, since the second John Hopkins' study *confirmed* the results of the first which claimed that 98,000 died in the first 18 months after the war began. Thus the majority of the deaths in the 655,000 death study had to have occured after that "chaotic first year". But Kurdistan has been very peaceful compared to the rest of Iraq. Surely you aren't claiming that the death rate in Kurdistan is any higher than in Baghdad. If not, then again, the number undercounted can't be much more than the baseline count. You are still missing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of bodies, death certificates and eyewitness reports. By the way, the liberal, anti-war, mainstream media won't tell the public this, but Kurdistan is a real success story. They are doing quite well right now compared to under Saddam.
Another one of your trademarked diverisons. The survey asked if they had death certificates. They did not ask if they had death certificates from a morgue or a hospital that happened to be contacted by the LA Times. Seems like "ROTFLOL" is your code for "I'm starting to have difficulties really explaining my position." The survey said most of their respondents had death certificates. The LA Times said it was difficult to summarize, collate and count the number of death certificates issued, at official reporting levels. A completely bullshit argument you're pulling out of thin air. The LA Times like any reputable publication does not claim to know what it has just said it does not know. If they knew they were off by a factor of ten, they would have had the real number to begin with. You really like to make this crap up as you go along, don't you? False. They confirmed their number with a 2nd sample, which corroborated the first. They didn't try to prove their number with official statistics which they explicitly noted were difficult to come by. Not during the first year in Mosul and Kirkuk. There is also Anbar province and possibly Basra which are worse. That has already been discussed. You keep spamming the same old stuff. Four bodies a day x 90 municipalities, plus deaths in the countryside not associated with those municipalities, easily brings the total past 600,000. Many Kurds are mercenaries in the employ of the US government, and their government is also letting Israeli money and military operatives have free rein in return for a future chunk of their oil reserves should they be able to pull off secession. There's Big Oil money around there too, because Kurdistan sits on top of 2% of the world's proven oil reserves. Kurdistan is a welfare project for Big Oil and Israeli shysters all being financed by the American taxpayer.
But the LA Times only mentioned morgues, hospitals and the health ministry as being sources of death certificates. So I ask you ... what other sources are there? Does the John Hopkins report mention any other sources? No. So what sources are you claiming exist. Oh that's right ... your *theory* is that the morgues, etc did issue the 655,000 certificates but just forgot to make a note of them. ROTFLOL! Reputable? ROTFLOL! Do you know why they call it the LASlime? Not false. That's exactly what I said. The second study confirmed the results of the first study ... so the second study must have concluded that 98,000 (or so) died in the first 18 months after the war. So your theory that the reason they couldn't find the death certificates of 600,000 is that "many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion" does not help your case. You can't use the first year of the war to explain why so many death certificates are missing. But those areas were supposedly counted in the first John Hopkins study during the first year. You are still missing half a million death certificates. No, I already addressed the problem with assuming that most of the deaths occurred in Anbar. You'd have to have killed half the population of the region to explain the John Hopkins estimate and SURELY that would have gotten the attention of the world media. And the Basra statistics from John Hopkins' study have the same problem. Basra is also only 2.5 percent of the population. In fact, even at 1 per hour death rates you and Juan Cole are now claiming you can't make the John Hopkins' estimate make sense. Consider ... 39 months times 30 days times 24 hours time 1/hour = 28,080. That's it ... 28,000. And you'd have to claim THIS is one of the most violent areas of the country every day since the beginning of the war. Just to get 28,000 deaths. When are you going to understand that the John Hopkins study is fundamentally flawed? Probably never...
Clearly you don't understand the meaning of "Serious lapses in recording deaths," and "Continued spotty reporting," and "Unable to compile the data," A pretty lame attempt to weasel out of my incisive answer with an ad hominem. You said the LA Times would have stated if they were off by a factor of ten. I said that if the LA Times knew how much they were off, then they'd have the real number to begin with. Then you try to change the subject. And you fancy yourself a *debater.* I use "gross undercounts," serious lapses in recording deaths," "continued spotty reporting," and "unable to compile the data," to explain why the LA Times could not get a summary of the death certificates at a top level And that does not equate to those death certificates being *missing.* No I am not missing them. I know this is your last, best hope to try to obfuscate the results of the survey, but handing out a death certificate, and keeping track of the total number of death certificates handed out, are two completely different actions. Especially in a chaotic war zone, which Iraq is. Anbar is off-limits to the world media. And this really is all you have to say once one strips away the bullshit. You claim there couldn't have been 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq because the media is picking on poor little George Bush. That's really the only agrument you have to offer. Consider...4 bodies per day average, x 89 municipalities, plus Baghdad, plus deaths in the country, in a country the size of California with a population of 36 million and a normal death rate of over 100,000 per year, most of which is off- limits and very dangerous to anyone including the media. And yet you keep on harping on a non-existent "problem" of where the bodies are - as if they aren't scattered all over the country. When are you going to understand the war was based on lies, its supporters adamantly keep information about it from the world and from American citizens, there has been more than $1 Trillion spent on it, there have been tens of thousands of missions both in the air and on the ground, it has been going on for more nearly 4 years - yet you would have everyone believe that hardly any one ever has died as a result of it.
By the way ... this is another bit of misinformation. Shall we discuss that topic too?
Again. "Issuing" a death certificate, and "compiling" hundreds of miles away in Baghdad the number of death certificates that were issued, are two separate and distinct processes. And your source clearly and explicitly states many times its number is not in the least representative of the number of death certificates or the number of deaths. Furthermore, at the end of the day the bottom line is: How many people have died in this war, and how many of them are noncombatants. The Administration, and people like you, are doing everything they can to distract attention from this bottom line. However there are plenty of people in Iraq who have been killed who never got death certificates, and who don't have relatives who would say they have been murdered. These deaths are over and above any numbers within the confidence ranage of the survey. So your attempted obfuscation about the minutiae of the survey do not address the fact that there is a population that the survey did not count, over and above whatever number the survey did count. "Nobody is dying in Iraq because the media hates Bush" AGAIN? No I didn't. That is just one of several factors, which I have set out many times. The surveys did not cover identical time periods, and the first survey had a confidence interval where its authors opined that 100,000 seemed to be a reasonable minimum. Diversion and straw man. There are a number of reasons why the authorities in Baghdad could not ***COMPILE*** - read the article, then look up the word - the number of death certificates. The insurgency does not play by your rules. If you want them to, become a jihadist, go join them, and tell them to! ROTFLOL!!! Nobody said 28,000 except you. I'm saying 4 bodies per day x 89 municipalities plus Baghdad. I never had an *OLD* theory. My theory is that hundreds of thousands of excess deaths have occurred, both as direct results of the war, and as indirect results of the social chaos caused by the war. Now for your "lamer and lamer" claims. The war has cost more than $1 Trillion, it has gone on for more than 3 1/2 years, the Americans have had more than 4,000 killed and more than 30,000 wounded when "contractors" are added to the count. That's a total of 34,000 casualties on "our" side. There have been tens of thousands, possibly more than 100,000, missions, over 3 1/2 years. Assuming for the sake of And you would allege "we are winning?" ROTFLOL yourself!!! Furthermore, continuing the same And you would allege "we are winning?" ROTFLOL yourself!!! No, that would be your distortions of my statements. ROTFLOL! yourself. False. The supplemental appropriations for Iraq alone are well past half a trillion and that is cold hard cash spent in the current years. Then there are the costs from the regular budget, and last but not least the huge unpaid liabilities that are not counted because of the government's fly-by-night accounting which would send any business executive to Federal prison if he reported results the same way.
Where does the LA Times explicitly use the words "many times"? It doesn't. Of course, people have died in this war. But the truth won't be found on a foundation of lies. The John Hopkins' studies are lies. Which is why you are having so much difficulty with what I'm pointing out about those studies and its authors. You most certainly did suggest that was a primary factor. Don't try and deny that. FALSE. The second survey includes the period of the first survey and the second survey stated it's results validated the results of the first survey. FALSE FALSE FALSE. The minimum of the 95% confidence range was 8,000. No, it's an argument that strikes at the heart of your claim the John Hopkins survey is believable. Which is why you are clearly having so much trouble dealing with it. Which is why you keep putting forward one explanation after another only to discover each explanation does not explain. You can't explain the missing death certificates by claiming the first year was chaos. You can't explain them by claiming most of the deaths occurred in Anbar. Or Basra. Now you are finding it necessary to claim that every major city in Iraq has been more violent on a daily basis since the beginning of the war than the media has even noted for only a few short specific periods in only a couple of cities. Your excuses are getting sillier and sillier. See what I mean about getting sillier and sillier? You now want us to believe that insurgents wouldn't use what is clearly the most powerful leverage possible to get America out of Iraq. Do you honestly believe the world would stand for our remaining if the insurgents showed proof that we'd committed genocide in Anbar by killing HALF of its population? Of course not ... so it defies reason that had that occurred the insurgents wouldn't be making use of evidence of such a crime now. Actually, after finding your Anbar suggestion didn't hold water, you offered Basra as an explanation, claiming that 1 person per hour was dying (based solely on ONE comment by ONE person a year ago). I simply showed that even if we assumed 1 death an hour for the entire time since the invasion, it would only amount to 28,000 ... proving how ridiculous your Basra excuse was. No, after your Anbar and Basra arguments collapsed, you moved on to claiming (without any proof) that 4 bodies per day had been dying in 90 cities in Iraq every day, day in and day out, since the beginning of the invasion. If that were true, you could account for perhaps 400,000 deaths. But its ALL based on nothing but speculation. You still don't have the death certificates. You still don' t have ANY proof of that many bodies. And you still haven't explained how John Hopkins just happened to pick a group of people for their survey of whom 92 percent could supply death certificates on demand. Sure you did. We all watched your theory evolve on this very thread, AGAviator. It's no use claiming otherwise. All one has to do is reread this read to see that I'm right. No, it has not. This figure is just as bogus as John Hopkins' death estimate. 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. Lamer and lamer. Now you make the FALSE claim that the American military directly killed those 100,000 Iraqis. The truth is that most of the deaths in Iraq are directly a result of terrorist, insurgent and secular violence. Iraqi on Iraqi violence. Even the John Hopkins' researchers have said as much. No, the supplemental appropriations for the WOT as a whole are past half a trillion dollars. Not for just Iraq. http://www.senate.gov/~budget/republican/hearingarchive/testimonies/2007/2007-02-06Kosiak.pdf " The Global War on Terror (GWOT): Costs, Cost Growth and Estimating Funding Requirements Testimony, Before the United States Senate Committee on the Budget, Steven M. Kosiak, Vice President for Budget Studies, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, February 6, 2007 ... snip ... Since fiscal year (FY) 2001, Congress has appropriated about $502 billion for the GWOT. This includes some $463 billion for the Department of Defense (DoD) and $39 billion for other departments and agencies. Military operations, reconstruction and other assistance to Iraq and Afghanistan account for, respectively, some $345-375 billion and $100 billion of this total. The remaining roughly $25-55 billion has been used to fund a variety of other programs and activities, including classified programs, Army and Marine Corps restructuring and some homeland security activities (Operation Noble Eagle)." If you can't even get that right, how reliable can you be about anything else?
Really? You, BeAChooser would testify before Congress that the Johns Hopkins' studies "are lies?" No? And why is that BeAChooser? Perhaps because you are not invited? And why is that? I'll give you the reason - because your laymanBot opinions and the opinions of Mr. neocon Kaplan from Slate and the opinions of the LA Times, Washington Post, Fox News news reporters and all the bloggers you have quoted, ARE NOT CONSIDERED EXPERT BECAUSE NONE OF YOU ARE EXPERTS on anything except the science of bushbotulism - ie. how to deny, obstruct, and cover your a** . That's your specialty. Let me tell you who was invited to testify before Congress on Dec. 11, 2006 -it was the 2 co-authors of the Lancet study, Dr. Gilbert Burnham, MD, and Dr. Les Roberts. Do you think these 2 men would "lie" to Congress? These are medical professionals, they're not war mongering professionals like Bibi Netanyahu. Drs. Burnham and Roberts actually had to attend college and pass board exams. Read this testimony, BAC. You might learn something about "expert testimony." Monday, December 11, 2006 "Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq" http://www.juancole.com/2006/12/kucinich-paul-congressional-hearing- on.html
Be happy to, scrapper. Yes. Too bad none of those on the Congressional staffs were smart enough (or honest enough, themselves) to prompt their Congressperson to ask Burnham and Roberts about that 92% claim. Now THAT would have been interesting. Kucinich? Ron Paul? ROTFLOL! Now there's two with no agenda to promote. (sarcasm) You want an example of those of Burnham and Roberts LYING to Congress, scrapper? Here, from own your source: Where are the missing death certificates?
With so many deaths, maybe the medical examiner is a little bit backlogged.
BeALoser: With so many deaths, maybe the medical examiner is a little bit backlogged. And also please see the information in my msg #111. Islam requires burial within 24 hours. If a physician cannot be reached easily within that time frame for a death certificate to be issued, the loved one is buried without a certificate in a place other than a grave yard.
Are you saying they can't get buried in grave yards without death certificates? Seems reasonable to prevent people from burying individuals they're guilty of killing themselves.
b. Seems reasonable to prevent people from burying individuals they're guilty of killing themselves. a. Yes, that is what Dr. Roberts told me is a requirement in Iraq. b. Good observation.
Prove it. Post the email you sent him and post the email he sent back.
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. I cut and pasted what is for public consumption in my correspondence with Dr. Roberts. 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 asked him and I gave you his response. Eat it. 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Look oozer I would rather walk into traffic than "give up" to a tardbotshill like yourself. You boozer have zero credibility - what's your field of expertise? Do you have an MD? Do you have a PhD? Yes, no...uh huh I thought so. You are a net troll and a sad little specimen of a troll at that, I might add. Where do you get the authority to call Dr. Roberts ( PhD) a LIAR (those were your trailer park trash talk exact words)? What credentials empower you to sit in judgement of Dr. Burnham, MD? You think it's soooo evil for Dr. Burnham to support Dr. Roberts because Dr. Roberts is a Democrat( eeeek! keep your distance, BAC, you may catch Democrat cooties!) and because in an interview Dr. Burnham made this outrageous, scandalous statement: "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." I take no joy in telling you this, BAC, but the fact that you take offense to such a caring human statement from Dr. Burnham reflects very poorly on you. You may be a darker individual than merely a sad little specimen of a troll. As for your spam quotes from that joke of a biased website called "Magic Statistics" ...harharharhar...did you think that I would not double check the "credibility" of this information "source?" You under estimate my intelligence and that of other 4um posters. Here's the bio of the website owner http://magicstatistics.com/about/ Let's see...hmmmm...: Perpetually perplexed Christian statistician, Scott Gilbreath, aka StatGuy, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. Happily married to the wife of my youth (Prov 5:18). Okay okay - I'll keep my guffaws to a minimum - anyways, I have travelled to Canada on business in the past - to Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and you know, "Whitehorse, Yukon" is not where the big fish of any profession live - Yukon is like next door to "the Northwest Territories" ie the Siberia of Canada frankly speaking - it's where teeny tiny minnows are FORCED to live because they can't get a job in the Canadian big cities - so in addition to your source being a rapture nutter he's also - let's put this politely to your tender BAC bot ears - your source is not a Canadian statistician success story. Do you get the picture, BAC? For a giggle I checked out at random what "your" statistician posted under Israel - what a joke - I think his Israel thread of articles and comments makes a definitive statement about his bias and credibility: http://magicstatistics.com/category/asia/middle-east/israel/ "Israeli Jews use Christian donations to help Muslims" "UN official praises Israel" "Israel to begin producing energy from oil shale" Ouch! Are you calling uncle yet, BAC? I'll stop now - I don't like poking fun at single focused israelfirster statisticians forced to live in Canada's Siberia. As for your hero, Kaplan...he lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone...sounds like he may have some vested personal interests in down playing the numbers of civilian Iraqi Muslims killed for lies. Also, Freddy does not have a stats degree or an MD does he? So the long and short of it is that Freddy Kaplan is basically a layman, an artsy amateur. So when Freddy the music critic for Forward magazine doesn't "connect" or get a response he's expecting from Drs. Burnham, M.D. and Roberts, PhD...it could be that Drs. Burnham and Roberts can't be bothered to answer a biased isrealfirster shill. Anyways, time for you BAC to go back to your closet, plug into your Botenergizer, and try again tomorrow. It's late for your botbunny self. The adults are talking now.
Having a little problem satisfactorily addressing the issues I and many others have raised about the John Hopkins studies? At least you got the name right, this time. Mind telling me why Dr Burnham hasn't resolved the factor of 3 discrepancy between peer reviewed estimates of pre-war infant mortality by one of the report authors and Roberts' *peer* reviewed estimate? Mind telling me why Dr Burnham didn't resolve the discrepancy between Lancet blessed estimates of pre-war mortality (by the UN and WHO) and John Hopkins numbers? You see, the pre-war mortality is a rather important number when estimating excess deaths caused by the invasion and alone could explain why the John Hopkins estimate for excess deaths is so outlandishly high. Mind telling me why Dr Burnham told Congress that "at the end of that survey where there was a death in the household, we asked, "By the way, do you have a death certificate?" And in 91 percent of households where this was asked, the households had death certificates." That sure borders on lying when he was supposedly part of the study and should know that description is false. Is it professional for a researcher to make public statements like he made before beginning the research? Don't you think the large contributions he made to a highly partisan democRAT candidate (who just happened to be lead researcher on the first report) might suggest a *little* bias on his part when he led the second effort? Do you think *Dr* Burnham did his job when he allowed such an obviously partisan and defective report to be published? I don't. ROTFLOL! Having a little problem satisfactorily addressing the questions that Dr Burnham simply ignored or was dishonest/misinformed about in his public interviews? Having a little difficulty with the issues and points made at by that writer? Hmmmmmmm? You ignored the most important part of that bio, scrapper. Occupation: STATISTICIAN. He works for the Yukon State Bureau of Statistics in Canada. He got his masters in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington in 1981. That being the case, he might actually have something credible to say about John Hopkins' methodology. But I'm sure you won't bother reading or trying to understand any of what he has to say. Because you already know the answer ... just like Burnham and Roberts knew the answer before they began their research. You can't face the probability that they fabricated their data, can you? And since you seem to want to use nothing but adhominems to defend YOUR two John Hopkins "heros" from specific complaints about their report methodology, bias and dishonesty, perhaps you'd like a few more names to smear: How about smearing the authors of this UN report: http://www.iq.undp.org/ILCS/PDF/Analytical%20Report%20-%20English.pdf ? Dr Jon Pedersen, who headed that study, is quoted in both the NYTimes and WaPO saying the Lancet numbers are "high, and probably way too high. I would accept something in the vicinity of 100,000 but 600,000 is too much." Here is more on what Dr Pedersen thinks about the John Hopkins work (http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2006/11/26/conversation-with-jon-pedersen-on-iraq-mortality-studies/ ) Debarati Guha-Sapir (director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels) was quoted in an interview for http://Nature.com saying that Burnham's team have published "inflated" numbers that "discredit" the process of estimating death counts. (http://www.prwatch.org/node/5339 ) And according to another interviewer, "She has some methodological concerns about the paper, including the use of local people — who might have opposed the occupation — as interviewers. She also points out that the result does not fit with any she has recorded in 15 years of studying conflict zones. Even in Darfur, where armed groups have wiped out whole villages, she says that researchers have not recorded the 500 predominately violent deaths per day that the Johns Hopkins team estimates are occurring in Iraq." Madelyn Hicks, a psychiatrist and public health researcher at King's College London in the U.K., says she "simply cannot believe" the paper's claim that 40 consecutive houses were surveyed in a single day. "There is simply not enough time in the day," she says, "so I have to conclude that something else is going on for at least some of these interviews." Households may have been "prepared by someone, made ready for rapid reporting," she says, which "raises the issue of bias being introduced." (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/314/5798/396 ) Dr. Hicks published a clarification of these concerns titled "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Were valid and ethical field methods used in this survey?", which concluded that, "In view of the significant questions that remain unanswered about the feasibility of their study’s methods as practiced at the level of field interviews,it is necessary that Burnham and his co-authors provide detailed, data-based evidence that all reported interviews were indeed carried out, and how this was done in a valid manner. In addition, they need to explain and to demonstrate to what degree their published methodology was adhered to or departed from across interviews, and to demonstrate convincingly that interviews were done in accordance with the standards of ethical research. If the authors choose not to provide this further analysis of their data, they should provide their raw data so that these aspects can be examined by others. Even in surveys on the sensitive and potentially risky subject of community violence, adequately anonymized data are expected to be sufficient for subsequent reanalysis and to be available for review. In the case of studies accepted for publication by the Lancet, all studies are expected to be able to provide their raw data." But as some of these sources have noted, they've refused to do so or they can't. Beth Daponte, senior research scholar at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, after reading the Lancet article told Fred Kaplan "It attests to the difficulty of doing this sort of survey work during a war. … No one can come up with any credible estimates yet, at least not through the sorts of methods used here." Go ahead, scrapper, smear her: http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/1818 "So the pre-war CDR that the two Lancet studies yield seems too low. It may not be wrong, but the authors should provide a credible explanation of why their pre-war CDR is nearly half that of the UN Population Division. If the pre-war mortality rate was too low and/or if the population estimates were too high – because, for example, they ignored outflows of refugees from Iraq – the resulting estimates of the number of Iraqi "excess deaths" would be inflated." Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times, in an interview with PBS, questioned the study based on their earlier research in Iraq, saying, "Well, we think -- the Los Angeles Times thinks these numbers are too large, depending on the extensive research we've done. Earlier this year, around June, the report was published at least in June, but the reporting was done over weeks earlier. We went to morgues, cemeteries, hospitals, health officials, and we gathered as many statistics as we could on the actual dead bodies, and the number we came up with around June was about at least 50,000. And that kind of jibed with some of the news report that were out there, the accumulation of news reports, in terms of the numbers kill. The U.N. says that there's about 3,000 a month being killed; that also fits in with our numbers and with morgue numbers. This number of 600,000 or more killed since the beginning of the war, it's way off our charts." Let's hear your smear about Steven E. Moore, who conducted survey research in Iraq for the Coalition Provisional Authority. In an article titled, "655,000 War Dead? A bogus study on Iraq casualties", Moore wrote, "I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points. Neither would anyone else...". Professor Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway's Economics Department, and physicists Professor Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley of Oxford University have published a highly detailed paper (http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Economics/Research/conflict-analysis/iraq-mortality/BiasPaper.html ). They claim (http://www.rhul.ac.uk/messages/press/message.asp?ref_no=367 ) the John Hopkin "study’s methodology is fundamentally flawed and will result in an over-estimation of the death toll in Iraq. The study suffers from "main street bias" by only surveying houses that are located on cross streets next to main roads or on the main road itself. However many Iraqi households do not satisfy this strict criterion and had no chance of being surveyed. Main street bias inflates casualty estimates since conflict events such as car bombs, drive-by shootings, artillery strikes on insurgent positions, and market place explosions gravitate toward the same neighbourhood types that the researchers surveyed." More on their work can be found here: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Economics/Research/conflict-analysis/iraq-mortality/index.html . And then there's an article in Science magazine by John Bohannon which describes some of the above professors criticisms, as well as the response from Gilbert Burnham. Burnham claimed that such streets were included and that the methods section of the published paper is oversimplified. Bohannon says that Burnham told Science that he does not know exactly how the Iraqi team conducted its survey; and that the details about neighborhoods surveyed were destroyed "in case they fell into the wrong hands and could increase the risks to residents." Michael Spagat says the scientific community should call for an in-depth investigation into the researchers' procedures. "It is almost a crime to let it go unchallenged," says Johnson. In a letter to Science, the John Hopkins authors claim that Bohannon misquoted Burnham. Bohannon defended his comments as accurate, citing Burnham saying, in response to questions about why details of selecting "residential streets that that did not cross the main avenues" that "in trying to shorten the paper from its original very large size, this bit got chopped, unfortunately." Apparently, the details which were destroyed refer to the "scraps" of paper on which streets and addresses were written to "randomly" choose households". Such a well conducted survey. ROTFLOL! How about Alastair Mackay (aka AMac) (see http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006577.php and http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006694.php ) Surely you can find something nasty to say about him? And how about some of the members of Iraq Body Count? How about John Sloboda or Joshua Dougherty (AKA joshd)? They've made pretty strong criticisms of the John Hopkins' work. I posted some of them earlier on this thread. Want to smear them too, scrapper? Want to try connecting them to Israel? Or would like to actually address the many specific criticisms that have been raised in this thread. Stick to the facts and logic or smear?
He [Stats Guy] works for the Yukon State Bureau of Statistics in Canada. He got his masters in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington in 1981. That being the case, he might actually have something credible to say about John Hopkins' methodology. You can't face the probability that they [ Drs. Burnham and Roberts]fabricated their data, can you? Here's the credentials of Dr. Les Roberts: In former work, Roberts was a Director of Health Policy at the International Rescue Committee. In 1994 he worked in Rwanda for the World Health Organization, and performed a similar study to estimate the number of Rwandan refugees. In 2000, he performed a similar study which estimated 1.7 million deaths due to the war in the Congo [1]. This study met with widespread acceptance when published [2], and resulted and was cited in a U.N. Security Council resolution that all foreign armies must leave Congo, a United Nations request for $140 million in aid, and a pledge by the US State Department for an additional $10 million in aid. In 2007, Roberts is an Associate Professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Roberts did post-graduate fellowship work with the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. He obtained a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1992, and has been a regular lecturer there, teaching courses in numerous semesters. He obtained a masters degree in public health from Tulane University in 1986, and an undergraduate degree at St. Lawrence University in 1983 Here's the credentials of Dr. Burnham: Academic Degrees MD, Loma Linda University, 1968, MSc, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 1977, Ph.D., University of London, 1988 Research and Professional Experience Dr. Gilbert M. Burnham is the co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins. He has extensive experience in emergency preparedness and response, particularly in humanitarian needs assessment, program planning, and evaluation that address the needs of vulnerable populations, and the development and implementation of training programs. He also has extensive experience in the development and evaluation of community- based health program planning and implementation, health information system development, management and analysis, and health system analysis. He has worked with numerous humanitarian and health development programs for multilateral and non-governmental organizations, regional health departments, ministries of health (national and district level), and communities in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. A major current activity is the reconstruction of health services in Afghanistan. Drs. Burnham and Roberts credentials experience int'l reputation TRUMP your stats guy from Yukon with a Masters in Economics from U of Washington hands down. Furthermore, Drs. Burnham and Roberts did not rise to the international stage of epidemiology, which is where they are now, by lying, oozer. As for ad hominems about Kaplan - what the heck is that about? Kaplan writes music related articles for The Forward magazine and he contributes journalistic pieces to Slate. He's an artsy kind of guy - and it's odd that with his academic background and professional interests thusfar that he'd bother to challenge a research study done by MD's/epidemiologists unless Kaplan had a personal interest in having the Muslim casualties down played. Isn't that a reasonable observation to make?
http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/reports/lackdiversity.html "Political Bias in the Administrations and Faculties of 32 Elite Colleges and Universities, August 28, 2003 ... snip ... we found these representations of registered faculty Democrats to Republicans: ... snip ... Columbia, Yale 14-1. He should be right at home. By all means, scrapper ... ignore the rest of what I posted in #212. Ignore the SPECIFIC and DETAILED criticisms levied by all of those folks. Ignore the fact that Roberts and Burnham continue to wave their hands at those criticisms. Ignore that not one argument put forth to explain the missing death certificates is defensible. It'a all par for the course here at FD4UM. Perhaps because "ignore" is the root word of ...
You asked me if there was anything that you could do for me...well, can you write a script to euthanize an entire thread from our screens? Thanks.
I had an idea for a "bozo thread" function, where you could elect to bozo an entire thread which would last for a week or so. If after a week it was still active, you could just rebozo it. It would be handy for threads you wish would just go away. Something like that?
rebozo flashed me to Bebe Rebozo - but that's another story from the past. I was thinking along the lines of banned to perdition, gone to hell, never to be seen again in this computer's lifetime type of bozoing...if that is possible, or you could have the time limit thingie, also...I would most often check eternity. Not wanting to stop anyone from participating or mindlessly bantering, I just don't want to waste my time, or disc-space from viewing it.
Technically, going the permo thread bozo route is just as easy to create, but needlessly puts a little more overhead on the system since it would always need to filter threads that have long since died off. Since persistent threads do die on their own sooner or later, it would be "cleanest" to just have it block the thread until it likely does. Balancing the desired features with overhead considerations helps keep the response time for all as speedy as possible.
Thanks for the explanation - just do what is best for all concerned. Stay safe down there. Cheers.
The function for ignoring threads is now in place. There's a link after each article for ignoring the thread. It will prevent general comments from appearing on the LC page, though you'll still get any pings made to you should someone do so. It's presently set to last for one week. You can see a list of ignored threads on the setup page -> Content filters.
thank you! that's great!
It is. And guess which thread I'm ignoring first! Please do not post anymore important 4um news to this thread ;P Seriously, it's so easy ( it's almost too easy ).
There are no replies to Comment # 374. End Trace Mode for Comment # 374.
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#16. To: Brian S, Minerva, christine, zipporah, Morgana le Fay, Red Jones, Ferret Mike, HOUNDDAWG (#7)
It is pretty fucking sad that this, of all forums, has come to this 'back and forth sniping tripe'.
#21. To: Destro (#16)
Anyone who places anyone on bozo for non harassment reasons on a forum is an intellectual coward.
#22. To: Diana (#21)
He's a classic narcissist, therefore impossible to reason with or get along with.
#25. To: RickyJ, All (#22)
#26. To: Diana (#25)
(Edited)
Perhaps you haven't heard, but often in wartime when people are killed, their deaths are not always documented by photograpshs, film, video or even by death certificates.
"Not to mention that for substantial periods of time since 2003 it has been dangerous in about half the country just to move around, much less to move around with dead bodies.
#31. To: AGAviator, Diana, ALL (#26)
Les Roberts Answers Your Questions
Juan Cole: 655,000 Dead in Iraq since Bush Invasion
#64. To: BeAChooser (#31)
There is heavy fighting almost every day at Ramadi in al-Anbar province, among guerrillas, townspeople, tribes, Marines and Iraqi police and army. We almost never get a report of these skirmishes and we almost never are told about Iraqi casualties in Ramadi. Does 1 person a day die there of political violence? Is it more like 4? 10? What about Samarra? Tikrit? No one is saying. Since they aren't, on what basis do we say that the Lancet study is impossible?
In that same article, The Los Angeles times explicitly stated that 50,000 is a gross undercount and excluded entire sections of the country.
#70. To: AGAviator, ALL (#64)
There are about 90 major towns and cities in Iraq.
In that same article, The Los Angeles times explicitly stated that 50,000 is a gross undercount and excluded entire sections of the country.
#79. To: BeAChooser, Minerva, Skydrifter, Red Jones (#70)
(Edited)
Are the people in these 90 major towns and cities different than the people John Hopkins surveyed as being typical of them? Why didn't they go to morgues, hospitals and the health ministry to get a death certificate issued like the ones in the study? Or did they go but then ask those organizations to wipe their records of the fact? Please, resolve this question for me AGAviator since you seem so knowledgeable about the situation in Iraq.
In that same article, The Los Angeles times explicitly stated that 50,000 is a gross undercount and excluded entire sections of the country.
True, the LATimes article says "Iraqi officials involved in compiling the statistics say violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west." But somehow I doubt they meant their data was off by a factor of ten (or more). A factor of two or three, possibly ... but not a factor of ten. You would think that the LATimes would have mentioned something like that. Wouldn't you?
Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since...
#81. To: AGAviator, ALL (#79)
"Are the people in these 90 major towns and cities different than the people John Hopkins surveyed as being typical of them? Why didn't they go to morgues, hospitals and the health ministry to get a death certificate issued like the ones in the study? Or did they go but then ask those organizations to wipe their records of the fact? Please, resolve this question for me AGAviator since you seem so knowledgeable about the situation in Iraq."
There are some very good reasons for not going to morgues and hospitals: (1) You can get killed in the process of moving around the country, and (2) You can have your dead kin accused of being a terrorist which will result in some serious problems for you and your own surviving family.
"True, the LATimes article says "Iraqi officials involved in compiling the statistics say violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west." But somehow I doubt they meant their data was off by a factor of ten (or more). A factor of two or three, possibly ... but not a factor of ten. You would think that the LATimes would have mentioned something like that. Wouldn't you?"
No I don't.
Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since...
The Health Ministry acknowledged the undercount. In addition, the ministry said its figures exclude the three northern provinces of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan because Kurdish officials do not provide death toll figures to the government in Baghdad...
#83. To: BeAChooser (#81)
(Edited)
Did John Hopkins *random* sample just happen to pick a group who did when most of the rest of the country didn't? Or are you suggesting that those who don't go to morgues, etc can still get death certificates?
Perhaps the folks in the John Hopkins' study simply create their own? ROTFLOL!
Really? You really think that the highly liberal, anti-Bush, anti-war LA Times wouldn't mention that the death toll is off by a factor of 10 if it were? Really? ROTFLOL!
Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since...
That doesn't help your case either, since the second John Hopkins' study *confirmed* the results of the first which claimed that 98,000 died in the first 18 months after the war began.
But Kurdistan has been very peaceful compared to the rest of Iraq.
You are still missing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of bodies, death certificates and eyewitness reports.
By the way, the liberal, anti-war, mainstream media won't tell the public this, but Kurdistan is a real success story. They are doing quite well right now compared to under Saddam.
#86. To: AGAviator, ALL (#83)
"Did John Hopkins *random* sample just happen to pick a group who did when most of the rest of the country didn't? Or are you suggesting that those who don't go to morgues, etc can still get death certificates?"
Another one of your trademarked diverisons. The survey asked if they had death certificates. They did not ask if they had death certificates from a morgue or a hospital that happened to be contacted by the LA Times.
The LA Times like any reputable publication does not claim to know what it has just said it does not know.
"That doesn't help your case either, since the second John Hopkins' study *confirmed* the results of the first which claimed that 98,000 died in the first 18 months after the war began."
False. They confirmed their number with a 2nd sample, which corroborated the first.
But Kurdistan has been very peaceful compared to the rest of Iraq.
Not during the first year in Mosul and Kirkuk.
There is also Anbar province and possibly Basra which are worse.
Kurdistan is a welfare project for Big Oil and Israeli shysters all being financed by the American taxpayer.
#90. To: BeAChooser (#86)
But the LA Times only mentioned morgues, hospitals and the health ministry as being sources of death certificates. So I ask you ... what other sources are there? Does the John Hopkins report mention any other sources? No. So what sources are you claiming exist. Oh that's right ... your *theory* is that the morgues, etc did issue the 655,000 certificates but just forgot to make a note of them. ROTFLOL!
"Grossly undercounted," and
. So what do you do instead? Try to bluster past your ignorance with your usual flurry of "ROTFLOL's" The LA Times like any reputable publication does not claim to know what it has just said it does not know.
Reputable? ROTFLOL! Do you know why they call it the LASlime?
Not false. That's exactly what I said. The second study confirmed the results of the first study ... so the second study must have concluded that 98,000 (or so) died in the first 18 months after the war. So your theory that the reason they couldn't find the death certificates of 600,000 is that "many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion" does not help your case. You can't use the first year of the war to explain why so many death certificates are missing.
t those areas were supposedly counted in the first John Hopkins study during the first year. You are still missing half a million death certificates.
You'd have to have killed half the population of the region to explain the John Hopkins estimate and SURELY that would have gotten the attention of the world media.
Consider ... 39 months times 30 days times 24 hours time 1/hour = 28,080.
When are you going to understand that the John Hopkins study is fundamentally flawed?
#97. To: AGAviator, ALL (#90)
there has been more than $1 Trillion spent on it
#98. To: BeAChooser (#97)
(Edited)
Given the stated purpose of the survey, any questions about missing and dead persons were quite secondary to that stated purpose.
That doesn't make the results from that question inaccurate.
What gives an indication of inaccuracy is when a study claims that 92 percent of those claiming deaths during its interviews were able to a death certificates as proof ... yet the number of death certificates issued by those who issue such things appears to be a small fraction
Debunked Here
By Patrick Cockburn, AGAIN?
Let me try again. You claimed that the reason the LATimes couldn't find the death certificates of some 550,000 Iraqis is that "many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion".
But the source whose estimate you are trying to defend as credible, John Hopkins, only claims that 100,000 died in that first 18 months. That is a small fraction of the 550,000 that are missing.
Simply put, chaos in the first year cannot explain the missing HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of death certificates that MUST exist
But not to the insurgency's media. And don't claim they aren't using the media. They could easily document the death of the half of Anbar's population that would be necessary to make the John Hopkins' study results believable.
So go ahead and ignore what that 28,000 figure says about the theory you tried to pushed that Anbar and Basra can explain the John Hopkins estimate.
Now your NEW theory is that EVERY city in Iraq has been seeing 120 killings every month since the beginning of the war ... regardless of the total lack of evidence supporting that claim. This just gets lamer and lamer.
argument silliness your claim that the 50,000 death certificates may have been low by a factor of 2, that would mean 100,000 Iraqi excess deaths from all causes against known American casualties of 34,000. In other words, the greatest, most powerful, military machine in history can only kill fewer than 3 people for every one of their own who gets hurt or killed. And even fewer than 3 people when the excess deaths not caused by combat are filtered out. Then the number becomes more like 1 of theirs killed, to one of ours wounded or killed. argument silliness, the $1 Trillion cost equates to $10 million for each excess death, and even more than that when the excess deaths not caused by combat are filtered out. Then the number becomes more like $30 million for each of theirs killed. You must be really comfortable in the ME because your arguments shift just like the desert sands. ROTFLOL!
There has been more than $1 Trillion spent on it
By the way ... this is another bit of misinformation.
#104. To: AGAviator, ALL (#98)
And your source clearly and explicitly states many times its number is not in the least representative of the number of death certificates or the number of deaths.
Furthermore, at the end of the day the bottom line is: How many people have died in this war, and how many of them are noncombatants.
You claimed that the reason the LATimes couldn't find the death certificates of some 550,000 Iraqis is that "many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion".
No I didn't. That is just one of several factors,
"But the source whose estimate you are trying to defend as credible, John Hopkins, only claims that 100,000 died in that first 18 months. That is a small fraction of the 550,000 that are missing."
The surveys did not cover identical time periods,
and the first survey had a confidence interval where its authors opined that 100,000 seemed to be a reasonable minimum.
"Simply put, chaos in the first year cannot explain the missing HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of death certificates that MUST exist"
Diversion and straw man.
"But not to the insurgency's media. And don't claim they aren't using the media. They could easily document the death of the half of Anbar's population that would be necessary to make the John Hopkins' study results believable."
The insurgency does not play by your rules.
So go ahead and ignore what that 28,000 figure says about the theory you tried to pushed that Anbar and Basra can explain the John Hopkins estimate.
Nobody said 28,000 except you.
I'm saying 4 bodies per day x 89 municipalities plus Baghdad.
"Now your NEW theory is that EVERY city in Iraq has been seeing 120 killings every month since the beginning of the war ... regardless of the total lack of evidence supporting that claim. This just gets lamer and lamer."
I never had an *OLD* theory.
The war has cost more than $1 Trillion,
Assuming for the sake of argument silliness your claim that the 50,000 death certificates may have been low by a factor of 2, that would mean 100,000 Iraqi excess deaths from all causes against known American casualties of 34,000. In other words, the greatest, most powerful, military machine in history can only kill fewer than 3 people for every one of their own who gets hurt or killed.
The supplemental appropriations for Iraq alone are well past half a trillion
#105. To: BeAChooser, AGAviator (#104)
(Edited)
The John Hopkins' studies are lies.
#109. To: scrapper2, AGAviator, ALL (#105)
You, BeAChooser would testify before Congress that the Johns Hopkins' studies "are lies?"
"Let me tell you who was invited to testify before Congress on Dec. 11, 2006 -it was the 2 co-authors of the Lancet study, Dr. Gilbert Burnham, MD, and Dr. Les Roberts."
Do you think these 2 men would "lie" to Congress?
"Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq"
http://www.juancole.com/2006/12/kucinich-paul-congressional-hearing-on.html
DR. BURNHAM - "And then at the end of that survey where there was a death in the household, we asked, "By the way, do you have a death certificate?" And in 91 percent of households where this was asked, the households had death certificates. So we're confident that people were not making up deaths that didn't occur."
#115. To: BeAChooser (#109)
Where are the missing death certificates?
#116. To: BeALoser (#115)
(Edited)
BAC: Where are the missing death certificates?
#130. To: scrapper2 (#116)
If a physician cannot be reached easily within that time frame for a death certificate to be issued, the loved one is buried without a certificate in a place other than a grave yard.
#141. To: AGAviator (#130)
a. Are you saying they can't get buried in grave yards without death certificates?
#150. To: scrapper2, ALL (#141)
a. Yes, that is what Dr. Roberts told me is a requirement in Iraq.
#152. To: BeAChooser, All (#150)
(Edited)
Prove it. Post the email you sent him and post the email he sent back.
#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,
#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?
#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.
#184. To: BeAChooser, AGAviator (#176)
(Edited)
a. Does a liar deserve respect?
#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.
#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?
#204. To: BeAChooser, AGAviator, All (#193)
(Edited)
Give it up, scrapper. The John Hopkins studies on Iraq mortality are BOGUS.
#212. To: scrapper2, all (#204)
You boozer have zero credibility - what's your field of expertise? Do you have an MD? Do you have a PhD? Yes, no...uh huh I thought so. You are a net troll and a sad little specimen of a troll at that, I might add.
What credentials empower you to sit in judgement of Dr. Burnham, MD?
I take no joy in telling you this, BAC, but the fact that you take offense to such a caring human statement from Dr. Burnham reflects very poorly on you. You may be a darker individual than merely a sad little specimen of a troll.
As for your spam quotes from that joke of a biased website called "Magic Statistics"
Here's the bio of the website owner
Kaplan
#218. To: BeAChooser, AGAviator (#212)
BeAChooser: Or just more CLAIMS by Les Roberts?
#221. To: scrapper2, AGAviator, ALL (#218)
In 2007, Roberts is an Associate Professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
Drs. Burnham and Roberts credentials experience int'l reputation TRUMP your stats guy from Yukon with a Masters in Economics from U of Washington hands down. Furthermore, Drs. Burnham and Roberts did not rise to the international stage of epidemiology, which is where they are now, by lying, oozer.
#222. To: Neil McIver (#221)
#223. To: lodwick (#222)
#226. To: Neil McIver (#223)
Something like that?
#227. To: lodwick (#226)
#228. To: Neil McIver (#227)
#370. To: lodwick, *4um Admin News* (#228)
#373. To: Neil McIver (#370)
#374. To: christine, Neil McIver (#373)
thank you! that's great!
Replies to Comment # 374.