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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: 27872
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.

Beachy Spills the Beans

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.

Post Comment   Private Reply   Ignore Thread  

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.

Having a little problem satisfactorily addressing the issues I and many others have raised about the John Hopkins studies?

What credentials empower you to sit in judgement of Dr. Burnham, MD?

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.

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.

ROTFLOL! Having a little problem satisfactorily addressing the questions that Dr Burnham simply ignored or was dishonest/misinformed about in his public interviews?

As for your spam quotes from that joke of a biased website called "Magic Statistics"

Having a little difficulty with the issues and points made at by that writer? Hmmmmmmm?

Here's the bio of the website owner

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?

Kaplan

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?

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   16:13:23 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

I think the closet is where he hides his pics of Jeff Gannon.

Can't you stick to the facts and logic, IndieTX ... or is unfounded smear the only thing FD4UM'ers as a rule know?

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   16:15:25 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Looser, are you still trying to argue after being so totally destroyed on this thread by Scrapper2's post from Les Roberts totally rebutting all your phony arguments you've posted and reposted dozens of times and wasted hundreds of hours on?

Ping to Post # 212.

doctors also issue death certificates in Iraq besides hospitals and morgues,

You haven't proven this. And you certainly haven't proven that they issued half a million death certificates that the *system* is completely unaware of, AGAviator.

Any direct quotes from some of those doctors in Iraq? Hmmmmm?

Or just more CLAIMS by Les Roberts?

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   16:20:52 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

brings out an anonymous internet blogger calling himself "Stat Guy" to make his case on this thread.

He's not anonymous. His name and many details of his life are widely available.

Including the fact that he's a STATISTICIAN who works for the government of Canada.

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   16:22:44 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Call it what you will, I call it a bozo. He's done communicating with you.

ROTFLOL!

That doesn't mean I won't communicate with him should he post some more misinformation.

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   16:24:11 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

AGAviator: brings out an anonymous internet blogger calling himself "Stat Guy" to make his case on this thread.

BeAChooser: He's not anonymous. His name and many details of his life are widely available.

Including the fact that he's a STATISTICIAN who works for the government of Canada.

You are right - "stat guy" makes very clear everything there is to know about him. He's a christonutterisrealfirster who is such valuable respected stats guy that he works for the Cdn gov't in their Siberian hinterland outpost.

And this stat guy is challenging the likes of the internationally respected Johns Hopkins public health center and 2 similarly respected professionals Dr. Roberts and Dr. Burnham. Comparing the curriculim vita of Drs Burnham and Roberts to "stats guy" in the Yukon, and it doesn't take genius to recognize who is more credible.

scrapper2  posted on  2007-03-01   16:59:14 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

BeAChooser: Or just more CLAIMS by Les Roberts?

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?

scrapper2  posted on  2007-03-01   17:30:28 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

He's a christonutterisrealfirster

Which has what to do with the specific criticisms he outlines in detail in his blog articles? Any lurkers or visitors to FD4UM by now will observe that you don't want to discuss the details of the criticisms ... not by Mr Gilbreath or any one else.

Comparing the curriculim vita of Drs Burnham and Roberts to "stats guy" in the Yukon, and it doesn't take genius to recognize who is more credible.

How about Burnham and Roberts versus Dr Jon Pedersen, Debarati Guha-Sapir, Dr Madelyn Hicks, Beth Daponte, Steven Moore, Professor Michael Spagat ... shall I go on? You see, scrapper, it's not just about credentials. It's about professionalism and addressing specific shortcomings in the methodology. It's about having good answers to what many highly qualified people see as red flags. It's about letting your biases get in the way of good research. Sadly, Drs Burnham and Roberts have demonstrated what not to do if good science is your goal.

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   19:31:11 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

a. He's a christonutterisrealfirster Which has what to do with the specific criticisms he outlines in detail in his blog articles? Any lurkers or visitors to FD4UM by now will observe that you don't want to discuss the details of the criticisms ... not by Mr Gilbreath or any one else.

b. How about Burnham and Roberts versus Dr Jon Pedersen, Debarati Guha-Sapir, Dr Madelyn Hicks, Beth Daponte, Steven Moore, Professor Michael Spagat ... shall I go on? You see, scrapper, it's not just about credentials. It's about professionalism and addressing specific shortcomings in the methodology. It's about having good answers to what many highly qualified people see as red flags. It's about letting your biases get in the way of good research. Sadly, Drs Burnham and Roberts have demonstrated what not to do if good science is your goal.

a. That stat guy is a religious idealogue has everything to do with his bias. That his credentials both academic and experiential pale by comparison to those of Drs. Burnham and Roberts has everything to do with stat guy's lack of professional credibility.

b. The fact that 26 medical field professionals signed a petition in support of Drs. Burnham and Roberts study - its methodology and findings - trumps any internet opinions of the people you cite. Did "Dr Jon Pedersen, Debarati Guha- Sapir, Dr Madelyn Hicks, Beth Daponte, Steven Moore, Professor Michael Spagat" sign a petition and stake their own reputations and those of the institutions they represent to support their opinions?

scrapper2  posted on  2007-03-01   19:47:13 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

In 2007, Roberts is an Associate Professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

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.

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.

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 ...

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   19:49:27 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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.

Dr.Ron Paul for President

Lod  posted on  2007-03-01   19:55:05 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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?

Pinguinite.com

Neil McIver  posted on  2007-03-01   19:59:14 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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.

b. 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 ...

a. What does your laughably biased "study" by a throughly discredited neocon war monger punk named DAVID HOROWITZ, a former communist and Black Panther wannabe, have to do with the validity and credibility of the Johns Hopkins research study on Iraqi civilian deaths?

BAC, your back is to the wall now if you resort to quoting anything with DAVID HOROWITZ's name on it.

HAHAHAHAHAHA. I love it.

Thank you BAC - you've just added 6 feet to the hole you've dug yourself in. DAVID HOROWITZ - oh my - tears are rolling down my face.

b. You are coming undone, BAC. Call your therapist.

I have not ignored any of the crap you have posted. Other 4um posters, like AGAviator, have not ignored what you have posted on this thread.

What we have done is systematically discredited your arguments, your sources, and that's what has you unravelling at the seams. It's not about ignoring you. It's about answering you. It's about burying you.

scrapper2  posted on  2007-03-01   20:07:04 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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 think this thread has come to its natural conclusion.

BAC did his swan song in #221.

scrapper2  posted on  2007-03-01   20:14:18 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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.

Dr.Ron Paul for President

Lod  posted on  2007-03-01   20:15:44 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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.

Pinguinite.com

Neil McIver  posted on  2007-03-01   20:25:31 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Thanks for the explanation - just do what is best for all concerned.

Stay safe down there.

Cheers.

Dr.Ron Paul for President

Lod  posted on  2007-03-01   20:30:16 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

BAC,

If you can't admit that even "YOUR" number of civilian deaths is testimony to the Bush Cabal War Crimes; you have nothing viable to contribute. You're just another Next-Generation Nazi, doing Tel Aviv's bidding.

SKYDRIFTER  posted on  2007-03-01   20:54:15 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

The fact that 26 medical field professionals signed a petition in support of Drs. Burnham and Roberts study - its methodology and findings - trumps any internet opinions of the people you cite.

Let's take a closer look at that so-called petition (btw, it's an internet petition, scrapper):

****************

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

October 21, 2006

LAST week, the medical journal The Lancet published the findings of an important study of deaths in Iraq. President George Bush and Prime Minister Howard were quick to dismiss its methods as discredited and its findings as not credible or believable. We beg to differ: the study was undertaken by respected researchers assisted by one of the world's foremost biostatisticians. Its methodology is sound and its conclusions should be taken seriously.

Professor Gilbert Burnham and colleagues from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and Al Mustansiriya University School of Medicine in Baghdad measured deaths in Iraq between January 2002 and July 2006. They surveyed 12,801 individuals in 1849 households in 47 representative clusters across the country.

Their study is important in providing the only up-to-date, independent, and comprehensive scientific study of mortality after the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. The study found that mortality had risen alarmingly since March 2003 and continues to rise. The number of conflict-related excess deaths, above and beyond those that would normally occur, was estimated at 655,000. While precision about such figures is difficult, we can be confident that the excess deaths were above 390,000, and may in fact be as high as 940,000. The vast majority (92 per cent) of the excess deaths were due to direct violence.

The cross-sectional household cluster sample survey method used is a standard, robust, well-established method for gathering health data. A copy of a death certificate was available for a high proportion (92 per cent) of deaths. Conservative assumptions were made about deaths of uncertain cause and about the small areas not sampled.

Except in situations of highly reliable, well-maintained, comprehensive vital statistics collection — clearly not the case in Iraq at present — such surveys have been repeatedly demonstrated to be the best method for establishing population rates for key health indicators such as deaths, disability and immunisation coverage. Where passive information collection (such as death counts in morgues or hospitals) are incomplete, as is the case in Iraq today, population-based survey methods can be expected to find higher rates — often considerably higher — but that more accurately reflect the true situation.

Conducting such a rigorous study within the constraints of the security situation in Iraq is dangerous and difficult, and deserves commendation. We have not heard any legitimate reason to dismiss its findings. It is noteworthy that the same methodology has been used in recent mortality surveys in Darfur and Democratic Republic of Congo, but there has been no criticism of these surveys.

THE SIGNATORIES

... snip ...

*****************

First, one can't help but notice that these doctors signed this within one week of the latest report being published. Not very much time for them to ponder the implications and methodology. And certainly a lot of potential defects have been pointed out by many since then. I wonder whether the doctors have ever defended the study from any of those specific criticism ... or if all they did was sign a petition and like you base their opinion solely on the credentials of the researchers.

The second thing to notice is that the petition doesn't address a single one of the complaints I've pointed out in this thread. They point out that "A copy of a death certificate was available for a high proportion (92 per cent) of deaths" but apparently miss the implications of this if death certificates don't turn up with anywhere near the same regularity in the general population.

Certainly their claim "We have not heard any legitimate reason to dismiss its findings" is interesting. In one week could they really have had time to carefully read the study, ponder its methodology and potential shortcomings, pay attention to what others had to say about it (a debate that actually took some time to mature), put together a petition and publish it? No. What their petition looks like is a rush to judgement. Now why would they do that? Well let's look at some of the names.

THE SIGNATORIES

Professor James A Angus, dean, faculty of medicine, dentistry and health sciences, University of Melbourne

According to this, "James Angus was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne in July 2003. Before becoming dean, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Pharmacology and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences. He has extensive research experience in pre-clinical pharmacology in relation to cardiovascular and antinociceptive drugs." Now just what does he know about statistics and surveys ... compared to say Dr Pendersen or Dr Hicks? And has he written ANYTHING about the study, Iraq or mortality since then? No.

Professor Bruce Armstrong AM, director of research, Sydney Cancer Centre; professor of public health and medical foundation fellow, University of Sydney

According to this, his interest is "cancer causes and control, measuring and improving the performance of cancer services". Again, where does it suggest he know anything about proper surveying methodologies for problems like war related dead? He's a skin cancer expert. Has he written anything since about Iraq? No.

Dr Jim Black, head of epidemiology, Victorian Infectious Diseases Service

This gentleman actually does have survey experience similar to Roberts' and Burnham's. He even teaches a course that "Provides a theoretical introduction and is followed by practical experience in critically appraising both published research findings and proposals for new research." So you'd think he'd have asked a few questions like those I and others have been asking before putting pen to virtual paper. Has he written anything since about Iraq? No.

Professor Peter Brooks, executive dean, faculty of health sciences, University of Queensland

Again, outside of signing that petition he hasn't written anything about Iraq or the John Hopkins' studies.

Professor Jonathan Carapetis, director, Menzies School of Health Research, Darwin

According to this, "he is a paediatric infectious disease specialist with extensive experience working with Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory; established research record in the field of Group A Streptococcal disease covering all aspects from molecular biology to epidemiology and public health; involved with the current international effort to develop an agenda of research to support pneumococcal vaccine introduction in the developing world." I wonder why he felt so certain about the statistical methodology and results to sign that petition so quickly? But again, he's written nothing about Iraq before or since so it's hard to know.

Dr Ben Coghlan, medical epidemiologist, Centre for International Health, Burnet Institute

According to this, "Ben Coghlan is a medical epidemiologist and public health physician trainee. e has worked for a variety of organisations (Australian Red Cross, MSF, IRC and WHO) providing assistance to refugee and displaced populations in Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. He is an honorary lecturer with Monash University’s Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine and teaches for the International Health stream of the Master of Public health degree, the Master of International Research Bioethics and for the undergraduate medical course. He has also taught epidemiology, communicable disease control and refugee health courses in Uganda, PNG, and Cambodia." And unlike the others "He has conducted cross-sectional surveys in conflict settings assessing mortality, nutritional status and immunisation coverage." And unlike the others, he apparently wrote something about Iraq and the lancet study back in October 2006, about the time he signed the petition. http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=1942 Too bad I can't read it because you have to subscribe to read it and I don't care to do that right now. But I gather its because he says the Burnet Institute (where he works) used the same methodology (clustering) in a study that found 3.9 million Congolese had perished because of that conflict. Ergo any study that uses clustering must be right.

Professor Mike Daube, professor of health policy, Curtin University

I gather Duabe is an expert on tobacco, smoking and cancer. But other than his signature on the petition, I don't see anything written on Iraq or the Lancet reports. Although I hear he is concerned about its use of cigarettes.

You know ... I don't really care to spend more time on this. I think readers will get the ghist of what I'm noting about these doctors. I am beginning to think Australian universities are even more liberal than ours. Certainly there appears to be a tendency in that direction amongst the signatories of this petition. I wonder if one could find a correlation between them in terms of who their friends are? ROTFLOL!

PS ... I don' t know if you're aware of this but some of these doctors signed a previous petition in September of 2004, condemning the Iraq war. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/09/04/1094234080677.html Among them was Bruce Armstrong, Rob Moodie and Anthony Zwi. Does that suggest they might have a preconceived bias and just like to sign petitions?

Did "Dr Jon Pedersen, Debarati Guha- Sapir, Dr Madelyn Hicks, Beth Daponte, Steven Moore, Professor Michael Spagat" sign a petition and stake their own reputations and those of the institutions they represent to support their opinions?

They did more than that. They actually got themselves quoted in the mainstream press. And many of them wrote whole articles on the topic. I'd say they put a whole lot more on the line than your fabulous 26, scrapper. ROTFLOL!

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   22:07:46 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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?

Isn't it amazing the lengths to which certain people would go to hide from facts?

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   22:09:46 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Isn't it amazing the lengths to which certain people would go to hide from facts?

Yeah, this thread is chock full of your 10,000 word, 36 image attempts to hide from facts.

Critter  posted on  2007-03-01   22:11:21 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

And isn't it interesting that this *Hit Thread* on me turned into something else ...

so now certain FD4UMers want it to go away. ROTFLOL!

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   22:11:51 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

BAC did his swan song in #221.

Ping to #230, scrapper.

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   22:13:57 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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.

No one is making you read this thread, lodwick. Have you no will power?

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-01   22:15:02 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Looser, are you still trying to argue after being so totally destroyed on this thread by Scrapper2's post from Les Roberts totally rebutting all your phony arguments you've posted and reposted dozens of times and wasted hundreds of hours on?

Ping to Post # 212.

You've been doing a song and dance for months now, on 2 websites, on dozens if not hundreds of posts, about how an LA Times article explicitly saying that morgue and hosptital death totals were "grossly undercounted" somehow impugns a statistical study which says there've been 655,000 excess deaths.

As part of that song and dance you've been supplying arm-waving numbers you make up yourself, about how the difference between the LA Times "gross undercount" of death certificates, and the estimated 655,000 excess deaths of the survey, couldn't possibly be so "gross" as to exclude a 600,000 difference t hat you claim exists.

No, instead you argue that "gross," can't be more than "double," or at most, three times. Even though your only proof for your definition of "gross" [on this issue only] is that "The media hates Bush."

But in your "gross" [haha] ignorance, you never bothered to consider that in addition to "gross undercounts," there are also more sources of death certificates than hospitals and morgues - namely individual doctors.

That fact alone blows all your phony numbers completely out of the water. And even more so when you consider there are far more individual doctors than there are hospitals and morgues. And that these individual doctors are far more likely to immediately come to scenes where people have been killed or injured, than the people are to try to cart dead bodies across entire cities to the nearest morgue or health care facility.

I've never seen somebody's claims been so completely annihilated by one simple, and overlooked, fact.

Now before we go any further, put some of your extensive speculative abilities to work and tell me how many individual doctors there are in Iraq writing death certificates, compared to how many hospitals and morgues there are in Iraq writing death certificates.

And how that number of death certificates written by individual doctors affects your thoroughly-debunked claims there are "hundreds of thousands of missing death certificates" that the LA Times survey never attempted to count to begin with.

And *try* come up with something good, because you're hardly worth even bothering to reply to any more, you've stepped in it so bad.

You haven't proven this. And you certainly haven't proven that they issued half a million death certificates that the *system* is completely unaware of, AGAviator. Any direct quotes from some of those doctors in Iraq? Hmmmmm? Or just more CLAIMS by Les Roberts?

Yes, the troll's mantra.

"You haven't proven it!" "Liar!" "I haven't lost, I can still post!"

ROTFLAMO!

AGAviator  posted on  2007-03-02   2:30:24 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

No, instead you argue that "gross," can't be more than "double," or at most, three times.

No, I didn't say that. I said " "Grossly undercounted" could just as easily mean 50% too low. Or a factor of two." Contrast that with you declaring ""Gross" means "very large." "Two" is not "very large."" Unfortunate for you that I easily showed multiple uses of gross where gross is 50% or a factor of two. Shall I repeat that proof?

***********

Let's google "grossly undercount". Here's the first few hits:

http://www.adrants.com/2004/02/study-finds-media-usage-grossly-undercoun.php "Unfortunately, those syndicated research tools are grossly undercounting actual media usage according to a new study from Ball State University's Center For Media Design. The study followed 101 people around for a day observing actual media usage and then compared it to usage determined by written diary and phone survey. Computer usage is undercounted by 205 percent, online by 169 percent, television by 164 percent, books by 100 percent, magazines by 75 percent, radio by 74 percent and newspapers by 13 percent."

http://talk.livedaily.com/showthread.php?t=565759 "If the revision for the 12 -months ending in March 2006 does produce the now expected upward revision of 810,000, that will mean that job growth in the period was about 40 percent stronger than the government's previous estimates. "It looks as if the monthly numbers grossly undercounted the true number of jobs created," said Bernard Baumohl, managing director of the Economic Outlook Group, a Princeton, N.J. research firm."

http://www.nypost.com/seven/02082007/news/regionalnews/population_surprise_for_jews_regionalnews_rita_delfiner.htm "America's Jewish population is far larger than previous estimates, a new survey shows. There are as many as 7.4 million Jews in the United States, researchers at Brandeis University said yesterday. They said the last authoritative survey was taken in 2000-01 and erroneously put the figure then at 5.2 million Jews. ... snip ... The Brandeis researchers said the earlier survey grossly undercounted non-Orthodox families, did not include "substantial numbers of young and middle-aged individuals" and was wrong to say the Jewish-American population had been in a state of decline since 1990."

Or how about this one, http://www.oasisclinic.org/10_PUBLICATIONS.html "the population of opioid-drug users may be grossly undercounted, because some surveys have found up to three times more illicit drug users in particular regions than commonly estimated"

************

you never bothered to consider that in addition to "gross undercounts," there are also more sources of death certificates than hospitals and morgues - namely individual doctors.

Again, nothing is stopping you from proving lots of doctors were issuing death certificates and then not notifying anyone so they could be recorded. But you haven't done that, have you. In fact, you haven't posted the names and quotes from ANY Iraqi doctors saying that. Why is that AGAviator?

That fact alone

It's not a fact until you actually prove that's the way Iraq worked/works. Name some doctors who say this and provide linked quotes. Provide us some form of documentation other than Les Roberts *word* that this practice was going on so much that only a TENTH of the death certificates in Iraq were recorded. I'll be waiting...

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-02   16:28:36 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

I said " "Grossly undercounted" could just as easily mean 50% too low. Or a factor of two." Contrast that with you declaring ""Gross" means "very large." "Two" is not "very large."" Unfortunate for you that I easily showed multiple uses of gross where gross is 50% or a factor of two.

Unfortunately for you, I easily showed where the LA Times specified the places where the Ministry of Health did not count even its own numbers - much less the numbers of all the doctors in Iraq not directly working for that Ministry.

And that makes the context of "gross undercount" a lot more meaningful than your haphazard Googlings of completely unrelated subjects

Shall I repeat that proof?

(1) Violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west.

(2) 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...

(3) The figure also does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the invasion.

(4) Last but not least, any and all death certificates issued by individual doctors who did not ever provide their statistics to the Ministry of Health in the first place.

Put another way, the Ministry of Health, in addition to having serious trouble "compiling" its own numbers its agencies actually did issue - which is far more than 50,000, has in its 50,000 total only Baghdad for an entire year, excludes a particularly violent province where there is still fighting going on to this day, excludes 3 entire provinces, and excludes all numbers issued by individual doctors.

And your response to this overwhelming lack of coverage is to say "Look! I can Google up somebody saying "very large" means "double!"

Furthermore, let your imaginary "readers" not forget that you have repeatedly premised your phony calculations of "missing death certificates" on only hospitals and morgues issuing death certificates, and not individual doctors.

Since there are far more doctors than there are hospitals and morgues, and as first responders doctors would see more casualties and deaths than those latter facilities, you've just cut your own "undercount" down by at least a factor of two - in additon to the two-something you claim that a "gross undercount" represents.

So reduce your "gross undercount" by the factor of 2 you concede, then reduce it by another bare minimum factor of 2 for those doctors you totally ignored, and then reduce it further because 87% x 92% = 80% - not 92% - told the survey they had death certificates. And then you will be in the hundreds of thousands, and the truth will slowly and inexorably start creeping [how appropriate a choice of words] up on you.

It's not a fact until you actually prove that's the way Iraq worked/works. Name some doctors who say this

I don't provide proof to trolls. Les Roberts knows some doctors and has been to Iraq. You haven't.

Go email Roberts for some names if you have the nerve.

AGAviator  posted on  2007-03-03   2:12:46 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

The Vermont Guardian
http:// www.vermontguardian.com/commentary/032007/TwinTowers.shtml

By William Rice
March 1, 2007

Having worked on structural steel buildings as a civil engineer in the era when the Twin Towers were designed and constructed, I found some disturbing discrepancies and omissions concerning their collapse on 9/11.

I was particularly interested in the two PBS documentaries that explained the prevailing theories as determined by two government agencies, FEMA and NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology). The first (2002) PBS documentary, Why the Towers Fell, discussed how the floor truss connectors failed and caused a “progressive pancake collapse.”

The subsequent 2006 repackaged documentary Building on Ground Zero explained that the connectors held, but that the columns failed, which is also unlikely. Without mentioning the word “concrete,” the latter documentary compared the three-second collapse of the concrete Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building with that of the Twin Towers that were of structural steel. The collapse of a concrete-framed building cannot be compared with that of a structural steel-framed building.

Since neither documentary addressed many of the pertinent facts, I took the time to review available material, combine it with scientific and historic facts, and submit the following two theories for consideration.

The prevailing theory

The prevailing theory for the collapse of the 110-story, award-winning Twin Towers is that when jetliners flew into the 95th and 80th floors of the North and South Towers respectively, they severed several of each building’s columns and weakened other columns with the burning of jet fuel/kerosene (and office combustibles).

However, unlike concrete buildings, structural steel buildings redistribute the stress when several columns are removed and the undamaged structural framework acts as a truss network to bridge over the missing columns.

After the 1993 car bomb explosion destroyed columns in the North Tower, John Skilling, the head structural engineer for the Twin Towers, was asked about an airplane strike. He explained that the Twin Towers were originally designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 (similar in size to the Boeing 767). He went on to say that there would be a horrendous fire from the jet fuel, but “the building structure would still be there.”

The 10,000 gallons of jet fuel (half capacity) in each jetliner did cause horrendous fires over several floors, but it would not cause the steel members to melt or even lose sufficient strength to cause a collapse. This is because the short-duration jet fuel fires and office combustible fires cannot create (or transmit to the steel) temperatures hot enough. If a structural steel building could collapse because of fire, it would do so slowly as the various steel members gradually relinquished their structural strength. However, in the 100-year history of structural-steel framed buildings, there is no evidence of any structural steel framed building having collapsed because of fire.

Let’s assume the unlikelihood that these fires could weaken all of the columns to the same degree of heat intensity and thus remove their structural strength equally over the entire floor, or floors, in order to cause the top 30- floor building segment (South Tower WTC #2) to drop vertically and evenly onto the supporting 79th floor. The 30 floors from above would then combine with the 79th floor and fall onto the next level down (78th floor) crushing its columns evenly and so on down into the seven levels below the street level.

The interesting fact is that each of these 110-story Twin Towers fell upon itself in about ten seconds at nearly free-fall speed. This violates Newton’s Law of Conservation of Momentum that would require that as the stationary inertia of each floor is overcome by being hit, the mass (weight) increases and the free-fall speed decreases.

Even if Newton’s Law is ignored, the prevailing theory would have us believe that each of the Twin Towers inexplicably collapsed upon itself crushing all 287 massive columns on each floor while maintaining a free-fall speed as if the 100,000, or more, tons of supporting structural-steel framework underneath didn’t exist.

The politically unthinkable theory

Controlled demolition is so politically unthinkable that the media not only demeans the messenger but also ridicules and “debunks” the message rather than provide investigative reporting. Curiously, it took 441 days for the president’s 9/11 Commission to start an “investigation” into a tragedy where more than 2,500 WTC lives were taken. The Commission’s investigation also didn’t include the possibility of controlled-demolition, nor did it include an investigation into the “unusual and unprecedented” manner in which WTC Building #7 collapsed.

The media has basically kept the collapse of WTC Building #7 hidden from public view. However, instead of the Twin Towers, let’s consider this building now. Building #7 was a 47-story structural steel World Trade Center Building that also collapsed onto itself at free-fall speed on 9/11. This structural steel building was not hit by a jetliner, and collapsed seven hours after the Twin Towers collapsed and five hours after the firemen had been ordered to vacate the building and a collapse safety zone had been cordoned off. Both of the landmark buildings on either side received relatively little structural damage and both continue in use today.

Contrary to the sudden collapse of the Twin Towers and Building #7, the four other smaller World Trade Center buildings #3, #4, #5, and #6, which were severely damaged and engulfed in flames on 9/11, still remained standing. There were no reports of multiple explosions. The buildings had no pools of molten metal (a byproduct of explosives) at the base of their elevator shafts. They created no huge caustic concrete/cement and asbestos dust clouds (only explosives will pulverize concrete into a fine dust cloud), and they propelled no heavy steel beams horizontally for three hundred feet or more.

The collapse of WTC building #7, which housed the offices of the CIA, the Secret Service, and the Department of Defense, among others, was omitted from the government’s 9/11 Commission Report, and its collapse has yet to be investigated.

Perhaps it is time for these and other unanswered questions surrounding 9/11 to be thoroughly investigated. Let’s start by contacting our congressional delegation.

William Rice, P.E., is a registered professional civil engineer who worked on structural steel (and concrete) buildings in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was also a professor at Vermont Technical College where he taught engineering materials, structures lab, and other building related courses.

SKYDRIFTER  posted on  2007-03-03   13:39:17 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

I don't provide proof to trolls. Les Roberts knows some doctors and has been to Iraq. You haven't.

Indeed physicians were key participants in the Johns Hopkins' research study.

The co-author of the Johns Hopkins' study, Dr. Burnham, is an MD.

And the Iraqi team who were responsible for collecting the data were all Iraqi medical doctors - 8 of them in total, as I understand it - 4 male MD's and 4 female MD's.

"The two survey teams each consisted of two female and two male interviewers, with the field manager (RL) serving as supervisor. All were medical doctors with previous survey and community medicine experience and were fluent in English and Arabic."

http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919 .pdf

scrapper2  posted on  2007-03-03   13:56:28 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

(1) Violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west.

Yet I proved quite easily that unreported deaths in Anbar can't come even close to explaining 500,000 missing death certificates unless you want to claim half the population of Anbar has been killed (and the rest wounded) ... and no one in the media has noticed.

(2) 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...

This only proves your DESPERATION. Kurdistan is the clear success story in Iraq. It is not by any stretch of the imagination as violent as you (and Les Roberts) would have to have people believe to even begin to explain the missing death certificates.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/16/60minutes/main2486679.shtml "Bob Simon On How The Kurds Are Reshaping Northeastern Iraq, Feb 18, 2007, Try to imagine a peaceful and stable Iraq where business is booming and Americans are beloved. Now open your eyes because 60 Minutes is going to take you to a part of Iraq which fits that description: it's called Kurdistan. ... snip ... 60 Minutes wanted to test the security situation, so one Saturday morning Simon and the team dropped by the main market in Erbil, the self-styled capital of Kurdistan, just 40 miles from the rest of Iraq. The only disagreements here were about price. Just how safe is it? Simon, an American, strolled through the market in his shirtsleeves, without wearing the flack jackets reporters often have to wear in other parts of Iraq."

In fact, a sociologist writing on the web brings up a very good criticism of the John Hopkins study regarding Kurdistan: "I am a sociologist who has been looking closely at the Lancet study and wanted to say that I find many of the comments useful here, as I craft a critique of the Lancet study. ... snip ... From what I know about this sampling, the gravest error was that they should have seperated Iraq into three regions and then sampled the same way within these regions: Kurdistan, Central Iraq, an Southern Iraq. They would have found virtually no excess death in Kurdistan (in fact, maybe even an overall improvement), in Central Iraq, probably something of the order of magnitude they actually did discover, and in Southern Iraq, much less than in Central Iraq. To have 25% of the sample be from Baghdad and extrapolate to, say, Kurdistan, is like taking the crime rate from Washington DC and extrapolating to Montana. This is very bad methodology ... "

And he's not the only one who sees that. Even the more rational anti-war sources can see what you simply refuse to see, AGAviator. Here is one:

*************

From http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/10/11/135644/20

"Here are some possible weaknesses in the John Hopkins study, based on the PDF Lancet article The Human Cost of the War in Iraq. ... snip ...

First, the most violent governorates are relatively oversampled. The provinces experiencing full-scale war - Anbar, Ninevah, Salahaddin, Diyala - (>10 violent deaths per 1,000 per year) were sampled at a rate of one cluster per 459,000 people. Baghdad was sampled at 1:540,000. In predominantly Shia' governorates that have experienced some inter-shia' political violence and some bombing incidents (Babel, Qadisiyya, Basra, the rate is one cluster per 809,000. In Kirkuk (Tamim), where violence is highly variable but with large areas that are peaceful, the rate is 1:881,000. In areas without significant violence, one cluster per 530,000 was sampled - but they did not survey the two most secure governorates in the north and south - Dohuk and Muthanna, respectively. Dohuk is the only Kurdish governorate that has experienced no fighting and no bombings of any sort. Likewise, Muthanna is the calmist governorate in the Shia' area. It's so calm, the US sent the Japanese there. Admittedly, these are small governorates, but they do have an aggregate population of 1.5 million people who are essentially unaffected by the war, other than soldiers recruited there who agree to fight elsewhere.

Put another way, the Sunni governorates were sampled 1:450,000; the mixed ethnicity governorates sampled 1:532,000; the Kurdish governorates 1:626,000 and the Shia' governorates 1:660,000. Violence is far higher in the Sunni and mixed-ethnicity governorates, because the fight between the US and the insurgency is in primarily Sunni areas, and the civil war is primarily in mixed ethnicity areas. Violence is lower in Shia' areas and very low in Kurdish areas. Finally, the populations in the Sunni and mixed ethnicity governorates may be slightly overestimated for two reasons: First, the UNDP data is based at least partially on Iraqi census figures before 2003, which tended to undercount Shia' and Kurds, and second, there has been massive migration out of Baghdad, Ninevah and Diyala governorates to safer, ethnically homogenous areas since the war - there are 250,000 registered IDPs in Iraq, but there could be twice that many or more who have quietly moved in with relatives outside of the most violent governorates.

My biggest concern however, is that violence is highly unequally distributed within governorates, both geographically and according to ethnic community. If there appears to be an unintentional sampling bias toward the most violent governorates, there could also be a trend to sample the more violent locations within each governorate. I know the report states that clusters were selected randomly, but the locations of those clusters are really important for assessing accuracy. For example, the study only sampled one cluster in Kirkuk (Tammim). If you survey a mixed-ethnicity neighborhood near the center of the city, the mortality rate would be sky high, among the highest in Iraq. If you measured an ethnically homogenous neighborhood in the city, the rate would be moderate to high. If you measured an ethnically homogenous village west or south of Kirkuk, the rate would be very variable from relatively high to low. If you measure a town or village in the east of the province, the rate would be negligible. It seems to me very hard to get an accurate reading on Kirkuk from one cluster.

Likewise, they used three cluster sites to determine the mortality rate for Ninevah governorate, Iraq's second largest governorate. The northeastern third and about 35% of the population are under Kurdish control and experience virtually no violence, rural areas and areas along the Syrian border experience localized violence depending to a great extent on the ethnic composition of the community, and Mosul city is insanely violent. The location of those three clusters is really important, even within Mosul city itself. The west side of town is twice as violent as the east. Without information on the location of the clusters, it is hard to be 100% convinced of accuracy. Diyala is similar - with extraordinarily violent areas (Khalis, Baquba) and relatively safe ones (Khanaqin, Kifri). I can travel safely to Khanaqin and have lunch in a restaurant, but I would be immediately killed or kidapped if I tried that in Baquba.

Unfortunately, the ethnic affiliation of the surveyor is also important (i.e. Arab communities would not accept a Kurd and vice versa). I know that they achieved gender balance, but it is hard to imagine how one could get accurate figures in mixed ethnicity governorates like Diyala or Kirkuk without first, a number of clusters and second, withou careful attention to assure an ethnic mix of researchers to assure trust on the part of participants and accurate interviews. They may well have done the latter, but it is not stated in the report.

... snip ...

My own guess is that the death rate in the war is twice as much or more than Iraq Body Count, but probably half as much as reported in this study."

****************

(3) The figure also does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the invasion.

But deaths the first year will NOT explain the missing 500,000 death certificates because John Hopkins' study only claims that about 100,000 (of the 655,000) died in the first 18 months after the invasion. Now this has been pointed out to you time and again. So why do you keep mentioning it? Because it is all you have...

(4) Last but not least, any and all death certificates issued by individual doctors who did not ever provide their statistics to the Ministry of Health in the first place.

Again, provide the names of some Iraqi doctors who say they issued dozens or even hundreds of death certificates and then never notified authorities. Provide us with *some* documentation other than Les Roberts' post facto claim this explains the discrepancy. Why isn't this significant fact mentioned in any of their actual research? Why doesn't Roberts or Burnham go find the doctors named on the death certificates they were provided by the interviewees? That would seem the obvious thing to do. Or didn't they make copies of the death certificates they were shown? Do they even remember which families they asked (note that there are indications that they don't have that information)?

Furthermore, let your imaginary "readers" not forget that you have repeatedly premised your phony calculations of "missing death certificates" on only hospitals and morgues issuing death certificates, and not individual doctors.

And you are premising your belief on a still unsupported claim that doctors outside of hospitals and morgues have issued 9 out of 10 death certificates and then not reported doing so to anyone. If you did that in this country you would surely lose your license. Prove to us in Iraq that is permitted.

And just for the record, let me repeat what one of the authors of the LATimes story, Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times, in an interview with PBS, questioned the John Hopkins' study saying, "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."

You see, they even went to cemeteries, AGAviator. So apparently they didn't find evidence that another half a million Iraqis have been buried. So where are they?

Since there are far more doctors than there are hospitals and morgues,

How many of them don't work in hospitals or morgues or for the Health Ministry? Do you have a number?

There are currently about 17,000 doctors in Iraq. According to WHO in May of 2003 there were about 1500 medical facilities throughout Iraq, including 160 hospitals and 1300 health centers. In September of 2003, USAID said there were 280 hospitals and about 1500 primary health centers. The numbers are at least that now. So let's call it 200 hospitals and 1400 health centers.

Now let's suppose those hospitals each have an average of 20 doctors and the health centers have 3 each. A total of about 8000 doctors. That doesn't seem too unreasonable considering that the health ministry as a whole employs some 120,000 Iraqis. That would leave about 9000 doctors. And how many of doctors work for the ministry in morgues and for the ministry itself? Shall we guess another 1000? So that leaves 8000 doctors. And how many of these doctors work in areas of Iraq (like Kurdistan) that have been relatively peaceful? Let's say a quarter (although it is probably higher). That leaves 6000. And how many of those doctors follow the rules and report deaths like they are supposed to? Let's give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the answer is only 1000. So that leaves 5000 doctors who on average have to issue 100 death certificates each and not report them (to explain 500,000 missing death certificates). That your claim?

Well why don't you find ONE of them to come forward and support your assertion. That shouldn't seem to difficult a request. There are 5000 of them to draw from.

Les Roberts knows some doctors and has been to Iraq.

Yes. They told him they HATE Americans so he hired them to do his study.

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-03   18:29:08 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

After the 1993 car bomb explosion destroyed columns in the North Tower, John Skilling, the head structural engineer for the Twin Towers, was asked about an airplane strike. He explained that the Twin Towers were originally designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 (similar in size to the Boeing 767).

First of all John Skilling was NOT the head structural engineer for the WTC towers. Leslie Robertson is the head structural engineer of record. He was the one who moved to New York to do the design. Mr Skilling remained in Seattle. Second, did Mr Rice fail to note to the difference in the speed of the planes assumed in the design and the ones that hit the towers? That difference corresponds to a factor of 7 (or more) difference in the impact energy of the planes.

He went on to say that there would be a horrendous fire from the jet fuel, but “the building structure would still be there.”

There was NO consideration of fire after the plane impact in the design. Leslie Robertson stated that fire resulting from a plane impact was NOT considered in the design. If Mr Rice thinks otherwise, he is wrong.

The 10,000 gallons of jet fuel (half capacity) in each jetliner did cause horrendous fires over several floors, but it would not cause the steel members to melt or even lose sufficient strength to cause a collapse.

Melting of steel is not the theory of NIST.

This is because the short-duration jet fuel fires and office combustible fires cannot create (or transmit to the steel) temperatures hot enough.

Wrong again. First, the fires were NOT of short duration (didn't he read the NIST report like he claimed?) and second how hot does he think the temperatures have to get to weaken steel? The fires in the Windsor Tower in Madrid reached 1400 F and that was without jet fuel to start it. There are plenty of examples of temperatures in fires in ordinary office building reaching those temperatures or even higher. Or does Mr Rice actually think steel strength is unaffected at these temperatures? If so, then I question his credentials. Also, does he think the numerous engineers who did analysis with codes that are generally agreed to be the state of the art in fire engineering are incompetent or wrong when they concluded temperatures in the towers reached nearly 2000 F?

If a structural steel building could collapse because of fire, it would do so slowly as the various steel members gradually relinquished their structural strength.

Apparently Mr Rice overlooked the likelihood that fireproofing in the towers was extensively damaged by the impacts? And how fast does Mr Rice think unprotected steel strength responds to temperatures of ... say ... 1400 F or higher?

However, in the 100-year history of structural-steel framed buildings, there is no evidence of any structural steel framed building having collapsed because of fire.

This is the silliest statement yet. If that were the case, then why are there fire codes on steel structures? Why is there so much effort (and cost) to protect steel members from fire? The fact is that steel framed building HAVE collapsed due to fire. Mr Rice is simply WRONG.

Let’s assume the unlikelihood that these fires could weaken all of the columns to the same degree of heat intensity and thus remove their structural strength equally over the entire floor,

Again, we find Mr Rice claiming a theory that NIST does not promote. What Mr Rice is doing is putting forth a STRAWMAN ... something false to knock down. In fact, if Mr Rice had done as much research of the matter as he claims, he'd know that the theory is that sagging floors broke sections of the outer wall columns and THAT is what led to the collapse. Obviously, he didn't.

The interesting fact is that each of these 110-story Twin Towers fell upon itself in about ten seconds at nearly free-fall speed.

ROTFLOL! Where has this guy been the last 5 years? How can he claim the towers collapsed in ten seconds if he read the NIST reports as he claimed? If he looked at ANY non-conspiracy website he'd see the towers took 15 seconds or so to collapse. Videos and photos prove this. Even some conspiracy leaning websites admit this. And he should know this IF he's done ANY research besides visiting the more extreme conspiracy websites. This alone is good reason to doubt this individuals competence or opinion.

Contrary to the sudden collapse of the Twin Towers and Building #7

The collapse of WTC 7 was not sudden. Firemen have said they knew it was going to collapse hours before it did because they could see it deforming.

The buildings had no pools of molten metal (a byproduct of explosives) at the base of their elevator shafts.

This is more conspiracy nonsense. NO ONE who was an eyewitness has said they found POOLS of molten metal at the base of the elevator shafts.

only explosives will pulverize concrete into a fine dust cloud

If this is so, why hasn't ONE demolition expert in the entire world come forward to say it? Afterall, it should be so obvious when someone like Mr Rice even knows it. Does Mr Rice think they are all part of the conspiracy? ROTFLOL!

William Rice, P.E., is a registered professional civil engineer who worked on structural steel (and concrete) buildings in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was also a professor at Vermont Technical College where he taught engineering materials, structures lab, and other building related courses.

Any proof any of this is true? Can you perhaps point me to a resume or a university where he got his degree? And who did he work for while working on those structures? Pardon me if I'm now a little skeptical. Let's see what the Vermont Technical College website says. His name isn't listed as faculty or staff: http://catalog.vtc.edu/content.php?catoid=12&navoid=225 . Why is that? In fact, a search of their website doesn't turn up the name William Rice anywhere. Why is that?

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-03   19:58:38 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Aviator: Les Roberts knows some doctors and has been to Iraq.

BeAChooser: Yes. They told him they HATE Americans so he hired them to do his study.

1. What research studies have your chorus of net critics published in the Lancet regarding Iraqi deaths since the US invasion? I'd like to read those studies - please provide links. Thank you.

2. As for your LA journalist,Borzou Daragahi, what medical specialty does he have and what epidemiology research studies has he published or co-authored? Please provide the research study links as well as his academic credentials and training in population research. Thank you.

3. It would appear that Dr.( is it Dr?)Borzou Daragahi - gets around. The Washington Times refers to Borzou Daragahi as "Our Man in Baghdad" - interesting, isn't that comment? - NPR, Washington Times, LA Times - he's built lotsa bridges to people in high places, it would appear.

4. Regarding your comment about the medical doctors whom Drs. Roberts and Burnham hired to do the data collection - you are a liar, obviously.

And furthermore, BAC, America liberated Iraq so why would any of them hate us?

No doubt, it's all Al Quaeda's doing - those 650,000 dead Iraqis.

scrapper2  posted on  2007-03-03   22:34:19 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

I know that you're staying up nights to make a Bozo Thread Killer feature for our 4um - aren't you?

Some threads are too sick to die - they need to be killed.

Thank you.

Dr.Ron Paul for President

Lod  posted on  2007-03-03   22:41:19 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

And the Iraqi team who were responsible for collecting the data were all Iraqi medical doctors - 8 of them in total, as I understand it - 4 male MD's and 4 female MD's.

Did any of them mention HATING Americans? That's what Les Roberts said they felt about us.

Do we know the names of any of them and did they tell him that they'd written death certificates for a 100 people and not reported any of those deaths?

You don't happen to know the names of the physicians on the death certificates they CLAIMED they were shown, do you?

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-03   22:51:04 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

4. Regarding your comment about the medical doctors whom Drs. Roberts and Burnham hired to do the data collection - you are a liar, obviously.

This is a quote by Les Roberts in UK's Socialist Worker newspaper:

"Most of them [workers from non-governmental organizations, my colleagues and my driver] hate the Americans, most want the coalition troops gone."

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-03   22:57:34 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Some threads are too sick to die - they need to be killed.

The truth hurts, doesn't it.

BeAChooser  posted on  2007-03-03   22:58:33 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Did any of them mention HATING Americans? That's what Les Roberts said they felt about us.

Do we know the names of any of them and did they tell him that they'd written death certificates for a 100 people and not reported any of those deaths?

You don't happen to know the names of the physicians on the death certificates they CLAIMED they were shown, do you?

a. Put that in context BAC. Quote from the study where the Iraqi medical doctors said that exact phrase.

b. Who is we - you and me? No. Why should we? Do you or I know the names of the physicians in the Congo or Darfur who participated in those population studies?

c. Why would I know the names of the physicians who signed the death certificates? Do you know the names of the names of the physicians who signed the certificates that the Iraq Minestry of Health claims it has or what the LA claims it has seen?

scrapper2  posted on  2007-03-03   23:06:48 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

This is a quote by Les Roberts in UK's Socialist Worker newspaper:

"Most of them [workers from non-governmental organizations, my colleagues and my driver] hate the Americans, most want the coalition troops gone."

How do we know quotation in the "Socialist Worker" paper is accurate?

I don't see anything that specifically names the 8 medical doctors who particpated in the data collection.

Because you are not a medical professional - you don't have a clue about the higher values and truths that all MD's pledge themselves to uphold and abide by ie. a commitment to integrity, mercy, justice, sensitivity and trust.

Because you are a troll, you don't get it. That's why you'd put Iraqi medical doctors on the same level as an Iraqi vendor or cab driver or police officer.

Btw, was that inherent animosity of Iraqis to Americans documented in the research study? If it wasn't then it did not influence the study's methodology - scientific studies document known biases or negatives that might have an influence on outcomes.

Btw, you must explain to me why any hatred for Americans should exist in Iraq, considering that we liberated Iraqis - we've given them a future as a democracy with freedom everywhere - and if as you say the numbers of deaths are insignificent, why would Iraqis hate us? I don't get it - explain it to me.

scrapper2  posted on  2007-03-03   23:25:16 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

(1) Violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west.

Yet I proved quite easily that unreported deaths in Anbar can't come even close to explaining 500,000 missing death certificates unless

There are not 500,000 missing death certificates, and the stake has been driven through that lie once and for all on this thread.

And no one said anything about Anbar needing to explain all the excess deaths.

The LA Times itself said that for a year after the invasion, the only deaths the Health Ministry counted were inside Baghdad.

Iraq has a population of 36 million. Baghdad has a population of 6 million. This means for the year immediately following the invasion, the Ministry of Health was only counting death certificates from one sixth of Iraq's population. And they still came up with 50,000 violent deaths while counting one sixth of Iraq's population for a whole year.

This only proves your DESPERATION. Kurdistan is the clear success story in Iraq. It is not by any stretch of the imagination as violent as you (and Les Roberts) would have to have people believe to even begin to explain the missing death certificates.

In your dreams.

Kurdistan includes the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. There was combat in those cities, there are suicide bombings by Sunni groups killing dozens at a time, and there are kidnappings, murders, and "disappearances" by American-backed peshmarga militias.

All these deaths are from non-natural causes, and get included under the aegis of "excess deaths." Got it?

First, the most violent governorates are relatively oversampled.

The LA Times specifically said the Health Ministry's count did not include the most violent governates.

My own guess is that the death rate in the war is twice as much or more than Iraq Body Count, but probably half as much as reported in this study."

So your source "guesses" that ~only~ 300,000 have died unnecessarily, and you consider this a victory...

But deaths the first year will NOT explain the missing 500,000 death certificates

There are no missing death certificates, so there is no need to explain them.

The LA Times took a report from the Central Government. The Central Government said its numbers were substantally lower than the real numbers. All your bullshit to date has been based on your presumption that only hospitals and morgues give out death certificates. The fact is, Iraqi doctors also can give out death certificates. Your bullshit to date has also been based on 92% of the survey claiming they had death certificates, instead of 80% of the survey claiming they had death certificates.

Because John Hopkins' study only claims that about 100,000 (of the 655,000) died in the first 18 months after the invasion.

That's a lie.

The first John Hopkins study concluded that at least 100,000 had died.

That does not rule out that number being higher.

Now this has been pointed out to you time and again. So why do you keep mentioning it? Because it is all you have...

You pompous twit. You don't even understand basic English, as in "at least 100,000" and you now pretend you have a leg to stand on.

Again, provide the names of some Iraqi doctors who say they issued dozens or even hundreds of death certificates and then never notified authorities.

Provide some names of people familiar with the Iraq health care system who say that Iraqi doctors don't issue death certificates, blowhard.

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.

And as has been pointed out to you repeatedly, most deaths don't make it into the news media, and a number of deaths have bodies disposed of by dumping them into the river, others are buried in places other than cemetaries, or not buried at all.

You see, they even went to cemeteries, AGAviator. So apparently they didn't find evidence that another half a million Iraqis have been buried.

This is more of your jumping to conclusions and arm-waving which is what you do when you don't have any facts.

They did not count graves. They based their article on paperwork.

And here's what happens in Iraq when people try to count graves

Dahr Jamail's Mideast Dispatches

Another group, the People's Kifah, organized hundreds of Iraqi academics and volunteers who conducted a survey in coordination "with grave-diggers across Iraq," and who also "obtained information from hospitals and spoke to thousands of witnesses who saw incidents in which Iraqi civilians were killed by U.S. fire." The project was abandoned when one of their researchers was captured by Kurdish militiamen, handed over to US forces and never seen again. Nevertheless, after less than two months' work, the group documented a minimum of 37,000 violent civilian deaths prior to October 2003.

So that leaves 5000 doctors who on average have to issue 100 death certificates each and not report them (to explain 500,000 missing death certificates). That your claim?

The LA Times counted "sampled!!" death certificates from hospitals and morgues.

Who says Iraqi doctors have to report deaths to hospitals and morgues?

Well why don't you find ONE of them to come forward and support your assertion. That shouldn't seem to difficult a request. There are 5000 of them to draw from.

Because I don't prove things to trolls, since a troll never has enough proof when the facts are against him - like with your Iraqi doctors issuing death certificates - and when you find someone who agrees with you, even when it's an Internet blogger or a Google hit, you take it as Gospel.

Les Roberts knows some doctors and has been to Iraq.

Yes. They told him they HATE Americans so he hired them to do his study.

Another lie. He didn't hire them because they "hated Americans."

But it's possible they hated Americans because of what they found out Americans were doing before, during, and after that study.

AGAviator  posted on  2007-03-04   0:15:44 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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