100,000 civilian deaths (mostly women & children per the
flawed study) at the hands of the US since the removal of
Saddam works out to over 180 per day, every single day. You'd
think the MSM would have mountains of evidence to back those
kinds of numbers up. And surely Iraqi's by the hundreds of
thousands would be demonstrating in the streets if this were
true.
But they don't. No demonstrations. No media reports from
Iraq. No concrete evidence anywhere. Nothing to give it the
slightest credibility.
Why?
For every violent death, there would be 6 or 7 severe
injuries. That's 700,000 people, or about 1,300 people every
single day for the last 18 months. Why aren't the hospitals
overflowing with massive civilian casualties?
Why hasn't the MSM used this to bring Bush down? Mangled
babies by the tens of thousands would be a powerful way to
unseat Bush.
Why aren't the NGO's screaming for blood & medical supplies?
Between the alleged dead & the alleged injured, this study
claims the US killed or injured almost 3.5% of the entire
Iraqi population.
Give me a frigging break!
This study was another lame attempt to hurt Bush. It was
completely bogus.
Study on civilian deaths flawed
.... The Lancet fast-tracked the story, rushing it through its traditionally lengthy review and editing process in an effort to bring it to the public before November 2.....
.... The principal investigator has openly expressed his anti-war views. The rush to publicize the article makes one wonder what other shortcuts went into the process.....
miami.com
Commonsense Junk Science Alert!
"100,000 Excess Civilian Deaths After Iraq Invasion".
Apparently, plus or minus 92,000 or so (I am NOT exaggerating) Read the fine print: "The number of population clusters chosen for sampling is small; the confidence intervals around the point estimates of mortality are wide; the Falluja cluster has an especially high mortality and so is atypical of the rest of the sample; and there is clearly the potential for recall bias among those interviewed."
This paper was also received, peer reviewed, edited and published in less than 4 weeks, which is unheard of in academic publishing. The statistical confidence, however, is so low that nothing can be concluded. In fact, the article itself says the confidence interval runs from as few as 8,000 to as many as 194,000.
If you examine the confidence intervals and relative risk ratios (often in the 1.0 to 2.0 range which means they are not considered useful), this study is not worthy of fast track publication on the basis of science. On the basis of politics, perhaps? (I read much of the actual paper, not just the press release. The paper contributes nothing to public health science or an understanding of war's impacts. The news media that published the press release without reading the data can not be excused for its incompetence. Nor can the Lancet - fast tracking a useless study?)
Meanwhile, how the news media's attempt to "balance" all news coverage enables the scientific fringe to have a disproportionate sense of importance.
That and pajama wearing Internet bloggers. (The 2 linked stories were spotted on JunkScience.com.)
mitchellconsulting.net
Newsweek
....The leading British medical journal, The Lancet, recently published a study that used interviews and extrapolations to estimate the total figure at 100,000 or more, mostly from aerial bombardment. Other statisticians have since dismissed the study's conclusions as unreliable and speculative.....
msnbc.msn.com
The Economist
heraldsun.news.com.au
Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy
slate.msn.com
The Lancet: A Casualty of Politics
techcentralstation.com
The Lancet study
.... The Lancet raced to get the study on the Web in advance of its print publication and five days before the election. "I was opposed to the war, and I still think that the war was a bad idea. As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this," Roberts said in an interview.
Then why report junk science?
pittsburghlive.com
Bogus Lancet Study
Via The Command Post comes this study published in Lancet (free reg) which purports that 100,000 Iraqi have died from violence, most of it caused by Coalition air strikes, since the invasion of Iraq. Needless to say, this study will become an article of faith in certain circles but the study is obviously bogus on its face.
First, even without reading the study, alarm bells should go off. The study purports to show civilian casualties 5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source. Most other sources put total combined civilian and military deaths from all causes at between 15,000 to 20,000. The Lancet study is a degree of magnitude higher. Why the difference?
Moreover, just rough calculations should call the figure into doubt. 100,000 deaths over roughly a year and a half equates to 183 deaths per day. Seen anything like that on the news? With that many people dying from air strikes every day we would expect to have at least one or two incidents where several hundred or even thousands of people died. Heard of anything like that? In fact, heard of any air strikes at all where more than a couple of dozen people died total?
Where did this suspicious number come from? Bad methodology.
From the summary:
Mistake One:
"A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004"
It is bad practice to use a cluster sample for a distribution known to be highly asymmetrical. Since all sources agree that violence in Iraq is highly geographically concentrated, this means a cluster sample has a very high chance of exaggerating the number of deaths. If one or two of your clusters just happen to fall in a contended area it will skew everything. In fact, the study inadvertently suggests that this happened when it points out later that:
"Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters..."
In fact, this suggest that violent deaths were not "widespread" as 18 of the 33 clusters reported zero deaths. If 54% of the clusters had no deaths then all the other deaths occurred in 46% of the clusters. If the deaths in those clusters followed a standard distribution most of the deaths would have occurred in less than 15% of the total clusters.
And bingo we see that:
"Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja"
(They also used a secondary grouping system (page 2, paragraph 3) that would cause further skewing.)
Mistake Two:
"33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002."
Self-reporting in third-world countries is notoriously unreliable. In the guts of the paper (page 3, paragraph 2) they say they tried to get death certificates for at least two deaths for each cluster but they never say how many of the deaths, if any, they actually verified. It is probable that many of the deaths, especially the oddly high number of a deaths of children by violence, never actually occurred.
So we have a sampling method that fails for diverse distributions, at least one tremendously skewed cluster and unverified reports of deaths.
Looking at the raw data they provide doesn't inspire any confidence whatsoever. Table 2 (page 4) shows the actual number of deaths reported. The study recorded 142 post-invasion deaths total with with 73 (51%) due to violence. Of those 73 deaths from violence, 52 occurred in Falluja. That means that all the other 21 deaths occurred in one of the 14 clusters were somebody died, or 1.5 deaths per cluster. Given what we know of the actual combat I am betting that most of the deaths occurred in three or four clusters and the rest had 1 death each. Given the low numbers of samples, one or two fabricated reports of deaths could seriously warp the entire study.
At the very end of the paper (page 7, paragraph 1) they concede that:
"We suspect that a random sample of 33 Iraqi locations is likely to encounter one or a couple of particularly devastated areas. Nonetheless, since 52 of 73 (71%) violent deaths and 53 of 142 (37%) deaths during the conflict occurred in one cluster, it is possible that by extraordinary chance, the survey mortality estimate has been skewed upward."
Gee, you think? It's almost as if military violence is not randomly distributed across the population of Iraq but is instead intelligently directed at specific areas, rendering a statistical extrapolation of deaths totally useless.
In the next paragraph they admit:
"Removing half the increase in infant deaths and the Falluja data still produces a 37% increase in estimated mortality."
That puts their final numbers just above the high end of the range reported by other sources.
This "peer reviewed study" is a piece of polemical garbage. Everybody is supposed to take away the bumper sticker summary, "Coalition kills 100,000 Iraqi civilians, half of them children," without reading the details. It tries to use crude epidemiological models like those used to study disease and applies them to the conscious infliction of violence by human beings. The result is statistical static.
Posted by Shannon Love on October 29, 2004 05:14 PM | TrackBack
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