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Keith

Keith

Oklahoma City, OK
August 2002

OCT 28, 2004 04:40 PM

Source: Yahoo! News/Associated Press

LONDON - A survey of deaths in Iraqi households estimates that as many as 100,000 more people may have died throughout the country in the 18 months after the U.S. invasion than would be expected based on the death rate before the war.

There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000. As of Wednesday, 1,081 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to the U.S. Defense Department.

The scientists who wrote the report concede that the data they based their projections on were of "limited precision," because the quality of the information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.



Richard Peto, an expert on study methods who was not involved with the research, said the approach the scientists took is a reasonable one to investigate the Iraq death toll.

However, it's possible that they may have zoned in on hotspots that might not be representative of the death toll across Iraq, said Peto, a professor of medical statistics at Oxford University in England.

To conduct the survey, investigators visited 33 neighborhoods spread evenly across the country in September, randomly selecting clusters of 30 households to sample. Of the 988 households visited, 808, consisting of 7,868 people, agreed to participate in the survey. At each one they asked how many people lived in the home and how many births and deaths there had been since January 2002.

The scientists then compared death rates in the 15 months before the invasion with those that occurred during the 18 months after the attack and adjusted those numbers to account for the different time periods.

Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

PoopooHead

PoopooHead

Brooklyn, NY
September 2003

OCT 28, 2004 04:49 PM

Yeah, I submitted this to the news wire. This is shocking and extremely disturbing.

highcontrast

highcontrast

San Francisco, CA
March 2003

OCT 28, 2004 05:32 PM

since republicans like pre-emption so goddamn much, let me just answer the question "where did this liberal-biased bullshit study come from" that's sure to be asked by one of you moronic bush supporters: it's to be published in The Lancet; a well respected, peer-reviewed medical journal.






saritalr

saritalr

Mexico
December 2003

OCT 28, 2004 10:10 PM

horray johns hopkins!

s5

s5

STAFF

San Francisco, CA

OCT 28, 2004 10:13 PM

highcontrast said:
since republicans like pre-emption so goddamn much, let me just answer the question "where did this liberal-biased bullshit study come from" that's sure to be asked by one of you moronic bush supporters: it's to be published in The Lancet; a well respected, peer-reviewed medical journal.



the phrases "well respected" "peer reviewed" and "science journal" will be spun as "elite liberal media" and "biased research community looking for grant money" by the GOP and their surrogates. just wait and see.

stockula

stockula

Anchorage, AK
May 2003

OCT 28, 2004 11:15 PM

Bullshit

Infra

Infra

La Crosse, WI
November 2003

OCT 28, 2004 11:17 PM

desperatecomfort said:
Yeah, I submitted this to the news wire. This is shocking and extremely disturbing.



You and me both. wink

Here's a link to the Lancet article and editorial for those people who don't want to dig around for it.

(Login info at bugmenot.)


[Edited on Oct 29, 2004 by Infra]

prozacrefugee

prozacrefugee

Phoenix, AZ
September 2004

OCT 28, 2004 11:24 PM

I feel sick - we paid for that. Our government did that.

troglodyte

troglodyte

Victoria, BC
May 2003

OCT 28, 2004 11:31 PM

s5 said:

highcontrast said:
since republicans like pre-emption so goddamn much, let me just answer the question "where did this liberal-biased bullshit study come from" that's sure to be asked by one of you moronic bush supporters: it's to be published in The Lancet; a well respected, peer-reviewed medical journal.



the phrases "well respected" "peer reviewed" and "science journal" will be spun as "elite liberal media" and "biased research community looking for grant money" by the GOP and their surrogates. just wait and see.



Stockula said:
Bullshit



ta-da!

dnmolenaar

dnmolenaar

Minneapolis, MN
May 2004

OCT 28, 2004 11:36 PM

stockula said:
Bullshit


Because stockula has been there firsthand people! He knows better than any silly peer review journal! He counted every last dead Iraqi with a notebook and a piece of paper.

(I'm vomiting from the sarcasm here:vomitsmile

prozacrefugee

prozacrefugee

Phoenix, AZ
September 2004

OCT 28, 2004 11:43 PM

stockula said:
Bullshit



Quick tip chief - when you drop bombs on cities, people die.

rottenart

rottenart

Norman, OK
February 2004

OCT 29, 2004 12:39 AM

stockula said:
Bullshit



doesn't this prove that your attitide is all just a facade?

bean

bean

STAFF

Los Angeles, CA

OCT 29, 2004 12:40 AM

rottenart said:

stockula said:
Bullshit



doesn't this prove that your attitide is all just a facade?


I think it just proves that our dear Stock is drunk again.

lostarchitect

lostarchitect

Brooklyn, NY
January 2004

OCT 29, 2004 12:52 AM

stockula said:
Bullshit



no, stock, it's bushshit.

recalcitrant

recalcitrant

Canada
February 2004

OCT 29, 2004 12:58 AM

I hate to point this out (no I don't), but this is 33x the number of people that died in New York. And Iraq wasn't even involved in that.

Where's the moral authority?

Akrasia

Akrasia

Ireland
August 2004

OCT 29, 2004 04:02 AM

according to the UK independent, half of those 100,000 were women and children killed in the initial aerial raids. These were civilians that weren't even counted by the Americans as a matter of policy. It is american policy that the lives of foreign nationals are not worth counting.

For every one death in Iraq there are also numerous injuries, many of them horrific and severely debilitating. I have heard from people who have been in iraq and conducted investigations there (visited hospitals, talked to people etc) , that the number of serious injuries are ten times higher than the number of deaths. If this is true then there are a million serious injuries to iraq people. Each of those people have families and friends, say ten people each (a small nmber to account for the overlap)
This makes ten million iraqi people wth a good reason to be very angry at the American invasion. At least some of these people will be angry enough to take action.
If even one percent of these people take up arms against America, that's 100,000 Iraqi'sn fighting a geurilla war against the occupation.

America did not liberate iraq. America did not make the world safer.

Mike11

Mike11

Titusville, FL
OLD SKOOL

OCT 29, 2004 04:17 AM

highcontrast said:
since republicans like pre-emption so goddamn much, let me just answer the question "where did this liberal-biased bullshit study come from" that's sure to be asked by one of you moronic bush supporters: it's to be published in The Lancet; a well respected, peer-reviewed medical journal.


Thanks for calling be a moran. And you dont even know me. I guess you make up your mind with very little information. Maybe thats why you are choosing Kerry? Or is it Nader?

Akrasia

Akrasia

Ireland
August 2004

OCT 29, 2004 04:21 AM

It is moronic to support bush for any of the reasons most bush supporters claim to support him for. Now if you're a millionaire and want a bunch of tax cuts, then your support of him is rational (if very selfish)

bean

bean

STAFF

Los Angeles, CA

OCT 29, 2004 04:37 AM

Mike said:

highcontrast said:
since republicans like pre-emption so goddamn much, let me just answer the question "where did this liberal-biased bullshit study come from" that's sure to be asked by one of you moronic bush supporters: it's to be published in The Lancet; a well respected, peer-reviewed medical journal.


Thanks for calling be a moran. And you dont even know me. I guess you make up your mind with very little information. Maybe thats why you are choosing Kerry? Or is it Nader?



Well, to be fair, I think he may have been directing the term "moron" only at those Bush-supporters who blindly declare any news that triggers too much cognitive dissonance to be "biased bullshit from the mouth of the liberal elite" or whatever terms the neocon-blogs have been throwing around this week.

And maybe poking a bit of fun at the Bush Doctrine.

In all seriousness though, it's absurd that people on both sides of the aisle have been either inflating or downplaying Iraqi casualties depending on how it suits them at that moment, without any sort of reliable figure being available before now. At this point, of course, there's no use trying to spin this study one way or the other. Nobody's going to change their mind as to who gets their vote on Tuesday. It shouldn't be too hard for everyone at every point of the political spectrum to admit that if these numbers are accurate (and it seems that they've been scrutinized enough to warrant at least a tentative trust), that it's an astonishingly grotesque figure.

toomaas

toomaas

Denmark
February 2004

OCT 29, 2004 04:39 AM



However, it's possible that they may have zoned in on hotspots that might not be representative of the death toll across Iraq, said Peto, a professor of medical statistics at Oxford University in England.



The survey didn´t zone in on hotspots.. actually they didn´t count places like falluja with extreme violence going on...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/international/europe/29casualties.html


[Edited on Oct 29, 2004 by toomaas]

[Edited on Oct 29, 2004 by toomaas]

Akrasia

Akrasia

Ireland
August 2004

OCT 29, 2004 05:32 AM

bean said:
In all seriousness though, it's absurd that people on both sides of the aisle have been either inflating or downplaying Iraqi casualties depending on how it suits them at that moment, without any sort of reliable figure being available before now. At this point, of course, there's no use trying to spin this study one way or the other. Nobody's going to change their mind as to who gets their vote on Tuesday. It shouldn't be too hard for everyone at every point of the political spectrum to admit that if these numbers are accurate (and it seems that they've been scrutinized enough to warrant at least a tentative trust), that it's an astonishingly grotesque figure.


There wouldn't be any ambiguity if the coalition forces had bothered to count the civilian casualties.

jholtsnider

jholtsnider

I'm lost
February 2004

OCT 29, 2004 07:20 AM

I'm not saying that civilian deaths aren't a tradegy, but 100,000 seems a little on the high end. Perhaps that's because they're using a survey of Iraqi households?

Akrasia

Akrasia

Ireland
August 2004

OCT 29, 2004 07:37 AM

they're asking a pretty simple question. "Who has died in the last 2 years"

100,000 seems about right actually, considering you bombed iraqi cities non stop for weeks using the biggest bombs you could find.

If you dispite the figures, go and disprove them using official collected statistics... oh yeah, there aren't any.

stockula

stockula

Anchorage, AK
May 2003

OCT 29, 2004 07:23 PM

Ruh-oh. Michael Totten linked to this on Instapundit.com. I thought it smelled a lot like the UN's prediction in 2003 that 500,000 civilians would die from the invasion and millions would become refugees, so this 100,000 dead civilians claim immediately set off the bullshit alarms in my head. But as always, Bush haters are willing to believe almost literally ANYTHING anti-Bush at face value, without the slightest examination. You'd think after almost 4 years of manufactured scandals, blatent disinformation like Fahrenheit 9/11, and Bush being exonerated and his critics made to look like shrill and hysterical exaggerators, they'd begin to see a pattern. Nope. Witness the missing explosives non-scandal, the Bush National Guard records, Niger yellowcake, fantasy pipelines, on and on and on.....

Bogus Lancet Study

Via The Command Post comes this study published in Lancet (free reg) which purports that 100,000 Iraqi have died from violence, most of it caused by Coalition air strikes, since the invasion of Iraq. Needless to say, this study will become an article of faith in certain circles but the study is obviously bogus on its face.

First, even without reading the study, alarm bells should go off. The study purports to show civilian casualties 5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source. Most other sources put total combined civilian and military deaths from all causes at between 15,000 to 20,000. The Lancet study is a degree of magnitude higher. Why the difference?

Moreover, just rough calculations should call the figure into doubt. 100,000 deaths over roughly a year and a half equates to 183 deaths per day. Seen anything like that on the news? With that many people dying from air strikes every day we would expect to have at least one or two incidents where several hundred or even thousands of people died. Heard of anything like that? In fact, heard of any air strikes at all where more than a couple of dozen people died total?

Where did this suspicious number come from? Bad methodology.

From the summary:

Mistake One:

"A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004"

It is bad practice to use a cluster sample for a distribution known to be highly asymmetrical. Since all sources agree that violence in Iraq is highly geographically concentrated, this means a cluster sample has a very high chance of exaggerating the number of deaths. If one or two of your clusters just happen to fall in a contended area it will skew everything. In fact, the study inadvertently suggests that this happened when it points out later that:

"Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters..."

In fact, this suggest that violent deaths were not "widespread" as 18 of the 33 clusters reported zero deaths. if 54% of the clusters had no deaths then all the other deaths occurred in 46% of the clusters. If the deaths in those clusters followed a standard distribution most of the deaths would have occurred in less than 15% of the total clusters.

And bingo we see that:

"Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja"

(They also used a secondary grouping system (page 2, paragraph 3) that would cause further skewing.)

Mistake Two:

"33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002."

Self-reporting in third-world countries is notoriously unreliable. In the guts of the paper (page 3, paragraph 2) they say they tried to get death certificates for at least two deaths for each cluster but they never say how many of the deaths, if any, they actually verified. It is probable that many of the deaths, especially the oddly high number of a deaths of children by violence, never actually occurred.

So we have a sampling method that fails for diverse distributions, at least one tremendously skewed cluster and unverified reports of deaths.

Looking at the raw data they provide doesn't inspire any confidence whatsoever. Table 2 (page 4) shows the actual number of deaths reported. The study recorded 142 post-invasion deaths total with with 73 (51%) due to violence. Of those 73 deaths from violence, 52 occurred in Falluja. That means that all the other 21 deaths occurred in one of the 14 clusters were somebody died, or 1.5 deaths per cluster. Given what we know of the actual combat I am betting that most of the deaths occurred in three or four clusters and the rest had 1 death each. Given the low numbers of samples, one or two fabricated reports of deaths could seriously warp the entire study.

At the very end of the paper (page 7, paragraph 1) they concede that:

"We suspect that a random sample of 33 Iraqi locations is likely to encounter one or a couple of particularly devastated areas. Nonetheless, since 52 of 73 (71%) violent deaths and 53 of 142 (37%) deaths during the conflict occurred in one cluster, it is possible that by extraordinary chance, the survey mortality estimate has been skewed upward. "

Gee, you think? It's almost as if military violence is not randomly distributed across the population of Iraq but is instead intelligently directed at specific areas, rendering a statistical extrapolation of deaths totally useless.

In the next paragraph they admit:

"Removing half the increase in infant deaths and the Falluja data still produces a 37% increase in estimated mortality."

That puts their final numbers just above the high end of the range reported by other sources.

This "peer reviewed study" is a piece of polemical garbage. Everybody is supposed to take away the bumper sticker summary, "Coalition kills 100,000 Iraqi civilians, half of them children," without reading the details. It tries to use crude epidemiological models like those used to study disease and applies them to the conscious infliction of violence by human beings. The result is statistical static.

http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002543.html

troglodyte

troglodyte

Victoria, BC
May 2003

OCT 29, 2004 07:26 PM

Your credible source is a blog called "chicagoboyz"?

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