Right-Wingers Can't Cover Up Iraq's Death Toll Catastrophe (John Hopkins/Lancet Study Most Accurate)

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/74263/

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So I contacted the people who had done a previous, largely ignored survey-top public health professionals at Johns Hopkins University. They had published a survey in October 2004 that showed 98,000 had died in the first 18 months of the war, which was greeted with disbelief and charges of politicizing science, and quickly dismissed.

I said: 'do a bigger survey to improve the accuracy, and I will make sure it gets the proper attention in the news media.' They did do a bigger survey, and I managed a public education campaign that permitted the results to be considered more broadly, results that estimated total deaths at 600,000 by violence after 40 months of war. The survey was published in The Lancet, the British medical journal. And get attention it did, roundly disbelieved and scorned by war supporters, but spurring a brief but intense debate about the human cost of the war.

Dozens of statisticians and other professionals scoured the study and its data to see if the methods and implementation were proper; a special committee at the World Health Organization was convened to review it, and the Lancet had also subjected it to rigorous peer review. The survey held up to this scrutiny, with quibbles and some lingering "should have done this" and "might have done that." But virtually every competent person agreed that the study provided the best estimate we have.

Then, earlier this month, the National Journal, a Capitol Hill "insider" weekly, ran a cover story titled "Data Bomb" by Neil Munro and Carl Cannon.

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But it was news that "Soros" was a donor, and the wingnuts went berserk. The line that Munro and Cannon took was that "Soros" was somehow behind the survey from the start, which was timed to affect the 2006 elections. It was not only fraud, they contend, but the perversion of science for political ends backed by the disgruntled, Bush-hating billionaire.

It's classic right-wing defamation, and of course none of it is true. Munro and Cannon were painstakingly walked through the chronology and donors, but deliberately ignored it to fashion their paranoid fairy tale, and the Wall Street Journal et al lapped it up.

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And, needless to say, OSI and "Soros" had no influence over the initiation, conduct, or findings of the survey. Neither Burnham and his colleagues nor the Lancet editors knew OSI was one of the donors. The contract was with MIT.

I carefully told this to Munro on the telephone...

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In an odd twist, a new mortality survey-approvingly mentioned by the NJ piece-appeared earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, it found 151,000 deaths by violence as of June 2006, about the same period as the Lancet article. Newspaper coverage duly noted that their estimate was only one-quarter that of the Lancet. But a little digging would have revealed much more: the total deaths attributable to the war, non-violent as well as violent, was about 400,000 for that period, now 19 months ago. If the same trends continued, that total today would be more than 600,000.

The deaths-by-violence in that latter survey remained the same from year-to-year, however, which is not plausible-all observers agree that violent deaths were rising sharply in 2005 and 2006. The discrepancy is found in how the survey was conducted: interviewers identified themselves as employees of the Ministry of Health, then under the control of Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr. Those interviewed, therefore, would be wary of saying a brother or son or husband had been killed by violence, fearing retribution. And, indeed, there are non-violent categories in the survey that suggest just such equivocation: "Unintentional injuries" would equal about 40 percent of the death-by-violence toll, for example. Road accidents were ten times their pre-war totals-if someone is run off a highway by a U.S. convoy, is that a "non-violent" death?

The researchers, to their credit, acknowledge that their estimate is likely too low due to several factors. They did not go into dangerous neighborhoods, which made up 11 percent of the sample, and could not accurately estimate the death toll in those, which would of course have been high. Still, the survey is revealing on the non-violent mortality, too: deaths by kidney failure, cancer, diabetes, and others rose by several times, signaling the near-collapse of the health care system.

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As long as we are safer without Saddam in power, the war can be justified.

At least Ron Paul and Kucinich think that we would be safer with Saddam in power and war avoided.

Have a friend who lives near Johns Hopkins, and we drive through the campuses all the time and make 'Johns Hopkins' jokes all the time.

Disgusting Bushie Pigs. So long as they can get their liesout and into short-declaartive form, before we can get out our long-winded debunking (we are cripplie by trying to "unpack" a Bushie Lie and explain the truth, which as Goebbels knew is ineffective against the constant repeat of The Big Bushie/Nazi Lie.

This had splattered onto a local newsboard and because no one had heard this New Bushie Lie, nothing was sais.

You have to admire the Bushie Propagandists and their legions of stormtroopers, as with the Nazis, for the well-oiled Machine of Lies they have built and the crazy "delivery systems" they have programmed to be inasane zealots.

When one first hears a Bushie Lie like that, a new one fresh off the factory floor, one doesn't know how to responsd.

On thousands of "neutral" message boards that lie has been laundered and the customary Busie Smear has been inncoulated. Now, anyone who has been exposed to that Bushie lie will immediately dismiss the British study, sometime subconsciously.

The Bushies' Triumph of the Will is the calibration of advretising and marketing technology in cyberspace and MSM.

that the repeat widely and often so much so they actually believe it. This just goes to show the ignorance of the RW and how they actually want to dumb down the discourse in America. I'm glad someone posted this. I fired it off to those wingers who made great hay out of the Soros connection which as we see was for naught.

How do they explain away all those massive deaths day by day, week by week, month by month? The math and just talking to the people betrays them, their logic, and their lies in the face of stone cold facts.

K&R.

Yesterday, the Oregonian's local right-wing tool David Reinhard had a column about how bogus all this "estimating" of civilian casualties was. Since the Bush administration and its military lackeys have famously remarked that they don't "do" body counts, I thought it was kind of strange that such a reliable cheer-leader for everything neocon would give a tin shit.

But the fact that the 600,000 body count is actually getting a PR push, and especially that it's George Soros involved, just discombobulates the usual mouthpieces.