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| Home Front: Politix |
| MIT Funds Openly Fraudulent Johns-Hopkins Iraq Death Toll, Now 655,000 |
| 2006-10-11 |
| A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates. The timing of the survey's release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to call it "politics." In the new study, researchers attempt to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer. "Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, said in a statement. The study by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and others is to be published on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal. An accurate count of Iraqi deaths has been difficult to obtain, but one respected group puts its rough estimate at closer to 50,000. And at least one expert was skeptical of the new findings. "They're almost certainly way too high," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He criticized the way the estimate was derived and noted that the results were released shortly before the Nov. 7 elections in the United States. "This is not analysis, this is politics," Cordesman said. The work updates an earlier Johns Hopkins study -- that one was released just before the November 2004 presidential election. At the time, the lead researcher, Les Roberts of Hopkins, said the timing was deliberate. Many of the same researchers were involved in the latest estimate. Speaking of the new study, Burnham said the estimate was much higher than others because it was derived from a house-to-house survey rather than approaches that depend on body counts or media reports. A private group called Iraqi Body Count, for example, 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." For Burnham's study, researchers gathered data from a sample of 1,849 Iraqi households with a total of 12,801 residents from late May to early July. That sample was used to extrapolate the total figure. The estimate deals with deaths up to July. The survey participants attributed about 31 percent of violent deaths to coalition forces. Accurate death tolls have been difficult to obtain ever since the Iraq conflict began in March 2003. When top Iraqi political officials cite death numbers, they often refuse to cite the source of the numbers. The Health Ministry, which tallies civilian deaths, relies on reports from government hospitals and morgues. The Interior Ministry compiles its figures from police stations, while the Defense Ministry reports deaths only among army soldiers and insurgents killed in combat. The United Nations keeps its own count, based largely on reports from the Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry. The major funder of the new study was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This goes hand-in-hand with their other studies: "Voting republican causes cancer", and "George W. Bush is Stupid. Stoopid." |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #34 From the general "attitude" of this site I fail to see why you guys care about a few 100,000 Iraqi deaths in an estimate either way. So tell us, oh ye great deviner of all knowledge - what the hell are you here for? Some of us "mouth-breathers" would like to know. BTW, some of us "mouth-breathers" hold PhDs dickhead. Some of us even hold more than one. Most of the rest of us are either well-educated, well-seasoned, or at least well-read (you may count me in as all of the previous). Your act is as old-hat as the last grad student I ran into who thought he was better than this lowly security guard until I explained to him who he was dealing with and what he would address me as the next time he opened his stupid mouth. So, I suspect that's likely exactly what you are - a grad student, likely working in a field where The Lancet would be nearly required reading. Thus far, you've shown exactly zero reason for respect. You haven't earned your bones here. Most of us don't know you. Respect here is earned, not given. There's a difference and you should already know that. |
| Posted by: FOTSGreg 2006-10-11 22:35 |
| #33 Extrapolate - the new word for fact |
| Posted by: Dunno 2006-10-11 22:08 |
| #32 Our pedantic and supercilious commenter is from somewhere near London. But it seems pointless to discuss the merits of the Lancet paper (who believes the Lancet anyway, they're just a bunch of commies). The past few decades have left sufficient evidence of malfeasance to make one doubt such 'respected' publications and organizations. Speaking of 'commies' - my dear over-educated friend, did the Lancet ever publish on the manufactured famine in the Ukraine? |
| Posted by: Pappy 2006-10-11 21:27 |
| #31 You have to admit, that's a pretty good kill ratio. 1 American for every 200+ Iraqi "citizens". If I'm doing these numbers right, Iraq suffers a 9/11 at a faster clip than 1 a week since the war started. If you could show evidence of that, I'd love to see it. You know, some death tolls each week over the past year or so. It may surprise you I am against the Iraq war Aristides, and think we should have focused on other areas instead. (I've had my disagreements with others here, let's put it that way). The reality is this study is complete horse shit. Do the math, and see if this crap all adds up. Now, back to you Mitch(Aristides). |
| Posted by: Thoth 2006-10-11 20:32 |
| #30 Just another troll who wants to grovel before -real- religious fascists. His shoulders aren't broad enough for that nym. As OldSpook pointed out, this is a classic example of fraud right out of Huff's HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS. The fact that the Lancet prostituted itself for political reasons is all the more regrettable. |
| Posted by: Ernest Brown 2006-10-11 20:28 |
| #29 Oh, Aris - Perhaps you've read "On 'Mortal Exit Polling' In Iraq" at this site? Surely you must see the logical faults there, as well? Or have you left the building? |
| Posted by: Bobby 2006-10-11 20:26 |
| #28 Some of us care about truth, Aris (Hmmmmm....)over spin. Others value life over those that want to die and kill. But you're way too smart for me. I guess the press covered up all those deaths? Oh, yeah, the press that's controlled by the neo-cons, right? You know what you know. Too bad you can't convince anyone except those who also know what you know. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2006-10-11 20:23 |
| #27 #20 I believe Oldspook and I have been looking at different papers if one merely considers the paper's quoted crude mortality rate the LOWER estimate of the post-war /1000 death rate is TWICE that of the upper 95th percentile of the pre-war rate. Furthermore the authors 95% confidence estimates for the 650,000 estimate range from 390,000 to 940,000 (approx.). #22 I didn't select a time period merely used the US Dept of defences figures - take it up with them. I also stated that it is probably an overestimate since violence is probably increasing (if you choose to believe it is decreasing feel free to factor up the estimate). If a troll is someone that disagrees with you then I am a troll. #25 Regarding the name I'm not Greek and I'd refer you to .com #22 he appears to have read his Plutarch at school. They submitted to the Lancet because it has a higher impact factor than an obscure epidemiological journal, and if you don't believe a statistical study has a place in a medical journal I suggest you open a medical journal and read one. All large scale double blind treatment trials are statistical studies. The Lancet frequently publishes meta-analysis studies examining relationships between a given factor and population mortality or morbidity, eg. bodyweight and cardiovascular related deaths fom 2 week ago. But it seems pointless to discuss the merits of the Lancet paper (who believes the Lancet anyway, they're just a bunch of commies). From the general "attitude" of this site I fail to see why you guys care about a few 100,000 Iraqi deaths in an estimate either way. |
| Posted by: Aristides 2006-10-11 20:05 |
| #26 The survey participants attributed about 31 percent of violent deaths to coalition forces. Let's do a little extrapolating of our own. Assuming all reported fatalities are war related and not due to disease or natural causes, the above 31% figure allows us to conclude that: 69% , or WELL OVER TWO-THIRDS of all Iraqi deaths are caused by the terrorist insurgents. In other words, coalition forces are responsible for less than one third of the slaughter going on in Iraq. Let's see if the media picks up on that little nugget shall we? |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-10-11 19:53 |
| #25 Pauvre Aristides! My dear, what you fail to realize is some of the posters in this thread are highly paid to analyze statistics of this sort and draw conclusions therefrom. Why, even I did so once upon a time, although admittedly I wasn't terribly well paid for it. I'm afraid the chief conclusion I drew from the data as presented was that had anyone in my company set up a study in this way -- no outside verification of statements taken from a highly skewed sample of the population, using biased amateur interviewers, and with no basis for the extrapolations made -- the ones responsible for such a study would have been immediately let go without references. Of course, at the time I worked for an American Fortune 500 company that made consumer products (some of which you have stored in your cabinets at home, assuming you are as Greek as your name, or otherwise European, or Canadian or American, or...) so decisions based on faulty data had expensive consequences. As for what you so fondly think of as "a peer reviewed publication in one of the world's best medical journals": clearly it never occurred to you to question the authors submitting a statistical study for publication in a medical journal. The peers who review things for medical journals are medical experts, not statisticians; statisticians, whose expertise is in the generation and analysis of statistics, review articles submitted to statistical journals. There are a great many statistical journals out there, some of which focus on medical statistics, as the academics of both MIT and Johns Hopkins well know. So why do you suppose, my dear Mr. Aristides, that the authors chose not to submit their earthshaking study to one of them? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-10-11 19:15 |
| #24 Must have been done by the same MIT "rocket scientists" and "mathmatics experts" that SCO claimed found "their code" in Linux. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2006-10-11 19:06 |
| #23 Their last report in the runup to Election '04 said 100,000 dead. So over 500,000 must have died in the past two years That's 684 deaths per day. You'd think the media would have reported that. Hmmmm, must be a cover-up by the "right-wing / GOP supporting / neo-con" main stream media. Yeah, that's it. Or maybe it's all just bullshit. |
| Posted by: DMFD 2006-10-11 18:55 |
| #22 Lol. You do your namesake serious injustice. You can usually identify trollery by the selected nym - and you do not disappoint. Fraud is fraud - and we're fed up with it. You should be too, instead of weaseling for an angle to support it. The Lancet was correctly excoriated by its non-idiotarian peers for its absurd conclusions. You selected a time period which suits your pre-selected result - just as these faux mathematicians did. Fuck off. Extrapolate that. Your initial premise, made far more succinctly: All lies in jest, Still a man hears What he wants to hear, And disregards the rest --Paul Simon, The Boxer And it applies to you, troll. |
| Posted by: .com 2006-10-11 18:51 |
| #21 heh heh... "mouth-breathers" he lipped as he typed... Arrested Development - nice try. Ragheads huh? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-10-11 18:48 |
| #20 You miss the point of Oldspook's comment #14, which is damning. Those error bars mean that it is strictly and objectively meaningless to quote the numbers from this study. They may be right, they may be wrong -- but even if you accept the premises and assumptions (which are not easy to accept) what kills the credibility of this study is the variance in the data on which they base their assertions. And that's taking the data at face value. |
| Posted by: lotp 2006-10-11 18:42 |
| #19 The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of itsformer conclusions may remain inviolate. - Francis Bacon (Novum Organum) I realise it's wasted on you mouth breathers but your willingness to dismiss a peer reviewed publication in one of the world's best medical journals as "openly fraudulent" and the Lancet as "well established for fiction" appears in keeping with the ongoing open-minded search for truth typical of this site. I congratulate the one of your number that attempted to actually read the article. If you wish to entirely dismiss the paper merely consider a thumbnail estimate based upon the US Dept of Defence 2006 document "Measuring stability and security in Iraq." The US Dept of Defence quotes a rate of 117 deaths per day in incidents to which coalition troops responded (between May 2005 and June 2006). Extrapolated over the period considered by the researchers (an overestimate since the rate has probably increased) that results in excess deaths approximating 140,000. Now consider what proportion of incidents in Iraq coalition forces attend, 25%, 50%? I fail to see why you are concerned with the estimate anyway, I thought you considered them all a bunch of ragheads anyway. I expected to see more enthusiam for the destruction. |
| Posted by: Aristides 2006-10-11 18:38 |
| #18 We all knew that the Lancet 100,000 death number was a fraud. What I didn't know until now was that John Hopkins and MIT had also gone tits up for Allah. A child with an abacus could have debunked this report. |
| Posted by: Icerigger 2006-10-11 17:32 |
| #17 Sounds almost as bad as the Superdome during Katrina... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2006-10-11 17:10 |
| #16 Tom the anchorman: “Peril, crisis and fear tonight as what appears to be a massive flood has overtaken the town of Beaverton, Colorado, home of the world’s largest beaver dam. Earlier today, a break in the beaver dam which protected the town broke open, trapping people in their houses and destroying their lives.” Mitch, the reporter: “Tom, I’m currently ten miles outside of Beaverton, unable to get inside the town proper. We do not have any reports of fatalities yet, but we believe that the death toll may be in the hundreds of millions. Beaverton has only a population of about 8,000, Tom, so this would be quite devastating.” Tom: “Any word on how the survivors in the town are doing, Mitch?” Mitch: “We’re not sure what’s exactly is going on inside the town of Beaverton, Tom, but we’re reporting that there’s looting, raping and, yes, even acts of cannibalism.” Tom: “My God, you’ve actually seen people looting, raping and eating each other?!” Mitch: “No, no we’ve haven’t actually seen it, Tom. We’re just reporting it.” |
| Posted by: Thoth 2006-10-11 17:07 |
| #15 Did they bother to isolate how many deaths were due to Islamic terrorists slaughtering their own people? |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-10-11 16:36 |
| #14 Check the margin of error in the statistics - its huge and the confidence interval is nearly the whole of the sample space. In other words, their study if you strip it down to the math says: It is highly probably that between 1000 and 700000 extra deaths were incurred in Iraq due to US action. this includes Saddams's soldiers, Terrorists, Iraqi Army casualties, Iraqi police casualties, and civlians whoo died from stress, malnutrition, inadequate healthcare, domestic violence due to thehostil environment, and traffic deaths due to more cars on the road and less regulation, etc. They basically added up ALL the deaths in their survey set, extrapolated it to the total population size pre-war (ignoring refugees who have left, etc), and pulled a number out of a hat that was in the range at the high end, with little to no statistical backing, and zero relevance other than a political grenade for the willing leftist dupes/tools in the mainstream press in the US to trumpet. Color me disgusted that anyone would even pay attention to this lie, much less believe it. |
| Posted by: Oldspook 2006-10-11 15:32 |
| #13 The sole purpose of this study is to give the Donks a 'study' to quote: "Studies have shown that 655 thousand civilians have been killed because of BushHitler's illegal war..." So if 5 people in the same family say that Achmed died by wearing a homicide belt then this study shows that 5 people additional died from BushHitler's illegal war right? |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2006-10-11 14:08 |
| #12 From Mudville Gazette: From Lancet graph: Pre-invasion mortality rates were 5·5 per 1000 people per year (95% CI 4·3–7·1), compared with 13·3 per 1000 people per year (10·9–16·1) in the 40 months post-invasion. According to the CIA Fact Book The average death rate for Afghanistan is 20.34/1000(est) Hungary is 13.31/1000(est) The World is 8.67/1000 (est) The EU is 10.10/1000 (est) US is 8.26/1000 (est) Pakistan 8.23/1000 (est) But Iraq stood miraculously at 5.5/1000 (est). |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2006-10-11 13:44 |
| #11 The next step is to start blaming mass graves on the coalition and claim we've been trying to blame Saddam to cover our crimes. It is just a matter of time, there is no other way they can find the bodies to cover these claims any other way. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2006-10-11 12:43 |
| #10 For Burnham's study, researchers gathered data from a sample of 1,849 Iraqi households with a total of 12,801 residents from late May to early July. That sample was used to extrapolate the total figure. The estimate deals with deaths up to July. I herbeby call on Dr. Steve to release his own study, which interviewed 2 liberals. One of the two had an IQ below 90, so therefore, 50% of ALL liberals are ignoramuses. Jeez, I'm no pollster, but interviewing only ~2,000 households (I'd bet many of which are in the Sunni triangle), who have their own biases, and THEN applying it to the population as a whole is absofreakin-loutely asanine. |
| Posted by: BA 2006-10-11 11:40 |
| #9 600,000 deaths from smoking. |
| Posted by: Master of Obvious 2006-10-11 11:31 |
| #8 The problem is, this is fantasy. Were it true, we'd be further along the path to stability. |
| Posted by: SpecOp35 2006-10-11 11:26 |
| #7 1 Billion.... |
| Posted by: danking_70 2006-10-11 11:16 |
| #6 1 Billion.... |
| Posted by: danking_70 2006-10-11 11:09 |
| #5 Ah the left. Fake it until you make it. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2006-10-11 11:02 |
| #4 Yes, using their methodology. The Lancet is now well established for fiction in this field. Science gives way to politics. Thank Al Gore and the Democrats for doing everything possible to corrupt both science and politics. |
| Posted by: Darrell 2006-10-11 10:50 |
| #3 Hmmm. Their last report in the runup to Election '04 said 100,000 dead. So over 500,000 must have died in the past two years. Is that even remotely plausible? |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2006-10-11 10:41 |
| #2 Coming soon in the french msm, not as a discutable rapport, but as the Undeniable TRUTH (like the soon-to be democrat tsunami in the november elections the teevee talking heads gleefully announced this morning, "even on WOT, the american people think the democrats would do a better job than |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-10-11 10:28 |
| #1 Who would have thought that Maxwell Smart and his catch phrase "Would you believe....." would become the archetypes for the 21st century. |
| Posted by: RWV 2006-10-11 10:21 |