posted October 11, 2006 12:46 PM              

If the study proves to be correct we all know "it's Clinton's fault." hee hee

NEW YORK -- More than 2,660 Iraqi civilians were killed in the capital in September amid a wave of sectarian killings and insurgent attacks, an increase of 400 over the month before, according to figures from the Iraqi Health Ministry.

The increase came despite an intensified U.S.-Iraqi sweep of Baghdad that was launched in mid-August to try to put down the wave of violence that has swept over the capital. The violence consists of a deadly combination of bombings and shootings by Sunni insurgents, and slayings by Shiite and Sunni death squads.

The September numbers come as a controversial new study contends that nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq - more than 10 times higher than other independent estimates of the toll.

President Bush dismissed as "just not credible" the study's estimate study that contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war.

Bush, who in the past has suggested 30,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, would not give a figure for overall fatalities. "A lot of innocent people have lost their life," he said at a news conference in Washington.

The study, which is to be published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal, was based on a survey of households in Iraq, not a body count, and quickly raised skepticism among some Iraq experts.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said it was difficult "with any certainty" to estimate the number of Iraqi civilians who have died, and said the department does everything possible to prevent civilian casualties.

"We take great precautions in our military operations," he said. "That's in stark contrast to what the enemy in Iraq is doing. They take no such precautions. In fact, they deliberately target innocent civilians in their attacks."

An accurate count of total Iraqi deaths since the war's start has been difficult to obtain. According to an Associated Press tally, at least 13,414 Iraqis have been killed in war-related violence through Tuesday since the new government took office on April 28, 2005. Of those, 9,300 were civilians.

The AP tally is compiled from hospital, police and military officials cited in news stories, as well as accounts from reporters and photographers at the scenes. The actual number is likely higher as many killings go unreported or uncounted.

A private group called Iraqi Body Count says it has recorded about 44,000 to 49,000 civilian Iraqi deaths. But it notes that those totals are based on media reports, which it says probably overlook "many if not most civilian casualties."

The figures for the number of civilian deaths in September in Baghdad came in an official monthly report from the Health Ministry to the Cabinet on the number of Baghdad victims of violent deaths, two senior ministry officials told The Associated Press.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the government has issued orders that the death figures not be released. Civilian casualty numbers are always sensitive, and several other officials in the Health and Interior ministries contacted by the AP refused to give statistics.

The report said 2,667 civilians had died violent deaths in September - an average of 89 a day. Those deaths include bodies found dumped around Baghdad and the victims of explosions, shootings and other attacks, the two officials said.

By comparison, 2,222 people died violently in August in Baghdad, according to a U.N. report published in September, which is also based on official statistics from the Health Ministry.

The two ministry officials said the U.N. number was accurate for the August deaths.

The monthly figures include two categories. One is the number of bodies found in Baghdad, provided from the city morgue, where the bodies are taken to determine the cause of death.

In September, the morgue reported 1,471 bodies of people who died from violence.

Shiite and Sunni death squads are known to kidnap members of the opposing sect, then dump bodies of their victims, often bound and tortured. So a large proportion of the 1,471 bodies are likely from sectarian killings - though they also would include victims of criminal kidnappings and murders.

The other category included in the monthly figure encompasses the victims of explosions, shootings or other attacks, reported by hospitals. They numbered 1,196 in September, according to the report, the two Health Ministry officials said.

In August, 1,536 bodies were brought to the morgue, according to the U.N. report.

The past summer has seen a startling increase in bloodshed, centered in the capital, after the wave of sectarian violence was sparked by the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad.

The deadliest month was July, when 3,590 people were killed across the country - 2,884 of them in Baghdad, according to the U.N. The number killed countrywide fell in August to 3,009, the U.N. said.

The Health Ministry officials who spoke to the AP did not have September figures for the entire country, only for Baghdad.

Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

posted October 13, 2006 12:02 PM            

No person with 2 brain cells to rub together would believe a word they have to say.

These people destroyed any credibility they might have had by posing as Christians while denying the basic tenets of Christianity.

Their message is a social gospel while the message of Jesus Christ in the New Testament is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.

They are liars, pure and simple...not to mention that it takes a totally brain dead moron to agitate for communism. 200,000,000 citizen corpses in the 20th Century killed by the communists attest to the nature of that government and economic system. And yet we find some here posting communist propaganda from the Revolutionary Communist Party USA and from other communists and communist sites.

One must question not only their motives but their sanity.

Pinning Civilian Deaths on the Great Satan
By Mark D. Tooley
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 13, 2006

A British medical journal is once again inflating the number of Iraqis killed during the U.S.-led liberation of that country -- and pillars of the Religious Left have welcomed the chance to demonize the United States. The Lancet, is claiming that the freeing of Iraq has caused more than 600,000 deaths. The study interviewed 1,849 families and found that 547 people died in the post-invasion period, whereas these families remembered only 82 dying during a similar period before the invasion. From these 465 additional deaths, the study confidently extrapolated that 654,965 civilians have died from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As one blogger points out, the study claims that more Iraqi civilians have been killed over the last three years than were German civilians killed during five years of intense Allied bombing during World War II.

That is a remarkable claim indeed, but one eagerly embraced by Religious Left activists Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Bob Edgar of the National Council of Churches, who are eager for macabre new grist for their antiwar, anti-American tirades.

“From now on, any political debate on Iraq must start here and be disciplined by these FACTS,” Wallis asserts. “Not by politics, not by arguments, not by visions of democracy in the Middle East, but by the deaths caused to so many of God’s children.”

Edgar sounded a similar note of confidence about the study’s assertions. “When I first heard that nearly two-thirds of a million Iraqis have been killed I was shocked and horribly saddened,” he said. “The perpetrators of this war can no longer tell us this is 'collateral damage' as they prosecute this war. They must face up to the widespread death and destruction that is being inflicted daily upon innocent men, women, and children living in a country that never attacked the United States.”

Even the study acknowledges that two-thirds of these supposed 600,000-plus civilian deaths were caused by insurgents and sectarian violence, not by the Allied forces. At least Wallis makes reference to this. But naturally he and Edgar will latch onto the study as definitive validation of their demand for immediate U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, although such a precipitous withdrawal would certainly increase the sectarian strife, send an invitation to jihadists, and result in a bloodbath as did our withdrawal from Vietnam (which Edgar and Wallis also supported).

“Any politician speaking about the war should be asked how they intend to stop the violence and blood-letting that has overwhelmed that country,” Wallis demands, assuming it is within the power of U.S. politicians to stop Sunnis and Shiites from killing each other. ”Every candidate running for the U.S. Senate or Congress should be asked how they feel about the loss of all these lives and how they intend to stop it,” Wallis further opines, without explaining how any member of the U.S. Congress could stop all “the violence” in any country.

Edgar insists that “nearly every major Christian church leader spoke out against this war before the invasion” because the war “did not remotely meet the criteria of a just war.” Of course, neither Edgar nor Wallis have ever described what exactly would constitute a just war. Wallis is pacifist who believes that force is never justified, and Edgar, although disclaiming the label, is at least opposed to wars waged by the U.S. military, most especially those waged against Communists.

Wallis and Edgar have long experience in opposing the America at war. Both came of age politically by opposing the Vietnam War. Edgar as a young Democratic U.S. Representative from Philadelphia was even a member of the notorious 94th U.S. Congress, which refused to aid the drowning South Vietnamese in 1975 as they were overrun by North Vietnam's Soviet-supplied tanks.

Like others on the anti-war Left, Wallis and Edgar saw the Vietnam War as purely the invention of U.S. interventionism and imperialism. All killed Vietnamese and U.S. servicemen were victims of U.S. folly. American withdrawal from Southeast Asia was the end of Wallis’ and Edgar’s interest in any killing there. The victorious Communists murdered millions in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. Thousands more “boat people” would drown at sea or be killed by pirates as they attempted to flee from their “liberated” lands.

We will never know how many more countless deaths occurred because of the corruption and oppression of the Marxist police states that governed Cambodia for another two decades, and which still govern Laos and Vietnam. The sum total of human suffering caused by the poverty and oppression of those tyrannical regimes is incalculable. Southeast Asia without Communism could have replicated the prosperity and freedom of today’s South Korea, Taiwan, or Singapore.

But old Religious Left activists like Edgar and Wallis ignore the fruits of their activism, trying to relive those youthful days today. Even now, they avoid commenting about the many ongoing crimes of the Vietnamese and Laotian Communists, who came to power thanks in part to the causes Wallis and Edgar led, and whose 30 years of persecutions include the torment of Christians and other religious believers.

Similarly, Edgar and Wallis never had much to say about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whom Saddam Hussein murdered, a number that would have been even higher without the U.S. and British air forces giving 10 years of protection to the Kurds and southern Shiites. Like others on the left, Edgar and Wallis exclusively blamed the U.S for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who ostensibly died from United Nations sanctions against Saddam’s regime. Saddam’s own role in hoarding cash, medicines, and food for his own supporters, while withholding such essentials from his perceived enemies, was largely unremarked upon.

Edgar and Wallis do not have the nerve to assert it specifically, but the obvious implication of all their frenzied activism and statements before and after the U.S. led overthrow of Saddam’s regime is that Iraq would be better off if the dictator had been left in power. They should simply say it. At least their argument would be an honest one. Dictators, however brutal, at least can offer a terrible stability.

Perhaps Edgar and Wallis should go a step further. In his bold and ridiculous new 9/11 conspiracy book, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, David Ray Griffin blames the United States for 180 million deaths around the world every decade. Griffin, a professor emeritus at United Methodist Claremont School of Theology in California, claims that the U.S., as the hegemon of a global capitalist empire, is responsible for nearly every premature death everywhere. As such, it is worse than Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and is today the “chief embodiment of demonic power.” Ray’s book, which alleges the Bush administration actually blew up the World Trade Center and Pentagon, was published by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) publishing house.

Edgar and Wallis, who are eager to accept the dubious claim that the U.S. has killed 600,000 Iraqi civilians, may as well accept Griffin’s bracing thesis in full. Like Griffin, and at variance with traditional Christianity, they see the world as basically an innocent place, sullied only by the demonic presence of the United States. Edgar says he is praying for an end to the “unspeakable horrors” endured by Iraqis, by which he means chiefly the U.S. presence. But the poor Iraqis were suffering unspeakably long before U.S. forces appeared.

posted October 14, 2006 01:30 PM            

quote:

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...Mirandee

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posted October 20, 2006 11:38 AM            

"I can understand why Susan Estrich has no contact information on any of her so called articles. I rely on NewsMax to pass this message along to this leftist twit."

It's not enough that you radical leftists are trying to hand the Islamic terrorists a victory in the halls of Congress, a victory they cannot win on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, not enough that every word out of leftist mouths on the subject of terrorism is music to terrorist recruiters ears as you berate the President, Rumsfeld, our military forces and give aid and comfort to our enemies.

No, that's not nearly enough for me. I await the day you idiots on the extreme Marxist left declare openly that you are pulling for a terrorist victory over the United States. Any terrorist victory, large or small is good news for the radical Marxist left. Any defeat of terrorist plots, capture or killing of any high ranking terrorist sends radical Marxist leftists into despondency.

In truth, you and your radical Marxist pals are the best friends terrorists and terrorist supporting nations have on earth. While their supporters and funders simply give terrorists the means to fight US and coalition military forces, not to mention the killing of innocent civilians in deliberate attacks, you and your radical leftist pals promise them an actual victory by withdrawing US military forces from the battlefields who are capturing and killing them.

There is a word for people like you and your radical Marxist friends. That word is traitor. When the history of this period is written, that's the way you and other Marxist radicals will be identified, as traitors to the United States. You are not going to write the history of this era and the simple reason you won't is that you are not going to win this war against the United States or it's people.

posted October 20, 2006 12:14 PM            

Did you note what Mirandee said?

quote:

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If the study proves to be correct --Mirandee

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She obviously wasn't stating that 655,000 is necessarily true.

How you extrapolate talking about the National Council of Churches, and make a comment about the facts beating down a leftist lie is absurd. Jwhop's post doesn't say anything new as far as whether or not that study is accurate. Mirandee's article itself illustrates the ways that that estimate may not be true, and offers many other estimates based on other sources. Talk about needing to question sanity.

quote:

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but as you and I both know jwhop, Mirandee and others will NEVER believe facts.

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posted October 20, 2006 02:02 PM            

Further acoustic, if you really wanted to know what's wrong with the methodology of the study, you would have found it. The problem is in the sampling method and number of population clusters sampled. In this case 47 population clusters were sampled for a population of 27,000,000 people and that's not acceptable. Further, the study made no effort to find out who they were actually sampling. For all we know, they were sampling in terrorist controlled areas and got their information from propaganda artists.

So acoustic, the numbers are wildly overstated...as revealed by every other study and group who has examined Iraqi civilian deaths.

One wonders why the Lancet study didn't claim 10,000,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. Why not shoot the moon when your intent is to spread false and misleading propaganda.

What's also true about this study is that it includes all non coalition deaths which includes tens of thousands of terrorists, both foreign and Iraqi terrorists.

Numbers from Iraqi hospitals and others who have put forth numbers are a fraction of those claimed by the Lancet study.

Now, as for the Marxist National Council of Churches and the Marxist World Council of Churches, they have wholehearted embraced this study. These groups of phony christians have attempted from the beginning to shelter their Stalinist buddy Saddam from the consequences of his actions...and they're still attempting to discredit the United States and coalition forces.

Hope that 'splains it all for you acoustic. But if not, go check the "population cluster sampling" information.

Further acoustic, Lancet has made wild accusations of huge Iraqi death tolls before and as before, they published what would be telling for anyone familiar with what their study actually says.

In this case..655 thousand Iraqi deaths, they are 95% certain that the actual number falls between 392,979 and 942,636. Now that's real precision even if one is prepared to overlook their unreasonable..on the low side of..population clusters sampled.

In fact, that 655,000 number is what caught Mirandee's eye...and yours too. She attempted to use the phony study against the United States and Bush.

Of course leftists want to use these numbers and there's no one on planet earth who doesn't understand why leftists want to cling to these phony numbers produced by other leftists.

posted October 20, 2006 04:07 PM              

Even the smaller figure of that interval - 392,979 deaths - is still 10X greater than what the occupiers have been saying.

This field study is more accurate than the figures the iraqi body count website posts. That website collects their data from the media. The researchers from John Hopkins actually went to the Iraqi households to collect their data...and 92% of the deaths they recorded were verified by actual death certificates.

posted October 20, 2006 04:46 PM            

The study attempts to take causality figures from areas of high civilian casualties...like Fulluja for instance, a former terrorist stronghold which coalition forces cleaned out and extrapolate those numbers over the entire population of Iraq.

About the only thing the study got right is estimating that fully 2/3 of Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by direct attacks on civilians by foreign terrorists and terrorists within the Iraqi population.

You know, those whom terrorist supporters call "freedom fighters". You know, those "freedom fighters" who are fighting against the Iraqi government elected by about 70% of eligible Iraqi voters who defied the terrorists and voted anyway. You know, those "freedom fighter cowards" who deliberately attack women and children...when they're not actively hiding behind the skirts of women.

They aren't fit to be called "fighters" of any stripe. They are cowardly murderous thugs pure and simple. When they engage US forces, they get their sorry as$es shot off and that's the reason they mostly confine their attacks to car bombs directed at women, children and old men.

Now, I read the study and their conclusions along with their sampling methodology and number of population clusters they sampled.

To say this study is flawed is a gross understatement.

The only salvation for this study is that it gives cover for cut and run leftists, has been used by leftists to beat up on the US military and Bush and give cover for supporters of terrorists and terrorism.

posted October 20, 2006 05:04 PM            

The rest of your post is full of nonsense.

quote:

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This phony study of Iraqi civilian deaths has already been debunked...in the very article chosen to spread leftist disinformation...the very first article on this thread.

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If the article was written "to spread leftist disinformation," why would it call the study "controversial," and go on to illustrate other means of finding death numbers?

quote:

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if you really wanted to know what's wrong with the methodology of the study, you would have found it.

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At first blush it seems obvious where the error in methodology is, and it's far from your conspiracy point of view on it. Surveying households would seem to produce duplicates. More than one house could report the same death. However, if you actually read anything on the report you'd know that those interviewed often were able to produce death certificates. I'll post an article for you after this post, so you can see what you're up against.

quote:

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Now, as for the Marxist National Council of Churches and the Marxist World Council of Churches, they have wholehearted embraced this study.

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Who cares? Are you a part of them? Is Mirandee a part of them? Am I a part of them? No. So what difference does it make. As far as sheltering Saddam, I think you'd have a hard time proving such an allegation.

quote:

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In this case..655 thousand Iraqi deaths, they are 95% certain that the actual number falls between 392,979 and 942,636. Now that's real precision even if one is prepared to overlook their unreasonable..on the low side of..population clusters sampled.

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As the following article will illustrate, the sampling is better than most polling done here for politics.

quote:

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In fact, that 655,000 number is what caught Mirandee's eye...and yours too. She attempted to use the phony study against the United States and Bush.

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posted October 20, 2006 05:15 PM            

By EUGENE ROBINSON

October 20, 2006

WASHINGTON — “Not credible” was President Bush’s quick verdict on the new study, published last week in the British medical journal The Lancet, calculating that more than 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion and its ensuing chaos. It is understandable that the president would be quick to dismiss such an explosive claim, but the rest of us should take the time to look a bit more closely.

The number of estimated deaths claimed by the study is inconceivably huge, and wildly out of scale with any previous figures we’ve heard. But it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the human suffering in Iraq has been far beyond our imagining.

The peer-reviewed study’s named authors include three researchers from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University — one of them Gilbert Burnham, co-director of the school’s Center for Refugee and Disaster Response — and a professor from Baghdad’s al-Mustansiriya University. Funding for the project was provided by MIT. These are not shabby credentials.

But academic degrees and prestigious affiliations alone do not establish truth. Bush said the problem is that the study’s methodology has been discredited. But the team relied on a “cluster sample survey” technique that is frequently used for public health research, especially in the developing world.

No one should find the basic concept unfamiliar, since it underlies such mainstays of modern life as public opinion polls and market research. The survey team picked what was deemed to be a representative sample — in this case, 1,849 households scattered throughout Iraq — and used that sample to draw conclusions about the population as a whole. That’s the same method pollsters employ to predict who will win an election.

Ideally, the selection of respondents should be as random as possible. The process of choosing the 50 widely scattered neighborhoods in which the Johns Hopkins team did its work was not quite ideal, but The Lancet peer reviewers who cleared the study for publication could find nothing that would significantly skew the results. Interviewers went house to house, recording detailed information about deaths prior to the 2003 invasion and deaths since.

The researchers tallied 82 pre-invasion and 547 post-invasion deaths in those households. The death rate per year had nearly tripled following the invasion, they found, and a full 300 of the post-invasion deaths, or more than half, were the result of violence. (By contrast, only 2 percent of pre-invasion deaths were violent ones.) Of those killed by violent means, more than half died from gunshot wounds; the rest mostly died in bombings and airstrikes. Victims were primarily young and middle-aged men. In more than 90 percent of cases, family members were able to produce a death certificate confirming what they told the interviewers.

Those may look like small numbers on which to base such large claims, but that’s how the world of survey research works. Pollsters in the United States, a much larger country, routinely predict nationwide trends on the basis of fewer interviews.

Does this prove, as the study asserts, that precisely 654,965 Iraqis have died “as a consequence of the war,” and that exactly 601,027 of those deaths were due to violence? No, it doesn’t. The Johns Hopkins team reports being 95 percent certain that the true figure lies between about 400,000 and about 900,000 — a large range of uncertainty that some critics have seized upon as discrediting the whole project.

But the exact number is not the point. Rather, it’s the scope and scale of the carnage.

Late last year, President Bush gave an off-the-cuff estimate of 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths — this after the administration had steadfastly refused to acknowledge even trying to count the Iraqi dead. Now the administration is willing to allow that perhaps 50,000 civilians have died. It is unclear whether any science at all has gone into these estimates or whether they were essentially pulled out of a hat.

But quite a lot of science went into the Johns Hopkins study. Even if you assume that the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the war began is at the very low end of the study’s range, that’s still a quantum leap from earlier estimates. We now have reputable evidence — not proof, I’ll allow, but science-based evidence from respected scholars, published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals — that the humanitarian tragedy in Iraq is much, much worse than anyone had suspected.

posted October 20, 2006 05:22 PM            

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

The Lancet Study...

This has been the longest time I have been away from blogging. There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I'd be filled with a certain hopelessness that can't be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.

It's very difficult at this point to connect to the internet and try to read the articles written by so-called specialists and analysts and politicians. They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia- with a detachment and lack of sentiment that- I suppose- is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse. They fall between idiots like Bush- constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves.

The latest horror is the study published in the Lancet Journal concluding that over 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war. Reading about it left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it sounded like a reasonable figure. It wasn't at all surprising. On the other hand, I so wanted it to be wrong. But... who to believe? Who to believe....? American politicians... or highly reputable scientists using a reliable scientific survey technique?

The responses were typical- war supporters said the number was nonsense because, of course, who would want to admit that an action they so heartily supported led to the deaths of 600,000 people (even if they were just crazy Iraqis…)? Admitting a number like that would be the equivalent of admitting they had endorsed, say, a tsunami, or an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, or the occupation of a developing country by a ruthless superpower… oh wait- that one actually happened. Is the number really that preposterous? Thousands of Iraqis are dying every month- that is undeniable. And yes, they are dying as a direct result of the war and occupation (very few of them are actually dying of bliss, as war-supporters and Puppets would have you believe).

For American politicians and military personnel, playing dumb and talking about numbers of bodies in morgues and official statistics, etc, seems to be the latest tactic. But as any Iraqi knows, not every death is being reported. As for getting reliable numbers from the Ministry of Health or any other official Iraqi institution, that's about as probable as getting a coherent, grammatically correct sentence from George Bush- especially after the ministry was banned from giving out correct mortality numbers. So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.

The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?

We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?

There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.

Let's pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al.

posted October 20, 2006 06:15 PM            

It's pure bullsh!t propaganda, undertaken by leftists to discredit the United States, the Iraq war..and Bush.

posted October 20, 2006 07:01 PM            

By STEVEN E. MOORE
October 18, 2006; Page A20

After doing survey research in Iraq for nearly two years, I was surprised to read that a study by a group from Johns Hopkins University claims that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. Don't get me wrong, there have been far too many deaths in Iraq by anyone's measure; some of them have been friends of mine. But the Johns Hopkins tally is wildly at odds with any numbers I have seen in that country. Survey results frequently have a margin of error of plus or minus 3% or 5% -- not 1200%.

The group -- associated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health -- employed cluster sampling for in-person interviews, which is the methodology that I and most researchers use in developing countries. Here, in the U.S., opinion surveys often use telephone polls, selecting individuals at random. But for a country lacking in telephone penetration, door-to-door interviews are required: Neighborhoods are selected at random, and then individuals are selected at random in "clusters" within each neighborhood for door-to-door interviews. Without cluster sampling, the expense and time associated with travel would make in-person interviewing virtually impossible.

However, the key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points. In their 2006 report, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional sample survey," the Johns Hopkins team says it used 47 cluster points for their sample of 1,849 interviews. This is astonishing: I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points.

Neither would anyone else. For its 2004 survey of Iraq, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) used 2,200 cluster points of 10 interviews each for a total sample of 21,688. True, interviews are expensive and not everyone has the U.N.'s bank account. However, even for a similarly sized sample, that is an extraordinarily small number of cluster points. A 2005 survey conducted by ABC News, Time magazine, the BBC, NHK and Der Spiegel used 135 cluster points with a sample size of 1,711 -- almost three times that of the Johns Hopkins team for 93% of the sample size.

What happens when you don't use enough cluster points in a survey? You get crazy results when compared to a known quantity, or a survey with more cluster points. There was a perfect example of this two years ago. The UNDP's survey, in April and May 2004, estimated between 18,000 and 29,000 Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war. This survey was conducted four months prior to another, earlier study by the Johns Hopkins team, which used 33 cluster points and estimated between 69,000 and 155,000 civilian deaths -- four to five times as high as the UNDP survey, which used 66 times the cluster points.

The 2004 survey by the Johns Hopkins group was itself methodologically suspect -- and the one they just published even more so.

Curious about the kind of people who would have the chutzpah to claim to a national audience that this kind of research was methodologically sound, I contacted Johns Hopkins University and was referred to Les Roberts, one of the primary authors of the study. Dr. Roberts defended his 47 cluster points, saying that this was standard. I'm not sure whose standards these are.

Appendix A of the Johns Hopkins survey, for example, cites several other studies of mortality in war zones, and uses the citations to validate the group's use of cluster sampling. One study is by the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which used 750 cluster points. Harvard's School of Public Health, in a 1992 survey of Iraq, used 271 cluster points. Another study in Kosovo cites the use of 50 cluster points, but this was for a population of just 1.6 million, compared to Iraq's 27 million.

When I pointed out these numbers to Dr. Roberts, he said that the appendices were written by a student and should be ignored. Which led me to wonder what other sections of the survey should be ignored.

With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census.

Dr. Roberts said that his team's surveyors did not ask demographic questions. I was so surprised to hear this that I emailed him later in the day to ask a second time if his team asked demographic questions and compared the results to the 1997 Iraqi census. Dr. Roberts replied that he had not even looked at the Iraqi census.

And so, while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents. This would be the first survey I have looked at in my 15 years of looking that did not ask demographic questions of its respondents. But don't take my word for it -- try using Google to find a survey that does not ask demographic questions.

Without demographic information to assure a representative sample, there is no way anyone can prove -- or disprove -- that the Johns Hopkins estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths is accurate.

Public-policy decisions based on this survey will impact millions of Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Americans. It's important that voters and policy makers have accurate information. When the question matters this much, it is worth taking the time to get the answer right.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116113407074095991.html?mod=todays_asia_opinion

“It may well be that some or even many of the males could have been combatants. It is not possible to judge the motives of the dead through surveys. We could record only what households told us.” — Gilbert Burnham

http://pajamasmedia.com/2006/10/joisting_with_the_lancet_the_p.php

"We could record only what households told us"

One thing we do know is that these people way oversampled the so called hot areas of Iraq...big time and weighted it 25% of the entire sample. They then extrapolated those numbers onto the rest of the Iraqi population...which is blatant dishonesty.

posted October 20, 2006 07:05 PM            

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No amount of twisting and turning, bobbing and weaving

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I sincerely doubt anyone would characterize my points as any of those things. Let me remind you that I've stuck to the subject, and spoken on pertinent points meanwhile you've poorly attempted to call this propaganda, and tried to use it to hate on a couple Christian groups.

posted October 20, 2006 07:26 PM            

Your arguments in support of this report lack credibility. Your arguments are based on discredited data, by a discredited group who used discredited methodology.

Other groups who have compiled similar types of reports on Iraqi deaths and war deaths in other nations produced numbers far, far lower...and they used the same population cluster point methodology...but as I have pointed out to you, they used orders of magnitude higher numbers of cluster points. Their reports have the credibility the group you are arguing in favor of totally lack.

It is both instructive and amusing to see you arguing in favor of a report with a margin of error of 1200% as a well qualified survey researcher noted.

posted October 20, 2006 07:33 PM            

Steven E. Moore of Gorton Moore International? Whose clients include:

- Governor Schwartzenegger
- Governor Pete Wilson
- Boris Yeltsin
- The Social Democratic Party of Romania
- Republican Party of California

Moore, the speaker to the California delegation at the 2004 Republican National Convention?

posted October 20, 2006 08:52 PM            

It speaks well for Moore's qualifications to conduct research surveys when the people and groups you listed hired him. You see acoustic, they need accurate information on which to base decisions.

I doubt seriously anyone on your list would be overly thrilled if they were handed a survey with a margin of error of 1200%

I can see your boys from John Hopkins handing Arnold a survey which said with a 95% confidence rate that Arnold was going to capture between 5% and 60% of the vote in the coming California election for Governor.

posted October 21, 2006 12:00 AM              

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However, Iraqi citizens support the figures and feel that their leaders have been hiding the truth from them, analysts say.

Dying like fish

"Iraqis are dying like fish in a poisoned lake. They are insignificant lives and the numbers of the research just proves that. The Iraqi government wants to hide the reality but it is not necessary because it is very clear now, just proving what we already suspected before," said Muhammad Jaboury, a gold seller at Mansour district in the capital, Baghdad.

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The study made mention of the fact that there were likely to be many more thousands of deaths caused indirectly by the war but were not included in its survey.

"Aside from violence, insufficient water supplies, non-functional sewerage, and restricted electricity supply also create health hazards. A deteriorating health service with insecure access and the flight of health professionals adds further risks," reads a section of the survey.

"People displaced by the on-going sectarian violence add to the number of vulnerable individuals. In many conflicts, these indirect causes have accounted for most civilian deaths," it added.

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