There is an interview with Randi Rhodes on the study.
The BBC's Paul Reynolds now has a response from Roberts to some of the criticisms:
"There have to be ~300 deaths per day from natural cause even if Iraq was the healthiest 26 million people in the world. Where are those bodies? When the MOH [ministry of health] in Iraq is perhaps recording 10% of them, why should they be doing better with politically charged violent deaths. Yes, I think almost nothing is getting reported outside of Baghdad where things are worse."
"There has rarely been a scientific report so easily verified or discarded. If someone went to 4 or 6 places picked at random in Iraq, and went to the grave yards for those villages, they could easily see if there are 3 or 4 times more bodies being brought in per week compared to 2002. Or, if someone could go to a couple villages or places, if we are correct, on average ~70 percent of the deaths occurring will be from violence.
"This would take 2 reporters one day to decide if we are basically correct or in error!"
Reply from press: We don't do body counts either.
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This is an excellent point. It would not be hard to check the numbers. I have little doubt that the American military has a good idea what the real statistics are, but they don't disclose them for political reasons. Surely there must be some statisticians in the Pentagon nodding their heads in agreement.
"There have to be ~300 deaths per day from natural cause even if Iraq was the healthiest 26 million people in the world. Where are those bodies? When the MOH [ministry of health] in Iraq is perhaps recording 10% of them, why should they be doing better with politically charged violent deaths"
um...
"[MoH] 2005 figures record 115,785 deaths, an average of 320 per day. ... This excluded deaths in the Kurdish-administered regions, which contain 12% or more of the population."
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr14/4.php
I just skimmed through your report, Josh. It's fairly convincing.
Cheers for posting that link Josh, sorry I doubted you.
So, that section of the companion paper which claims the MOH was only recording 30% of the pre-war deaths in Iraq looks pretty dubious now. If they want to salvage it they're going to have to offer a citation for that 40,000 figure, and that's going to conflict with the other data being quoted anyway.
The only possibility of reconciling the Lancet study with the MOH figures, whilst still believing the study is essentially correct, is to imagine that the MOH efficiency slipped from ~75% to ~10%. Key thing now, is the Lancet dataset really representative of the rest of Iraq?
Not to me, it isn't. There doesn't have to be a conspiracy for manual data gathering to collapse during a civil war. People seem to be used to governments having huge databases where you can just click to get up a list of all recorded births and deaths. That is just not the way it's done in underdeveloped, corrupt, war-torn countries.
Information is simply not passed reliably upwards in a bureucracy, especially not one as corrupt, poorly organized and stressed as the Iraq administration.
According to the IBC "reality check" the MOH registered 84,025 deaths in 2002 (excl. Kurdistan). These figures were forwarded by the LA Times. But when did they become available? It's nice to know that the figures (or some of them) eventually get compiled, but we can't use them as a check on figures for 2005 unless the lag is less than a year.
IBC, which I was one of the first to support with a banner in my website, is frankly in a disappointing downhill. Like lunatics embracing every conspirative theory (it seems the world is out to 'get IBC), they grab out of context little facts to impeach the hard, peer-reviewed, methologically impeccable work by the people in the Lancet report. The 'document' Josh links to suggests that the Lancet report would imply that "Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued". The implication is obvious, Les Roberts lies. But the Lancet report says they asked for 'any' death certificate, not necessarily one issued by the MoH. Is it too much of stretch to think that people in remote locations got a certificate from their closest hospital the day of the death, and that the copy is sitting somewhere in that hospital waiting for Iraq to become a functional country to be sent to Baghdad? Is it too far out to think that in a dysfunctional violent country the bureaucracy is only 10% efficient?
I think it would be a good idea for me to shut up about this for awhile (whether I follow through or not is another question), but it would be good if someone compiled a list of all the objections to the Lancet paper, good and bad (I happen to think some are good), and put in refutations. Or maybe limit it to IBC's stated objections. They are experts on the subject in their own way and it's worthwhile refuting them (if possible) and not wasting time on every other silly statement some blogger or commenter (ahem, maybe including me) has made.