The Casualties of War

...The 2006 Lancet report states only, “Funding was provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health...

...com/articles/databomb/index.htm...

...Not that any of these revelations appears to have fazed the authors or editor of the Lancet...

...This is roughly one-fourth the war-related deaths found by Lancet in 2006...

...Too bad it wasn’t—silence (or at least a modicum of skepticism) is what should have greeted the Lancet report...

...This is not your father’s medical journal editor...

...The IFHS data,” states the paper, “indicate that every day 128 persons died from violence from March 2003 through April 2004, 115 from May 2004 through May 2005, and 126 from June 2005 through June 2006...

...And other estimates indicate the IFHS fi gures themselves may be too high...

...As if there could possibly be anything consistent with one survey that fi nds more than seven times the deaths as another survey over the same reporting period...

...It opined that laughable assertions that blamed the results of Saddam’s cruelty on the U.N...

...But here’s one: While it’s widely known that the Lancet authors refused to release their data to be evaluated by outsiders, there has been little talk about Riyadh Lafta...

...These bombings are fastidiously reported in the U.S...

...The other three are fi ghting to keep their medical licenses...

...The key importance of the [ORB] poll,” claimed one leftist British “media watch” organization, “is that it provides . . . strong support for the fi ndings of the 2006 Lancet study, which reported 655,000 deaths...

...Lafta was the man in charge of the actual collection of numbers, while another Lancet author was in Iraq but holed up in a hotel...

...invasion...

...imposed sanctions after the Gulf war...

...BY MICHAEL FUMENTO That the new World Health Organization-Iraqi government study of war-related Iraq deaths reached wildly different conclusions from two much-hyped reports in the British medical journal the Lancet is no surprise to anyone who has followed the issue...

...In late October, 2004 Lancet published a report estimating 98,000 warrelated deaths in the fi rst 18 months of the confl ict...

...As National Journal revealed, Lancet’s 2006 study was about half funded by antiwar billionaire George Soros, who in a November 2003 Washington Post interview said that removing President Bush from offi ce was the “central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death...

...The Iraq Body Count numbers were 43, 32, and 55 civilian deaths per day for the same periods...

...Assuredly, though, it lies somewhere that could only be spotted with a powerful telescope...

...It found an estimated 151,000 excess violent deaths from the U.S-led invasion in March 2003 through June 2006, when compared to violent deaths in the prewar period...

...Emphasis added...

...There is “far more in common in the results than appears at fi rst glance,” he has said...

...Just as defenders of Lancet 2006 claim that the ORB poll, with its far higher death rate, was somehow “consistent” with Lancet 2006, so does the coauthor of both Lancet studies, Les Roberts, astonishingly insists that the muchlower IFHS numbers are also consistent with Lancet 2006...

...The media stood at attention and saluted...

...Twice...

...Doesn’t that seem just a bit implausible...

...988 for Lancet 2004 and 1,849 for Lancet 2006—it found 24,000 war-related deaths from the opening of the war until May 2004...

...Richard Garfi eld, a coauthor of Lancet’s 2004 study who kept his name off the 2006 paper, told the National Journal he personally had studied “how Saddam had pilfered cash [intended] for the health care system...

...Using a dataset signifi cantly larger than that of either of the Lancet studies—22,000 households versus Michael Fumento, a Washington, D.C.based freelance writer, has been embedded three times in Iraq and once in Afghanistan...

...So Lafta doesn’t exactly fi t the defi - nition of a trustworthy researcher except in the sense of trusting him to come to the “proper” conclusions...

...Fortunately, the IFHS paper breaks the fi gures down so they are more comprehensible, and so doing utterly damns the Lancet assertion...

...For a massive number of other red flags having nothing to do with the actual numbers, you will want to read the National Journal article “Data Bomb” by Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon (it’s available even to nonsubscribers at news.nationaljournal...

...Osama bin Laden himself in his preelection 2004 video used the Iraq Body Count fi gures to decry the volume of blood spilled by the infi dels...

...It therefore appears that we can expect, just before this year’s national election, a new Lancet survey in which the American imperialist troops and their Iraqi puppets will be shown to have killed every single Iraqi...

...Only one source found higher numbers than either Lancet paper—a poll by the British Opinion Research Business (ORB...

...It doesn’t, however, include combatant deaths among Iraqis, which would be picked up by household surveys like that of the IFHS...

...Inevitably, the World Socialist website demanded: “Why is the American press silent on the report of 655,000 Iraqi deaths...

...Even now Iraq Body Count tallies fewer than 90,000 fatalities...

...Soros is known for concealing his massive political donations, and the Lancet was complicit on this occasion...

...He proudly said he had “no regrets” and pompously declared: “Progress in medicine depends on the free expression of new ideas...

...yet remember their total average of killings from all war-related causes for that period was 55...

...As National Journal notes, Lafta was also a highranking offi cial in Saddam Hussein’s ministry of health and there authored some of the agit-prop papers about the vast number of small children dying from U.N...

...Some progress...

...But the new study highlights the fanaticism of the Lancet and its defenders and illustrates yet again the bias of mainstream media coverage of the Iraq war...

...Further, for the most recent comparable reporting time periods for both surveys, it found the Lancet 2006 number to be more than seven times that of its own survey...

...media and Wikipedia keeps a comprehensive list of major car bombings in Iraq...

...Yet the highest single-day total it has for that period is 114, or 42 short of the alleged average...

...The British press reported “an unprecedented surge of measles cases” this summer, probably traceable to unwarranted fears of the vaccine...

...As to how high the ORB fi gure would be, for obvious reasons the IFHS doesn’t bother with it...

...Put another way, those 925 Lancet deaths extrapolated to the U.S...

...Then there’s the U.N-conducted Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004 (ILCS...

...That paper became a full-fl edged scandal, with 10 of its 13 authors demanding their names be withdrawn from it...

...Its fi gures, according to its website, include “individual or cumulative deaths as directly reported by the media or tallied by offi cial bodies (for instance, by hospitals, morgues and, in a few cases so far, NGOs), and subsequently reported in the media...

...That’s an amazing average of 166 daily...

...could only undermine efforts to lift the sanctions...

...So for that last period, while the IFHS daily fi gure was 2.3 times higher than that of Iraq Body Count, the Lancet 2006 daily fi gure was a stunning 7.3 times higher than that of the IFHS and 17 times higher than that of Iraq Body Count...

...Or at second or third glance, he might have added...

...That’s only the fi rst 14 months of confl ict compared with 18 in Lancet 2004, but it does stretch the imagination that in those ensuing four months the numbers of deaths somehow quadrupled...

...CBS News called the 2006 Lancet report a “new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq...

...Within a week, the study had been featured in 25 news shows and 188 articles in U.S...

...But the editor of the Lancet, physician Richard Horton, has unapologetically used the journal for advocacy on other issues, including a notorious 1998 paper that created an international panic over the safety of the childhood vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella—linking it to autism and bowel disease...

...One estimate that’s far lower even than the IFHS fi gures comes from IraqBodyCount.org, the antiwar website which at the time of Lancet 2004 reported 14,000-16,000 war-related deaths...

...This axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its infl uence through war and confl ict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease,” he angrily added...

...Horton’s reaction...

...population would be 10,763 killings each day...

...This no doubt explains the release of the Lancet study four weeks before the 2006 midterm elections, just as Lancet’s 2004 study was released days before the presidential election...

...Yet surely only a hardened cynic would assert that ORB’s purpose was to make the Lancet fi gures seem to be in the ballpark despite all other studies showing otherwise...

...The assertion that half a million Iraqi children had been killed by sanctions was criticized by no less than the Nation magazine, which noted that in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north child mortality rates actually fell...

...Big numbers can be hard to wrap your mind around...

...Two years later, the Lancet updated that fi gure to a stunning 655,000 Iraqis dead by July 2006 as a consequence of the March 2003 U.S...

...Horton spoke at a rally in 2006 sponsored by Stop the War Coalition, a British group set up on September 21, 2001, which is to say its purpose was to oppose punishing and defeating the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack...

...In the [Lancet 2006 study] there was a much higher rate of death from violence and a sharp increase during the 3-year period, with 231, 491, and 925 deaths per day, respectively...

...Iraq Body Count could hardly miss any of these deaths...

...Even the magazine’s ardent defenders don’t claim the timing was a coincidence...

...newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times,” according to an excellent investigative report in the January 4 National Journal...

...At the rally, Horton shouted about the “mountain of violence and torture” in Iraq—and no, he wasn’t talking about Saddam...

...The latest study, called the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), was published in the January 9 issue of the nation’s most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine...

...Moreover—and this one fi gure alone is enough to entirely damn the Lancet’s claims—the 2006 study says 18 percent of the deaths during the period in which those 925 killings occurred resulted from car bombings...

...Or perhaps it wouldn’t take a hardened cynic...

...The polling ended in August 2007, and the actual alleged death toll was over 1.2 million...

...At most scientifi c journals, alarm bells might have gone off over the likely biases of a Riyadh Lafta...

...It claimed in a September 2007 press release that “more than 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have been murdered since the invasion took place in 2003...

...Murdered” isn’t the language of the staid, neutral polling organization that its defenders claim ORB to be...