published by National Journal. Another grim milestone.
How to explain the enormous discrepancy between The Lancet‘s estimation of Iraqi war deaths and those from studies that used other methodologies? For starters, the authors of the Lancet study followed a model that ensured that even minor components of the data, when extrapolated over the whole population, would yield huge differences in the death toll. Skeptical commentators have highlighted questionable assumptions, implausible data, and ideological leanings among the authors, Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts.
Some critics go so far as to suggest that the field research on which the study is based may have been performed improperly — or not at all. The key person involved in collecting the data — Lafta, the researcher who assembled the survey teams, deployed them throughout Iraq, and assembled the results — has refused to answer questions about his methods.
Some of these questions could be resolved if other researchers had access to the surveyors’ original field reports and response forms. The authors have released files of collated survey results but not the original survey reports, citing security concerns and the fact that some information was not recorded or preserved in the first place. This was a legitimate problem, and it underscored the difficulty of conducting research in a war zone.
Each death recorded by the Hopkins surveyors in 2006 extrapolated to 2,000 deaths in the Iraqi population. Over the past several months, National Journal has examined the 2006 Lancet article, and another [PDF] that some of the same authors published in 2004; probed the problems of estimating wartime mortality rates; and interviewed the authors and their critics. NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros‘s Open Society Institute.
You can begin once again dating pundits’, pols’, journalists’ citations of that data from this date.
The survey served its purpose, which was to put a nail in the Republican coffin in 2006. All part of the propaganda offensive which also described Iraq as a civil war, all in an attempt to see an humiliating American retreat.
This survey may be discredited, but the legend of 655,000 Iraqis dead at American hands will live on forever. Anything that brings discredit on the Great – or Lesser – Satan always does.
Like this morning, driving into work, I was listening to the BBC describes Israeli power-cuts in, and Israeli Army attacks into the Gaza strip. The report made it sound like Hamas rocket attacks into Israel were the result, not the cause of the Israeli actions.
If one has any doubt regarding Wiki’s bias, just read the entry for the Lancet study. My linking skills are weak this morning, or I’d include it.
Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
This was the recent news I was alluding to in another thread while snarking at one of our trolls.
A junior college student who has passed a PSYCH 101 elective knows the concept of “researcher bias.” It takes just one look at the study’s authors, its underwriters, and its final conclusions, to recognize that the study is a bias-fraud.
Most honest experimenters will use a double-blind procedure to erase the inevitable errors caused by researcher bias. Strangely for a scientific journal, Lancet did not demand this elementary check on political biases.
Why?
Thanks Dan for linking to this report. I really is a must read. I found this passage particularly disturbing:
“Suspicious cluster. Lafta’s team reported 24 car bomb deaths in early July, as well as one nonviolent death, in “Cluster 33” in Baghdad. The authors do not say where the cluster was, but the only major car bomb in the city during that period, according to Iraq Body Count’s database, was in Sadr City. It was detonated in a marketplace on July 1, likely by Al Qaeda, and killed at least 60 people, according to press reports.
The authors should not have included the July data in their report because the survey was scheduled to end on June 30, according to Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain in Belgium. Because of the study’s methodology, those 24 deaths ultimately added 48,000 to the national death toll and tripled the authors’ estimate for total car bomb deaths to 76,000. That figure is 15 times the 5,046 car bomb killings that Iraq Body Count recorded up to August 2006.
According to a data table reviewed by Spagat and Kane, the team recorded the violent deaths as taking place in early July and did not explain why they failed to see death certificates for any of the 24 victims. The surveyors did remember, however, to ask for the death certificate of the one person who had died peacefully in that cluster.
The Cluster 33 data is curious for other reasons as well. The 24 Iraqis who died violently were neatly divided among 18 houses — 12 houses reported one death, and six houses reported two deaths, according to the authors’ data. This means, Spagat said, that the survey team found a line of 40 households that neatly shared almost half of the deaths suffered when a marketplace bomb exploded among a crowd of people drawn from throughout the broader neighborhood.”
The data also bolster Spagat’s criticism that the surveyors selected too many clusters in places where bomb explosions and gunfights were most common
NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
Wow, except maybe for the Soros sponsorship, (you can substitute T. Kerry and others) it sounds like Hansen and his crew on Anthropogenic Global Warming. What a surprise!
[…] again: Lancet study of Iraqi deaths. Will Old Media Learn a Lesson from Lancet? Doubtful. Should-Be Final Nail in Lancet Survey Coffin …. […]
I was talking with someone today about the Lancet Study, they directed me to the Lancet authors response to this National Journal article linked here at PW.
I remembered this thread, and wanted to add this response from the authors to the record.
Answers to Questions About Iraq Mortality Surveys
http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/publications_tools/iraq/lancet_mortality_response.html
Researchers Respond to National Journal Article
http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/publications_tools/iraq/national_journal.html
Unfortunately, the Lancet Study is alive and well.