If You Liked Our First Fabrication, You'll Love This One

You leave town, you have a nice visit with relatives in sunny Pennsylvania (it happens) and you hope that upon your return the Washington Post will have reformed itself.

I did say 'hope.'

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000 by David Brown on A12 doesn't include a single critical expert though it does, big surprise, cite experts from the left side of the bench in approval. It notes that the study was conducted by the same team that did an earlier "controversial" report claiming 100,000 deaths, and says this report is likely to be "controversial" as well. But it does nothing to educate readers about why the earlier report was widely derided and we're kind of on our own as to why this one might be questioned. The last study was released just before the elections in November 2004. So is this one. No 'analysis' of that fact here. One of the story's experts, Ronald Waldman, is blandly identified as an epidemiologist at Columbia University but you must conduct your own research to discover his defense of the earlier study and his status as an "expert speaker on Iraq" for Physicians for Human Rights, a group whose general drift is suggested by its opposition to President Bush's military commissions bill not to mention Waldman's own opposition to the Iraq War. Waldman and associates present their case in venues like those provided by the generally pacifist Society of Friends (Quakers) and left-wing Democracy Now, Amy Goldman's show on the Pacifica Network.

Now pay attention: None of this condemns Waldman, who has ventured into Iraq and from all appearances is genuinely trying to alleviate suffering. But I want to know where the guy is coming from. Why does the Washington Post force me to do all this work on my own?

Similarly, Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch is quoted in support of the study, and we are supposed to know on our own about that organization's reflexive anti-Bush Administration stance. As Joshua Muravchik wrote in the Weekly Standard, discussing a review of HRW documents:

And who do you suppose was the main villain in Iraq? Saddam Hussein? Al Qaeda in Iraq, which planted bombs killing civilians day in, day out? Of course not. The villain was the United States. Human Rights Watch issued nearly three times as many documents focusing on the depredations of the United States as on Saddam and the Iraqi "resistance" combined.

I don't care if you quote Sarah Leah Whitson. I do care if you don't help me understand who she is. I'd say the same thing about critics of the study but you don't quote any.

From the Post's story:

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

I'm not equipped to evaluate on my own whether the epidemiological technique used in this study, called "cluster sampling," can be applied to war and terrorist casualties. But I think you should have told me that the estimate of 655,000 deaths is extrapolated in part from a grand total of 302 actual violent deaths. I had to read National Review Online to find that out. The story does eventually mention the total of 629 deaths that the researchers actually counted.

Thanks a bunch.

Here's a .pdf version of the study eight pages), by Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts. Like the earlier one, published in The Lancet.

Comments

[John P]

I'm a scientist. I agree, you aren't equipped to evaluate the study. Any truly valid critique would involve mathematics, and it would provide a different estimate of the excess mortality. It would print some actual numbers, in other words. It would point out specific errors in the paper.

You can read up on statistical sampling at the Wikipedia, if you're curious.

[Christopher Fotos]

Oooh. I feel terrible.

I said I'm not equipped to evaluate whether an epidemeological technique can be applied to this subject. I am equipped to evaulate the reputation and motivations of these researchers. I also studied statistics at the graduate level and, to put it simply, garbage in, garbage out.

More here.

[ErnestD]

Like the first commenter, I, too, am a scientist. The flaws--and they are fatal flaws--in this survey have nothing to do with the calculations, which, as far as I can tell, are internally consistent and correct. In fact, I consider it likely that a total of 650 or 700,000 Iraqis have died since the invasion. The UN Population Division places total mortality in Iraq at around 250,000 per year...from 2000 through 2005 (i.e. both before and after the invasion). But just how many of these deaths are directly attributable to coalition military action?
The first flaw in the study, and the only one I will discuss here, since the others are relatively boring--is a major conflict of interest that is NOT declared, contrary to Lancet policy. I have no idea whether the timing of the survey's release was truly innocent, and I wouldn't accuse Gil Burnham without more evidence. HOWEVER, both Burnham and Les Roberts have made manifestly clear, on many occasions and in numerous interviews, that they oppose the war in Iraq and BELIEVE that the US is covering up casualty figures. Further, Roberts has stated that he wishes to see the Democrats take Congress back in 2006. In fact, he briefly conducted a campaign as a Democrat candidate for the House in New York state. He was a one-issue candidate (Get the troops out of Iraq now!). He received campaign contributions of $750 from his fellow author, Gil Burnham. So here we have two researchers--anti-Iraq war activists who wish to help fellow Democrats take control of Congress and exert "oversight" over George Bush and his Iraq policy in November, 2006--engaging in research on casualty numbers in Iraq. Why did they do this research? Gil Burnham stated in an interview with The World Today, "we wouldn't go to the effort of doing something like this if we didn't feel that here was a situation that was egregious and, you know, there really needs to be some attention to what we can do to better protect the civilians." In other words, before the study even began, the authors had decided on the conclusion. The authors EXPECTED to find high casualty rates and had already DECIDED that civilians were being harmed excessively. The political intent of the paper is also clear from a statement that "Coalition forces have been reported as targeting all men of military age," referring to two newspaper articles, one of them about a single soldier. Apart from bizarrely citing a newspaper article as a source in a supposedly reputable journal, the authors are not only saying that there are "reports"--they are implying that these reports tie the coalition forces to execution-style killings and assassinations. At the end of the article, the authors go on to suggest that the coalition is in violation of the Geneva Conventions without making any references. It is rare to detect political passion in a scientific publication. This article is rife with it. The authors' political and intellectual passion on this subject is a clear-cut conflict of interest as defined by the Lancet. It does NOT mean that the study should not have been published. It DOES mean that the paper should have been accompanied by a declaration of the author's close ties with the Democrat party and intellectual affiliation with the anti-war movement. That it was not declared is likely due to the influence of Lancet Editor Richard Horton, who wrote the fervent "Commentary" to the article and whose anti-Iraq war views are, if anything, MORE strident than those of Burnham and Roberts.

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