Or so the headline would read if they thought they could get away with it.

The next stop in the Democrats’ 2006 campaign tour is the newly released bogus study claiming 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war.

Don’t think it’s a coincidence that this study is being published a mere 4 weeks before a major election. The “researchers” did this same thing just before the 2004 election and admitted the timing was intentional to get the most impact on the election:

The work updates an earlier Johns Hopkins study _ that one was released just before the November 2005 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.

2005 Presidential election? Even the reporting on the reporting is wrong.

The lead “researcher” then was also a Democrat candidate for Congress this year, before dropping out of the race. The current lead “researcher” was a financial supporter of his campaign. There’s some whopping credibility for their “research”.

On page 7 of the report, the “researchers” even admit:

Many of the Iraqis reportedly killed by US forces could have been combatants.

And I wonder how many of the bodies from Saddam’s mass graves have been counted among this study. To say nothing of the number killed by the terrorists themselves.

Of course, this stuff doesn’t have to be accurate. The media will pick it up without providing any substance as to the motivations or flawed statistics, and they’ll use it to try and gain political advantage.

UPDATE:
Here’s a pretty good debunking of the Lancet study (it’s from 2005 and focused on the first release of the study to which the current is an “update”)

UPDATE 2:
The actual study has been released (registratin req’d) and here’s the press release from Johns Hopkins. Couple of interesting items in the release:

Males aged 15-44 years accounted for 59 percent of post-invasion violent deaths

Does that profile look familiar?

The proportion of deaths attributed to coalition forces diminished in 2006 to 26 percent. Between March 2003 and July 2006, households attributed 31 percent of deaths to the coalition

So where are the other 70-75% of the deaths coming from? The researchers certainly wouldn’t want the world to know that they could be related to the terrorists that don’t exist in Iraq, would they? Or how about victims of Saddam’s regime that were dug up from mass graves and identified after the invasion? And this statistic alone would bring their numbers of “war dead” down to around 170,000, even if the numbers were accurate.

The survey recorded 1,474 births and 629 deaths among 12,801 people surveyed. The data were then applied to the 26.1 million Iraqis living in the survey area.

I’d be interested to see the mortality rate here by applying the deaths of 600 people in South Central Los Angeles to the 300 million in the U.S. Oh my God, 100 million Americans have died since Bush took office!!!!!

Others:
Allah asks, “If 600,000 people have been killed, where are all the bodies?”
LGF points to the timing of this, and the last, report from Lancet, as well as more context on the editor, Richard Horton (with video):

Here’s some context that media isn’t giving you, in a video clip from the recent “Time To Go” demonstration of the UK Stop The War Coalition, at which Lancet editor Richard Horton was a star speaker—sharing the stage with luminaries such as George Galloway.

Mark Coffey puts the Iraqi deaths in context of other wars. It is war, remember?
Gateway Pundit poses an interesting question…

This latest Lancet Study released today claims that 555,000 Iraqis have died in the last two years since their last controversial study! That comes to around 770 violent Iraqi deaths each day on average!!!

So, does this mean all of those headlines of 18 or 30 deaths were off by 700 or so?

1. On the road; Lancet quick links

   I’m on the road today for a debate on immigration this evening at Colgate University–blogging from a lovely McDonald’s somewhere in northern Pennsylvania right now. I’m confident the students will be far more sane than the mob at Columbia U….

   Trackback by Michelle Malkin — 11:06 am
   

2. Lancet Report- A Study in Partisan Manipulation and Cut and Run Away Ideology

   You’ve probably all seen the the Lancet reports by now- “over 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq- 500 people die every day in Iraq”. The Lancet report comes out just in time for the elections, and presumably is an attempt to make the U.S a…

   Trackback by SacredScoop.com — 12:13 pm
   

3. Report: 655,000 Iraqi Civilians Have Died Since Start Of Iraq War

   I question the timing. And, apparently, so does the Associated Press. 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,…

   Trackback by The Political Pit Bull — 12:24 pm
   

4. One trillion…but there are only six billion people on earth……oh no I’m dead!!

   Comment by Sarah — 12:57 pm
   

5. If liberals were involved in counting the dead, they probably resurrected the previously dead to count them several times. I mean if the dead can vote in the elections in the US, surely it is no monumental task to count each one numerous times for a death count…

   Comment by Old Soldier — 1:09 pm
   

6. Obviously they didn’t count mass graves, or anyone killed by Saddam, as they used epidemiological models developed and tested in natural disasters. It allows them to extrapolate from on interviews in carefully chosen locations to get a representative sample. Last time they had to skip Fallujah because it was still in the process of being wiped out.

   Think of it as a kind of poll. Polls got a bad name, because they are often done randomly and with small samples. This poll was not random, it was very carefully targeted. The sample was around 15,000, which is about 15 times larger than the usual size that American pollsters use.

   And I see you’re arguing that the US killed perhaps hundreds of thousands of combatants? They’ve always estimated the number of fighters to be in the tens of thousands. And they don’t kill many of them.

   Mind you, the lancet isn’t saying US soldiers killed all these people. It’s largely the civil war that’s been raging (which everyone predicted).

   Comment by endorendil — 1:41 pm
   

7. The Lancet isn’t claiming that the US military killed all those people, but that George W Bush’s policies led to their deaths.

   Nevertheless, it’ll take more than a month to scope this out and by then the US election will be over. That’s their plan.

   Comment by Warren — 3:26 pm
   

8. Please don’t scream at me….just curious.

   The lancet is a science journal, I keep reading that their estimates are debunked, and their methods are faulty, but I have yet to see something other than an op-ed piece?

   Has anyone qualified, a statistician, not a politician published an article in a scientific journal debunking their methods?

   If so, where? Are there links?

   Comment by BKJ — 3:52 pm
   

9. […] Texas Rainmaker […]

   Pingback by Never Yet Melted » That Lancet Study — 9:33 pm
   

10. […] Texas Rainmaker […]

    Pingback by appletree » Blog Archive » Wingnuts Attempt to Debunk Iraq Deaths Survey — 10:01 pm
    

11. Hi BKJ, there have been a few guys with knowledge of statistics that have criticised the study, but with little effect. The basic methodology is sound and accepted for similar situations. That said, no one has been able to verify that this methodology applies on a battlefield (and no one ever will - it requires a better alternative, which isn’t available). In particular, cluster sampling is known to be less accurate in cases where the effect to be studied is small, but it will tend to underestimate the effect, not overestimate it.

    Aside from these ill-informed questions on methodology, there isn’t much else that is questioned. There can be deception from the interviewees, but that was countered by asking for death certificates from a fraction of them, and they were generally produced. The study cannot count deaths of entire households, which is a common effect of night-time aerial bombardment as well as ethnic strife, so it is possible that it underestimates the deaths again. Incidentally, the interviewers did find one such case, but excluded it from the analysis as it didn’t fit the methodology.

    The new data confirms the earlier report, BTW, although it didn’t reuse the data. The trends they find in the mortality are very similar to that obtained by all other sources.

    The IBC number is currently around 45,000. That’s only civilians, as reported in at least two independent (english-speaking) news organisations. It’s inconceivable that this would be even close to the actual count, and IBC does not claim that it is, it just tries to put an absolute bottom on the number of civilians killed. Note that casualties among the Iraqi police and army aren’t included in the count either.

    Comment by endorendil — 6:28 am
    

12. […] LGF has additional links to prior publishing by The Lancet.  Allahpundit asks “Where are all those bodies?” Texas Rainmaker explores the Democratic shadows behind it all.  It’s all Bush’s fault.  Yeah. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Disturbingly Yellow uses similar research algorithms to find that 600K WMD have been found in Iraq! Stop the presses! Unbelievable. […]

    Pingback by The Press and Liberal Politics Co-Dependent Relationship « Obi’s Sister — 7:06 am
    

13. So, all the links I have read, including the ’similar research algorithms’ link are just opinion pieces.

    I have yet to find anything actually criticizing the science, just the results.

    I work in the sciences, and regularly work with statisticians and biometricians and know that there is danger in statistics.

    The first being that people want an exact number, well ALL statistics, including censuses, have margins of error. In fact, when a poll says +/- 4% I want to know their confidence intervals. Meaning, how sure are they that the +/- 4% is accurate?

    The next problem with statistics, is that people say, “See! Studies show it.” Without really understanding what the study says.

    Finally, people don’t believe studies that show something different from what they want to believe.

    As far as I can tell, this study needs to be peer reviewed, not by bloggers, pundits, or politicians, but by responsible scientists.

    Until then, both sides are wrong in quoting it as fact or lie.

    Comment by BKJ — 3:03 pm
    

14. 40 months. 600,000+ dead. That’s over 15,000 per month. Didn’t I just read that in September the death rate rose to its highest in a year at 1,600? Might the ‘researchers’ have found an extra zero somewhere?

    Comment by Tom — 6:13 pm
    

15. […] Texas Rainmaker is a little het up. He lets us know that one of the researchers ran for Congress this year as a Democrat. He also points out that males 15-44 are 59% of the results. (Jihadists?) […]

    Pingback by My Own Thoughts » 600,000 is so wrong — 7:21 pm
    

16. […] Remember the study that found George Bush has personally killed one trillion innocent civilians in Iraq? (Okay, it was only 600,000, but don’t think they would’ve said one trillion if they thought they could get away with it.) […]

    Pingback by Texas Rainmaker » Lancet Study Was a Fraud — 9:03 am
    

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