Johns Hopkins University: 100,000 Iraqis Killed?

Source: Yahoo! News/Associated Press

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

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.

horray johns hopkins!

Bullshit

You and me both.

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]

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

ta-da!

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:vomit

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

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

no, stock, it's bushshit.

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?

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.

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?

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)

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]

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

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?

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.

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

Your credible source is a blog called "chicagoboyz"?