From the editorial page of Investor's Business Daily: Body Count Or October Surprise?
A study by a group led by Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to be published Thursday on the Web site of the Lancet, a British medical journal, will claim that about 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. ...They used a methodology known as "cluster sampling," which can be valid if using real data and not anecdotal reporting. Most of the original Lancet clusters reported no deaths at all, with the journal admitting, "two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Fallujah." Fallujah? Hello?
Fallujah at the time just happened to be a major concentration of pro-Saddam and anti-American sentiment, the home base for the homicide bombers and terrorist "resistance" before the U.S. Army and Marines cleared out that nest of thugs.
"They're almost certainly way too high," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said of the new numbers, noting the results were released just before another U.S. election. "This is not analysis, this is politics."
In this FoxNews video report the author of the Lancet report freely admits that its release was timed to affect the elections, "out of concern for the humanitarian issues."
And what might that mean? In this video, Lancet editor Richard Horton appears at an "antiwar" rally railing against the "lying" "axis of Anglo-American imperialists" who have created a "mountain of violence and torture" preferring "global death" and the "killing of children instead of building hospitals," all of which has "shattered the human family." Yeah, no political agenda there. (via Little Green Footballs).
More in this BBC analysis by Paul Reynolds: Huge gaps in Iraq death estimates. And at Pajamas Media: J'accuse: Iraq the Model responds to the Lancet Lies.
UPDATE I -- Oct. 15: From NewsBusters: Nets, Particularly CBS and Couric, Treat 655,000 Iraqi Death Guestimate as Credible. (via TIA Daily)
UPDATE II -- Oct. 16: Committees of Correspondence notes that the Lancet report used a pre-invasion, baseline mortality rate that is half that of Europe: The Lancet lies....
Posted by Forkum at October 12, 2006 04:55 PM
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