bigq
10-12-2006, 09:16 PM
Sounds like he may be off by only a few 100,000. Hate the war, but why do people do this shit. Come up with something better, like a decent plan to get out and finish it. Instead people come up with lame shit like this, amazing.
World War III: The anti-war left will no doubt tout and incorporate a flawed study of civilian deaths in Iraq into its mantra. But all the study proves is the adage about lies, damned lies and statistics.
A study by a group led by Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to be published Thursday on the Web site of the Lancet, a British medical journal, will claim that about 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began.
Burnham writes, "Deaths are occurring in Iraq at a rate more than three times that before the invasion of March 2003."
One wonders how he knows that since Hussein, Uday and Qusay did not invite researchers to observe their burying of people alive or stuffing them feet first into tree shredders. Those who disappeared, disappeared. Those who talked about it also disappeared.
This study is an update of an earlier Johns Hopkins study, one released just before the 2004 presidential elections. The lead researcher on that study, Les Roberts, admitted that the timing was deliberate.
The earlier study, published in the Lancet in October 2004, was a calculated attempt to influence the election, with the claim that nearly 100,000 deaths had resulted from the U.S. liberation of Iraq.
That effort failed, but the 100,000 figure, like the "3 million homeless" of an earlier era, has taken on a life of its own, endlessly repeated and always included in any litany of U.S. "mistakes" and charges of human rights violations.
As pointed out by Michael Fumento, former IBD reporter and now senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, the first Lancet "study" did not involve counting actual bodies or death certificates, but rather sending teams to interview 998 families in 33 allegedly randomly selected communities in Iraq and extrapolating the "results" to Iraq as a whole.
These families were asked how many people had died in each household and of what. It just took their word for it, without factoring in religious or political affiliation or whether respondents might be former regime supporters or members of a terrorist cell.
That sample was so small that the researchers estimated the number of deaths throughout Iraq at anywhere from 8,000 to 194,000. So Roberts and friends used the scientific method, split the difference and came up with the 100,000 number, which they called "conservative." A better word would be "worthless."
They used a methodology known as "cluster sampling," which can be valid if using real data and not anecdotal reporting. Most of the original Lancet clusters reported no deaths at all, with the journal admitting, "two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Fallujah." Fallujah? Hello?
Fallujah at the time just happened to be a major concentration of pro-Saddam and anti-American sentiment, the home base for the homicide bombers and terrorist "resistance" before the U.S. Army and Marines cleared out that nest of thugs.
"They're almost certainly way too high," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said of the new numbers, noting the results were released just before another U.S. election. "This is not analysis, this is politics."
Indeed, a private group called Iraq Body Count puts civilian casualties in this war at 44,000 to 49,000.
For Burnham's study, researchers from late May to early July gathered data from 1,849 Iraqi households with a total of 12,801 residents. That sample, which likely includes jihadists, terrorists and others who want the U.S. out of Iraq, was used to extrapolate the total.
This methodology is like determining how many Americans wear dentures by surveying only nursing homes. Yet the new mythical number will be endlessly quoted by those who silently ignore the atrocities of Hussein or the millions of purple fingers that signified democracy's struggle to take root in Iraq.
World War III: The anti-war left will no doubt tout and incorporate a flawed study of civilian deaths in Iraq into its mantra. But all the study proves is the adage about lies, damned lies and statistics.
A study by a group led by Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to be published Thursday on the Web site of the Lancet, a British medical journal, will claim that about 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began.
Burnham writes, "Deaths are occurring in Iraq at a rate more than three times that before the invasion of March 2003."
One wonders how he knows that since Hussein, Uday and Qusay did not invite researchers to observe their burying of people alive or stuffing them feet first into tree shredders. Those who disappeared, disappeared. Those who talked about it also disappeared.
This study is an update of an earlier Johns Hopkins study, one released just before the 2004 presidential elections. The lead researcher on that study, Les Roberts, admitted that the timing was deliberate.
The earlier study, published in the Lancet in October 2004, was a calculated attempt to influence the election, with the claim that nearly 100,000 deaths had resulted from the U.S. liberation of Iraq.
That effort failed, but the 100,000 figure, like the "3 million homeless" of an earlier era, has taken on a life of its own, endlessly repeated and always included in any litany of U.S. "mistakes" and charges of human rights violations.
As pointed out by Michael Fumento, former IBD reporter and now senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, the first Lancet "study" did not involve counting actual bodies or death certificates, but rather sending teams to interview 998 families in 33 allegedly randomly selected communities in Iraq and extrapolating the "results" to Iraq as a whole.
These families were asked how many people had died in each household and of what. It just took their word for it, without factoring in religious or political affiliation or whether respondents might be former regime supporters or members of a terrorist cell.
That sample was so small that the researchers estimated the number of deaths throughout Iraq at anywhere from 8,000 to 194,000. So Roberts and friends used the scientific method, split the difference and came up with the 100,000 number, which they called "conservative." A better word would be "worthless."
They used a methodology known as "cluster sampling," which can be valid if using real data and not anecdotal reporting. Most of the original Lancet clusters reported no deaths at all, with the journal admitting, "two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Fallujah." Fallujah? Hello?
Fallujah at the time just happened to be a major concentration of pro-Saddam and anti-American sentiment, the home base for the homicide bombers and terrorist "resistance" before the U.S. Army and Marines cleared out that nest of thugs.
"They're almost certainly way too high," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said of the new numbers, noting the results were released just before another U.S. election. "This is not analysis, this is politics."
Indeed, a private group called Iraq Body Count puts civilian casualties in this war at 44,000 to 49,000.
For Burnham's study, researchers from late May to early July gathered data from 1,849 Iraqi households with a total of 12,801 residents. That sample, which likely includes jihadists, terrorists and others who want the U.S. out of Iraq, was used to extrapolate the total.
This methodology is like determining how many Americans wear dentures by surveying only nursing homes. Yet the new mythical number will be endlessly quoted by those who silently ignore the atrocities of Hussein or the millions of purple fingers that signified democracy's struggle to take root in Iraq.