If You Teach Us Not To Trust You, We Won't

It's like Terrell Owens telling you to "tone it down."

Iraq Body Count has a detailed critique of the latest Lancet study claiming 655,0000 "extra" deaths as the result of the Iraq War. After running through the implications of this number, IBC considers what's required for the estimate to be true:  

• incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;
• bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;
• the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;
• an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.

This broadside wasn't available when the Post ran its Lancet story by David Brown on Oct. 11, an account that cited experts in favor of the study but not a single independent critic. But surely the telephones in the newsroom also can connect to them. Malcom Ritter at AP filed Mixed Reviews of Iraq Death Toll Study later that day, which included quotes like this:

"That 650,000 number seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen," [Gen.] Casey said. "I've not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don't give it that much credibility at all."

And neither does Michael E. O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, which also tracks Iraqi deaths.

"I do not believe the new numbers. I think they're way off," he said.

But that story--which still includes more supporters than criticis--didn't appear in the paper. The Post did revisit the figure, in Bush Stands Firm On Policies by Michael Abramowitz:

Bush said he does not find credible a new report in the Lancet, a British medical journal, which estimates that 655,000 more Iraqis have died since coalition forces arrived than would have died without the invasion. In a comment in the journal, the editors said the study was reviewed by four outside experts, all of whom recommended publication, with one noting the "powerful strength" of the research method. The findings, however, have a large margin of error. The low-end estimate of excess deaths (both civilian and military) is 393,000, while the high-end estimate is 943,000.

I think we know where this deep multilayered fact-checking came from: The story lists David Brown as a contributor.

Must be part of an efficiency drive. The Post reports part of the story, and outsources the rest to us.