LancetIraq
tlambert | February 14, 2008John Tirman has an article in Editor and Publisher. Extract:
The charge, repeated in all these media, that the Iraqi research leader, Riyadh Lafta, M.D., operated "without U.S. supervision" and was therefore suspect is particularly interesting. Munro, in a note to National Review Online, asserted that Lafta "said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey," which he also had noted in the National Journal piece. When he interviewed me he pestered me about two anonymous donors, demanding to know if either were Arab or Muslim. A pattern here is visible, one which reeks of…
tlambert | February 14, 2008Michael Spagat is back with another attack on the Lancet study. Most of it is stuff we've seen before, like absurd assumptions he makes for Main Street Bias, and the false claim that Soros funded the study. But there is some new stuff, including this (L2 is the second Lancet study):
The above graphic shows results from three mortality surveys. The first is the Kosovo study of Paul Spiegel and Peter Salama: War and Mortality in Kosovo, 1998-99: an epidemiological testimony", published in the Lancet in 2000. This paper is cited in L1, L2 and the MIT paper that is a companion piece to L2.…
tlambert | February 11, 2008Neil Munro has had another go at the Lancet studies. This time he has gone on right-wing talk shows to attack Riyadh Lafta.
On Glenn Beck he claimed
This study -- the guys in this study have not shown the forms and the date and the sheets collected by the surveyors who worked for an Iraqi without U.S. supervision. This particular Iraqi was once employed by Saddam Hussein, where he produced crummy scientific papers as part of Saddam`s effort to lift economic sanctions in the 1990s.
On Mike McConnell he elaborated (search for "neil munro" at the link):
The strange thing is that the entire…
tlambert | January 30, 2008I wouldn't have thought that it was possible to be more wrong than Neil Munro's prediction of the result of the Iraq war:
The painful images of starving Iraqi children will be replaced by alluring Baghdad city lights, smiling wages-earners and Palestinian job seekers.
But in a piece scare-mongering about the Y2K problem Munro predicted that Al Gore would be a big loser from the Y2K problem: (National Journal , 20 June 1998)
Loser:
Vice President Al Gore, who fretted about global warming, legal authorities and campaign finance laws while missing the biggest technology problem facing the…
tlambert | January 29, 2008ORB has revised their estimate of violent deaths as a result of the Iraq war (discussed earlier here). They write:
Further survey work undertaken by ORB, in association with its research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.
Following responses to ORB's earlier work, which was based on survey work undertaken in primarily urban locations, we have conducted almost 600 additional interviews in rural communities. By and large the results are in line with the 'urban results' and we now estimate…
tlambert | January 21, 2008John Tirman documents Neil Munro's dishonesty. I think this is an excellent catch by Tirman -- Munro selling his National Journal story to Iraq war architect Michael Rubin:
George Soros funded the survey. The U.S. authors played no role in data-collection, and did not apply standard anti-fraud measures. The chief Iraqi data-collector had earlier produced medical articles to help Saddam's anti-sanctions campaign in the 1990s, and said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey. Some of the field surveyors were employed by Moqtada Sadr's Ministry of Health. The Iraqis'…
tlambert | January 15, 2008I think it is worthwhile to update James Wimberly's comparison of surveys of deaths in Iraq. In the table below death tolls have been extrapolated to give a number of deaths due to the war so far.
Survey
Violent deaths
Excess deaths
ILCS
150,000
Lancet 1
290,000
420,000
IFHS
280,000
700,000
Lancet 2
1,100,000
1,200,000
ORB
1,300,000
It is interesting to see that the IFHS ends up right in the middle, between the two Lancet studies. If you think that the IFHS study is reasonable then you must conclude that Lancet 1 has been confirmed and the critics of Lancet 1 were wrong.…
tlambert | January 14, 2008Johns Hopkins corrects some of the misinformation in the Neil Munro's hit piece.
John Tirman has gone through the whole thing, noting all the inaccuracies and misleading statements.
tlambert | January 13, 2008In a story funded by a pro-war billionaire, Brendan Montague, who seems to know which side of his bread is buttered on, writes:
A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.
It is untrue that its claim was 10 times greater than consensus estimates.
The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar…
tlambert | January 11, 2008John Tirman comments on Neil Munro's misconduct:
One quick note about the Soros bugaboo. I commissioned L2. It was commissioned in Oct 2005, with internal funds from the Center for International Studies at MIT, of which I am executive director. The funds for public education (not the survey itself) came from the Open Society Institute in the following spring, long after things had started. Burnham did not know this (Roberts was not much involved at this point.) MIT was providing funds, that's all he knew or needed to know. There were other small donors involved too. I told this to Munro on…
tlambert | January 10, 2008Les Roberts replies to a shamelessly dishonest WSJ editorial:
Your editorial entitled, "The Lancet's political hit" regarding our study of Iraqi deaths was a unique blend of error and innuendo. For example, I was not opposed to removing Saddam; I was opposed to invading a country while the UN Secretary General was stating that it would violate the UN Charter. Your suggestion that our Iraqi colleague Riyadh Lafta was suspect because he recorded child mortality during his career is particularly ironic. He was one of few professors in the country that never joined the Baath Party. You…
tlambert | January 9, 2008A new study of violent deaths in Iraq has been published in the NEJM. You can read it here. Here's the abstract:
Background Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count) to 601,027 (from a national survey). Results from the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), which was conducted in 2006 and 2007, provide new evidence on mortality in Iraq.
Methods The IFHS is a nationally representative survey of 9345 households that collected information on deaths in the household since June 2001. We…
tlambert | January 9, 2008Back in November 2001 Neil Munro was an advocate of war with Iraq and predicted:
The painful images of starving Iraqi children will be replaced by alluring Baghdad city lights, smiling wages-earners and Palestinian job seekers.
Iraq war advocates like Munro don't like the results of the Lancet study that suggest that about 600,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war they championed. So Munro has written a piece that throws every piece of mud he can find at the study, and to their discredit, the National Journal has published it. And if you think I'm being unfair by stressing Munro's…
tlambert | October 10, 2007Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts have an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun:
Not wanting to think about civilian deaths in Iraq has become almost universal. But ignorance of the Iraqi death toll is no longer an option.
An Associated Press poll in February found that the average American believed about 9,900 Iraqis had been killed since the end of major combat operations in 2003. Recent evidence suggests that things in Iraq may be 100 times worse than Americans realize.
News report tallies suggest that about 75,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S.-led invasion. But a study of 13 war-affected countries…
tlambert | September 21, 2007Will McLean found an error in the detailed tables for the ORB survey. The tables indicated that 60% of the Baghdad sample was Christian, which doesn't seem plausible. They've now released corrected tables. It looks like the religion of some of those surveyed was entered incorrectly. Also at the ORB link is a short video interview with Dr Munqeth Daghir, ORB's Iraqi pollster. And ORB is conducting additional interviews in rural Iraq to see if that makes a difference to their estimate.
tlambert | September 17, 2007James Wimberly adds the new ORB survey to his chart that extrapolates the various surveys of Iraqi deaths. He comments:
The ORB estimate of 1.22 million is very close to Lancet 2 updated according to the IBC body count timeline - 1.16 million. So they reinforce each other.
We now have four survey estimates from three independent teams of professionals using two different good-practice methods. They all say that the excess deaths in Iraq are hugely greater than the IBC body count, let alone the numbers from the MNF or the Iraqi government.
Les Roberts comments:
"The poll is 14 months later…
tlambert | September 14, 2007A new survey puts the Iraqi death toll at over one one million:
These findings come from a poll released today by O.R.B., the British polling agency that have been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,461 adults aged 18+ answered the following question:-
Q How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.
None 78%…
tlambert | September 13, 2007There has been more discussion at Crooked Timber on David Kane's criticism of the Lancet study. In response to Tim Burke's comment:
Good faith skepticism starts with, "Ok, I want to look at why you're making this claim, and your evidence for it. I don't want to take anything on faith." Not, "I'm sure you're wrong, because the results you're reporting aren't convenient for my political views and for my common sense understanding of things."--e.g., refusing to take seriously someone else's findings because of a particular conviction or faith in an opposite finding.
Kane replied with:
I think…
tlambert | August 30, 2007Boosted from comments. Robert Chung writes:
David Kane wrote:
Anyway, it seems clear to me now that you are bluffing
Me, bluffing about knowing how calculate a CMR? Ouch, that hurts.
David, what a fascinating example of hubris. You do not know how to do something, so you conclude that no one else can either. However, that something "seems clear to you" has, once again, led you down the wrong path -- though for you this seems about par for the course.
As you ought to have known long ago, we are clearly not "in the same boat." The reason you ought to have known this long ago is that you have…
tlambert | August 24, 2007I really don't know where to begin with this anti-Lancet piece by Michael Fumento. Should I start with the way Fumento describes Kane's paper as "so complex" that it "may cause your head to explode" while being utterly certain that Kane has demolished the Lancet study? Or with his assertion that I've been ignoring criticism of the Lancet study? Or with the way he quote mines me? Or that after again and again arguing that Lancet was wrong because they included Falluja when they should have left it out, he is embracing Kane's argument that they were wrong because they excluded Falluja? Or…