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| 2005/5/19 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:37763 Activity:high |
5/19 "I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have
weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your
claims, that Iraq had no connection to al Qaeda. I told the world,
contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity
on 9/11, 2001. Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out
to be right and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have
paid with their lives -- 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their
deaths on a pack of lies, 15,000 of them wounded, many of them
disabled forever, on a pack of lies. Senator, this is the mother of
all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes
that you supported." -Spoken in the Senate, May 17 2005
\_ url? more detail? Who spoke?
\_ I think it was George Galloway, MP from East London. He's a
major prick, liar, crook and Saddam-hugger (and probably took
a fair amount of illicit bribe cash from the guy) but hey, he's
got some good points. -John
\_ Has to be a lefty since the 100,000 numbers is made up by the
left. My guess is Ted Kennedy.
\_ "Made up" by the Lancet, the premier British journal
of medical research. Science is now "lefty" to the
howling Zealots.
\_ This site: http://www.iraqbodycount.net
says about 20K deaths. Which is right?
\_ This does not pretend to be a comprehensive review
of all casualties, just a numeration of those reported
by the media. I hope you can understand the difference.
\_ Yeah, made up:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html
http://slate.msn.com/id/2108887
\_ Your ignorance of statistics is stunning.
http://www.casi.org.uk/analysis/2004/msg00477.html
Quite seriously, you either have no knowledge of
statistics or you are being deliberately ignorant
of the facts.
\_ The salon article slams the stats as well as the
methodology. Which statements do you object to?
What about this one?
"One of the 33 clusters they selected happened to be
in Fallujah, one of the most heavily bombed and
shelled cities in all Iraq. Was it legitimate to
extrapolate from a sample that included such an
extreme case? More awkward yet, it turned out,
two-thirds of all the violent deaths that the team
recorded took place in the Fallujah cluster."
\_ That is false. The Lancet study specifically
discarded the Fallujah cluster because of fears
that it would skew the data. The whole thing
is riddled with innacuracies:
http://csua.org/u/c4j
http://csua.org/u/c4k (Washington Post)
"The researchers called their estimate
conservative because they excluded deaths in
Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad that has
been the scene of particularly intense fighting
and has accounted for a disproportionately
large number of deaths in the survey."
The fact is that this the best researched
study on civilian deaths in Iraq published.
It says there are at least 40,000 excess deaths
at a 90% interval. Rather than accept these
findings or do research on their own, war
apologists go for the "shoot the messenger"
approach. Which is not science, it is politics.
\_ The Salon article goes on to mention that they
discarded the Fallujah numbers and picked other
sites. Why do you refuse to read the article?
\_ Why did you pick a quote out of it that
implied otherwise then? Show me an equally
\_ So that you'd read the damn article.
well researched study that comes to a
different conclusion and I will consider it.
For now, this is the best science we have
\_ The point of the
article is that the
science is crap.
\_ The article
is wrong.
and your willful refusal to admit that fact
just makes you look uninterested in facts
that do not support your worldview. I
read the Slate (not Salon) article a long
time ago and watched it shredded in the
blogsphere.
\_ Just READ THE FUCING ARTICLE.
\_ I just told you that I read it many
times.
\_ No, you said you read it, period.
What are your objections to it?
\_ Calling a statistical
distribution a dart board
is foolish.
\_ Not when they're picking a
single value out of a
distribution with a massive
standard deviation. The
dartboard analogy is a good
one.
\_ Do you know anything about
statistics at all? Do you
know what a confidence
interval is?
\_ Yes and yes.
Then you know that to a 90% degree of confidence, the_/
number of excess deaths was 40,000 to 150,000 and to
a 75% degree of confidence it was 70,000 to 120,000.
How should these results be reported in the media
and in a speech? Knowing that the vast majority
of the people you are talking to don't know what
a standard deviation is, how do you report the
results of this peer reviewed, extensively
researched study? What number do you use
and what language do you use to explain it.
\_ Have you read the original Lancet
article or just what a bunch of
hacks have written in reply to it?
\_ No, it's a journal. I read the
guardian and nytimes summary.
\_ You can read it online for
free.
times. You are not smart enough to
be worth talking to.
distribution a dart board\
is foolish.
\_ I couldn't find a free
link. Feel free to supply
one.
/
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673604174412/fulltext
You have to register though.
\_ Thanks for the link. I'll read it and follow-up (probably in a different
thread) afterwards.
\_ http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/05/19/galloway/index.html
"British MP George Galloway returned to London to a standing
ovation after a fiery showdown with U.S. senators who have accused
him of profiting from the U.N.'s defunct oil-for-food program in
Iraq. ... 'We are the enemy within, Mr. Blair, the enemy of all
your wars, the enemy of all your betrayals, the enemy of all your
lies.'"
\_ Ah yes, he said he was coming to defend himself, but as far
as I can tell he just ranted left-wing talking points. In
other words, guity as charged.
\_ Facts are not "left-wing talking points." Those of us
in the reality based community are amused.
\_ 100K dead is not a fact, it's a lefty talking point.
\_ Do you think it's reached that number by now?
\_ Since the Pentagon has indicated it does not officially
track number dead/wounded from collateral damage,
clearly facts don't matter.
http://http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/news.asp?ArticleID=84438
\_ IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
\_ so, you really think we managed to avoid any civilian
casualties?
\_ sarcasm detector faulty!
\_ It's Captain False Dichotomy! And his sidekick
Strawman Boy!
\_ So tell us then. How many civilian casualties
do *you* think there have been in Iraq and
where do you get your numbers?
\_ Your false dichotomy was that either 100,000
civis died or I think that none did. Moron.
\_ So you continue to refuse to come up with
an answer and resort to Ad Hominem in
an attempt to cover up that fact.
\_ No, I added the ad hominem after pointing
out your false dichotomy for fun.
\_ And you still refuse to come up
with a number.
\_ political threads seem to be
getting stupider and stupider.
\_ yawn.
\_ Iraq Body Count looks more
reasonable at about 20K.
\_ Those are only civilian
deaths due to enemy action.
Overall deaths, which would
include all insurgent and
military casualties, would
have to be higher. There is
also a lot of murder in
Iraq these days, much more
than in SH days. IBC does
not count this, either. |
| 7/8 |
|
| www.iraqbodycount.net Surely there must be ma ny, many more civilian deaths than you've published. We are not a news organization ourselves and like everyone else can only base our information on what has been reported so far. What we are attem pting to provide is a credible compilation of civilian deaths that have been reported by recognized sources. Our maximum therefore refers to rep orted deaths - which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assu mes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. |
| www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html The Guardian About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have di ed in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coali tion forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll fro m Iraqi and US public health experts. The study, which was carried out in 33 randomly-chosen neighbourhoods of Iraq representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Before the invasion, most people di ed of heart attacks, stroke and chronic illness. The risk of a violent d eath is now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion. Last night the Lancet medical journal fast-tracked the survey to publicat ion on its website after rapid, but extensive peer review and editing be cause, said Lancet editor Richard Horton, "of its importance to the evol ving security situation in Iraq". But the findings raised important ques tions also for the governments of the United Sates and Britain who, said Dr Horton in a commentary, "must have considered the likely effects of their actions for civilians". The research was led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. Five of the six Iraqi interviewers who w ent to the 988 households in the survey were doctors and all those invol ved in the research on the ground, says the paper, risked their lives to collect the data. When death certificates were not available, there were good reasons, say the authors. "We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded. Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely fo r respondents to fabricate deaths," they write. They found an increase in infant mortality from 29 to 57 deaths per 1,000 live births, which is consistent with the pattern in wars, where women are unable or unwilling to get to hospital to deliver babies, they say. The other increase was in violent death, which was reported in 15 of the 33 clusters studied and which was mostly attributed to airstrikes. "Despite widespread Iraqi casualties, household interview data do not sho w evidence of widespread wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers o n the ground," write the researchers. Only three of the 61 deaths involv ed coalition soldiers killing Iraqis with small arms fire. In one case, a 56-year-old man might have been a combatant, they say, in the second a 72-year-old man was shot at a checkpoint and in the third, an armed gua rd was mistaken for a combatant and shot during a skirmish. In the secon d two cases, American soldiers apologised to the families. "The remaining 58 killings (all attributed to US forces by interviewees) were caused by helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial wea ponry," they write. The biggest death toll recorded by the researchers was in Falluja, which registered two-thirds of the violent deaths they found. "In Falluja, 23 households of 52 visited were either temporarily or permanently abandone d Neighbours interviewed described widespread death in most of the aban doned houses but could not give adequate details for inclusion in the su rvey," they write. The researchers criticise the failure of the coalition authorities to att empt to assess for themselves the scale of the civilian casualties. "This survey shows that with modest funds, four weeks and seven Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measu re of civilan deaths could be obtained." |
| slate.msn.com/id/2108887 Lancet, reveal s that this number is so loose as to be meaningless. The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis die d in a 14-month period before the US invasion, conducting surveys on h ow many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That differencethe num ber of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion periodsignifies the war's to ll. But read the passage that cites the calculati on more fully: We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period. Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what th e set of numbers in the parentheses means. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W Bush will win somewhere b etween 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday's election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet ar ticle: It's a useless study; The problem is, ultimately, not with the scholars who conducted the study ; It's hard to conduct reliable, random surveysand to e xtrapolate meaningful data from the results of those surveysin the chao tic, restrictive environment of war. However, these scholars are responsible for the hype surrounding the stud y Gilbert Burnham, one of the co-authors, told the International Herald Tribune (for a story reprinted in today's New York Times), "We're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate." Yet the text of the study reveals this is simply untrue. Burnham should have sai d, "We're not quite sure what our estimate means. Assuming our model is accurate, the actual death toll might be 100,000, or it might be somewhe re between 92,000 lower and 94,000 higher than that number." Not a meaty headline, but truer to the findings of his own study. Here's how the Johns Hopkins teamwhich, for the record, was led by Dr. L es Roberts of the university's Bloomberg School of Public Healthwent ab out its work. They randomly selected 33 neighborhoods across Iraqequal- sized population "clusters"and, this past September, set out to intervi ew 30 households in each. They asked how many people in each household d ied, of what causes, during the 14 months before the US invasionand h ow many died, of what, in the 17 months since the war began. They then t ook the results of their random sample and extrapolated them to the enti re country, assuming that their 33 clusters were perfectly representativ e of all Iraq. This is a time-honored technique for many epidemiological studies, but th ose conducting them have to take great care that the way they select the neighborhoods is truly random (which, as most poll-watchers of any sort know, is difficult under the easiest of circumstances). There's a furth er complication when studying the results of war, especially a war fough t mainly by precision bombs dropped from the air: The damage is not rand omly distributed; One of the 33 cluste rs they selected happened to be in Fallujah, one of the most heavily bom bed and shelled cities in all Iraq. Was it legitimate to extrapolate fro m a sample that included such an extreme case? More awkward yet, it turn ed out, two-thirds of all the violent deaths that the team recorded took place in the Fallujah cluster. They settled the dilemma by issuing two sets of figuresone with Fallujah, the other without. The estimate of 98 ,000 deaths is the extrapolation from the set that does not include Fall ujah. What's the extrapolation for the set that does include Fallujah? it's impossible to fi gure out how to extrapolate from it. A question does arise, though: Is t his difficulty a result of some peculiarity about the fighting in Falluj ah? Or is it a result of some peculiarity in the survey's methodology? The survey team simply could not visit some of the randomly chosen clusters; the roads were blocked off, in some cases by coalition checkpoints. So the team picked other, more accessible are as that had received similar amounts of damage. In any case, the detour destroyed the survey's randomness; In other cases, the team didn't find enough people in a cluster to interview, so they expanded t he survey to an adjoining cluster. Again, at that point, the survey was no longer random, and so the results are suspect. Beth Osborne Daponte, senior research scholar at Yale University's Instit ution for Social and Policy Studies, put the point diplomatically after reading the Lancet article this morning and discussing it with me in a p hone conversation: "It attests to the difficulty of doing this sort of s urvey work during a war. No one can come up with any credible estimate s yet, at least not through the sorts of methods used here." The study, though, does have a fundamental flaw that has nothing to do wi th the limits imposed by wartimeand this flaw suggests that, within the study's wide range of possible casualty estimates, the real number tend s more toward the lower end of the scale. In order to gauge the risk of death brought on by the war, the researchers first had to measure the ri sk of death in Iraq before the war. First, Daponte (who has studied Iraqi population figures for many years) questions the finding that prewar mortality was 5 deaths per 1,000. According to quite compreh ensive data collected by the United Nations, Iraq's mortality rate from 1980-85 was 81 per 1,000. From 1985-90, the years leading up to the 199 1 Gulf War, the rate declined to 68 per 1,000. After '91, the numbers a re murkier, but clearly they went up. Whatever they were in 2002, they w ere almost certainly higher than 5 per 1,000. In other words, the wartim e mortality rateif it is 79 per 1,000probably does not exceed the pea cetime rate by as much as the Johns Hopkins team assumes. The second problem with the calculation goes back to the problem cited at the top of this articlethe margin of error. Those mysterious numbers in the parentheses mean the a uthors are 95 percent confident that the risk of death now is between 1 1 and 23 times higher than it was before the invasionin other words, a s little as 10 percent higher or as much as 130 percent higher. report estimating that, of the 800 Iraqis killed in last April's siege of Fallujah, 572 to 616 of them were civilians, at least 3 08 of them women and children). The IBC estimates that between 14,181 and 16,312 Iraqi civilians have die d as a result of the warabout half of them since the battlefield phase of the war ended last May The group also notes that these figures are p robably on the low side, since some deaths must have taken place outside the media's purview. So, let's call it 15,000 orallowing for deaths that the press didn't rep ort20,000 or 25,000, maybe 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed in a pre-empti ve war waged (according to the latest rationale) on their behalf. That's a number more solidly rooted in reality than the Hopkins figureand, gi ven that fact, no less shocking. War Stories: Our Subtle New Strategy for Winning Iraqi Hearts and Min ds Kaboom! The most dismaying thing I've read in a while is a Page One story in the May 17 Philadelphi... |
| www.casi.org.uk/analysis/2004/msg00477.html Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless. The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the US invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That differencethe number of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion periodsignifies the war's toll. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully: We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period. Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday's election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet article: It's a useless study; The problem is, ultimately, not with the scholars who conducted the study; It's hard to conduct reliable, random surveysand to extrapolate meaningful data from the results of those surveysin the chaotic, restrictive environment of war. However, these scholars are responsible for the hype surrounding the study. Gilbert Burnham, one of the co-authors, told the International Herald Tribune (for a story reprinted in today's New York Times), "We're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate." Yet the text of the study reveals this is simply untrue. Burnham should have said, "We're not quite sure what our estimate means. Assuming our model is accurate, the actual death toll might be 100,000, or it might be somewhere between 92,000 lower and 94,000 higher than that number." Not a meaty headline, but truer to the findings of his own study. Here's how the Johns Hopkins teamwhich, for the record, was led by Dr. Les Roberts of the university's Bloomberg School of Public Healthwent about its work. They randomly selected 33 neighborhoods across Iraqequal-sized population "clusters"and, this past September, set out to interview 30 households in each. They asked how many people in each household died, of what causes, during the 14 months before the US invasionand how many died, of what, in the 17 months since the war began. They then took the results of their random sample and extrapolated them to the entire country, assuming that their 33 clusters were perfectly representative of all Iraq. This is a time-honored technique for many epidemiological studies, but those conducting them have to take great care that the way they select the neighborhoods is truly random (which, as most poll-watchers of any sort know, is difficult under the easiest of circumstances). There's a further complication when studying the results of war, especially a war fought mainly by precision bombs dropped from the air: The damage is not randomly distributed; One of the 33 clusters they selected happened to be in Fallujah, one of the most heavily bombed and shelled cities in all Iraq. Was it legitimate to extrapolate from a sample that included such an extreme case? More awkward yet, it turned out, two-thirds of all the violent deaths that the team recorded took place in the Fallujah cluster. They settled the dilemma by issuing two sets of figuresone with Fallujah, the other without. The estimate of 98,000 deaths is the extrapolation from the set that does not include Fallujah. What's the extrapolation for the set that does include Fallujah? it's impossible to figure out how to extrapolate from it. A question does arise, though: Is this difficulty a result of some peculiarity about the fighting in Fallujah? Or is it a result of some peculiarity in the survey's methodology? The survey team simply could not visit some of the randomly chosen clusters; the roads were blocked off, in some cases by coalition checkpoints. So the team picked other, more accessible areas that had received similar amounts of damage. In any case, the detour destroyed the survey's randomness; In other cases, the team didn't find enough people in a cluster to interview, so they expanded the survey to an adjoining cluster. Again, at that point, the survey was no longer random, and so the results are suspect. Beth Osborne Daponte, senior research scholar at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, put the point diplomatically after reading the Lancet article this morning and discussing it with me in a phone conversation: "It attests to the difficulty of doing this sort of survey work during a war. No one can come up with any credible estimates yet, at least not through the sorts of methods used here." The study, though, does have a fundamental flaw that has nothing to do with the limits imposed by wartimeand this flaw suggests that, within the study's wide range of possible casualty estimates, the real number tends more toward the lower end of the scale. In order to gauge the risk of death brought on by the war, the researchers first had to measure the risk of death in Iraq before the war. Based on their survey of how many people in the sampled households died before the war, they calculated that the mortality rate in prewar Iraq was 5 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The mortality rate after the war startednot including Fallujahwas 79 deaths per 1,000 people per year. First, Daponte (who has studied Iraqi population figures for many years) questions the finding that prewar mortality was 5 deaths per 1,000. According to quite comprehensive data collected by the United Nations, Iraq's mortality rate from 1980-85 was 81 per 1,000. From 1985-90, the years leading up to the 1991 Gulf War, the rate declined to 68 per 1,000. After '91, the numbers are murkier, but clearly they went up. Whatever they were in 2002, they were almost certainly higher than 5 per 1,000. In other words, the wartime mortality rateif it is 79 per 1,000probably does not exceed the peacetime rate by as much as the Johns Hopkins team assumes. The second problem with the calculation goes back to the problem cited at the top of this articlethe margin of error. Those mysterious numbers in the parentheses mean the authors are 95 percent confident that the risk of death now is between 11 and 23 times higher than it was before the invasionin other words, as little as 10 percent higher or as much as 130 percent higher. There is one group out there counting civilian casualties in a way that's tangible, specific, and very usefula team of mainly British researchers, led by Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda, called Iraq Body Count. They have kept a running total of civilian deaths, derived entirely from press reports. and they take great pains to separate civilian from combatant casualties (for instance, last Tuesday, the group released a report estimating that, of the 800 Iraqis killed in last April's siege of Fallujah, 572 to 616 of them were civilians, at least 308 of them women and children). The IBC estimates that between 14,181 and 16,312 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the warabout half of them since the battlefield phase of the war ended last May The group also notes that these figures are probably on the low side, since some deaths must have taken place outside the media's purview. So, let's call it 15,000 orallowing for deaths that the press didn't report20,000 or 25,000, maybe 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed in a pre-emptive war waged (according to the latest rationale) on their behalf. That's a number more solidly rooted in reality than the Hopkins figureand, given that fact, no less shocking. Correspondence with one of the report's authors has yielded the following: By Richard Garfield, one of the study's authors. second to last paragraph, the authors do give us a margin of sampling error. They have not found a hard-and-fast 98,000 additional deaths, but a range from 8,000 to 19... |
| csua.org/u/c4j -> crookedtimber.org/2004/11/01/talking-rubbish-about-epidemiology Lancet study on excess Iraqi dea ths, I can predict with certainty that there will be numerous posts on weblogs supporting the war attacking the study. Score several Cassandra points for Chris, they werent slow in coming. And to be honest, the standard of critique is enough to make you weep. Taking the complaints that seem to have been raised about this study: That is, a one in twenty chance that the effect simply does not exist ( from Tech Central Station). The author of the TCS piece appears to belie ve that because the Lancet study published a 95% confidence interval, th ere is a 5% chance that there was no effect. a relative risk ratio of anything less than three is regarded as statist ically insignificant. Interesting to note that TCS appear to have upped the ante on this pie ce of bogus epidemiology; The TCS author appears to have a very shaky g rasp of the statistical concepts he is using. The critique here, from Slat e, is that the 95% confidence interval for the estimate of excess deaths (8,000 to 200,000) is so wide that its meaningless. Althou gh there are a lot of numbers between 8,000 and 200,000, one of the ones that isnt is a little number called zero. One might have hoped that there was at least some chance that the Iraq war m ight have had a positive effect on death rates in Iraq. But the confiden ce interval from this piece of work suggests that there would be only a 25% chance of getting this sort of result from the sample if the true e ffect of the invasion had been favourable. we must invade, because Saddam is killing thousands of his citizens every year, and we will kill only 8,000 more. The idea here is that the sa mple chosen for the survey had a mortality rate of about 5 per 1000 in t he two years before the invasion. And, because the death rate for the pe riod 1985-90 was 68 per 1000 according to UN figures, this in some way suggests that the estimates are at fault. This critique is more interesting, but hardly devastating. For one thing, the contention that the Iraqi death rate did not fall from 68 to aroun d 5 during the 1990s is based on it must have done rather than on hard numbers. Since the 68 number includes (as far as I can tell) atrocitie s committed by Saddam during the period which were not repeated in 2000- 03, I am less convinced than the Slate author that the discrepancy strik es such a huge blow to the studys credibility. In any case, since the s tudy compares own-averages of the clusters before and after the invasion , anyone wanting to make this critique needs to come up with a convincin g explanation of why it is that the study had a lower death-rate than th e national average before the invasion and not after the invasion. various bog standard methodological quibbles are really really devastati ng. This line of attack is usually associated with Steven Milloy, so I will nickname it the devastating critique. The modus operandi is to take a decent piece of statistical resea rch carried out by someone who got his hands dirty with the data, point out a few areas in which it differs from the Platonic Form of the Epidem iological Study (if youre dealing with a really good study, it does you r work for you here by alerting you to the specific difficulties), and t hen say something like sheeeesh, how did this ever get published? I ve done it myself a few times, but thats hardly a recommendation. The Chicago Boyz blog post is an excellent example of the Devastating Cr itique. Surprise surprise, estimating civilian casualties is a difficul t business. They dont ac tually raise any principled reasons why the confidence interval ought to be wider than the one published, and therefore they arent raising any questions which would make us think that this confidence interval should include zero. The IBC numbers are compiled from wel l-sourced English language press reports. They therefore represent a low er bound on any credible estimate of casualties, not a definitive number . Oxblog to try to imply that IBC is in some way an overestimate (and therefore, of course, to push that confidence interval in the dire ction of zero). As the link Ive provided shows, the Oxblog critique (wh ich I dont agree with) refers in the main to whether documented casualt ies can be blamed on the Americans; there is no well-founded challenge t o suggest that the people IBC lists as dead are in fact consuming oxygen . There is something intrinsically suspect about accelerated peer review. John pointed out not so long ago, the time taken for peer review i s determined by academic procrastination above all other factors. Every academic paper could complete its peer review very quickly if the review ers got their finger out because they thought it was important. The sugg estion that people are trying to make here is that reviewers for the Lan cet usually spend six months humming and hawing over the data, to the ex clusion of all other activity, and that this process was short-circuited by politically motivated editors wanting to rush something into print w ithout anyone having a proper look at it. No such six month scrutiny eve r takes place, and this objection is also Simply Not True. Another staple critiqu e of epidemiological studies one doesnt like. It is true of more or les s any study you hear of, since you never hear of studies that dont have interesting headlines. In all honesty, I dont like these extrapolated numbers, never have and never will. I dont like linear models and I don t like extrapolation. However, its a venial sin rather than a mortal o ne, and I have never, ever, at all, heard of anyone criticising it in a study that they otherwise liked. The important thing as far as Im concerned is the position of zero in th e confidence interval; it seems very unlikely indeed that the process de scribed could have given this sample if it was not the case that the inv asion had made the death rate in Iraq worse rather than better. And this conclusion of the study is basically unchallenged. its been challenged so weakly and o n such spurious grounds that my Bayesian assessment has been updated in its favour, on the basis that if those who disliked the studys conclusi on had any real ammunition against it, the published critiques would not have been so weak. posted on Monday, November 1st, 2004 at 1:17 am comments 1 just so. and, although you dont bother to say so, provided that the 100,000 estimate is unbiased and the loss function is symmetric (Ive not seen the original study, but one assumes these standard conditions are met) then its just as likely that there were MORE than 100,000 deaths, not less. and, although you dont bother to say so, provided that the 100,000 estimate is unbiased and the loss function is symmetric (Ive not seen the original study, but one assumes these standard conditions are met) then its just as likely that there were MORE than 100,000 deaths. November 1st, 2004 at 2:33 am 4 One other thing that never seems to get mentioned is that the 95% con fidence interval only reaches down to 8,000 deaths after the researches jettisoned a huge high end outlier. If you include the outlier, (the falluja data), then the figure of 8,000 deaths would be close to 4 sigmas from the mean. It means that if the actual number of deaths were 8,000 or lower, there would have been well less than 1 chance in 1000 that they would have aquired the sample data that they did. The issue of what to do with outliers in statistical samples is tricky. But you can remove a huge outlier, and then act as if the 95% confidence interval has the same interpretation it would have if you had not removed the outlier. AT THE VERY LEAST: the study shows that there were at least 8,000 excess deaths PLUS the total number of deaths in falluja. November 1st, 2004 at 2:36 am 5 One other thing that never seems to get mentioned is that the 95% con fidence interval only reaches down to 8,000 deaths after the researches jettisoned a huge high end outlier. If you include the outlier, (the falluja data), then the figure of 8,000 deaths would be close to 4 sigmas from the mean. It means that if the actual number of deaths were 8,000 or lower, there would... |
| csua.org/u/c4k -> www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html All RSS Feeds 100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq By Rob Stein Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A16 One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraqi war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civili ans may have died because of the US invasion. The analysis, an extrapolation based on a relatively small number of docu mented deaths, indicated that many of the excess deaths have occurred du e to aerial attacks by coalition forces, with women and children being f requent victims, wrote the international team of public health researche rs making the calculations. Sign Up Now Pentagon officials say they do not keep tallies of civilian casualties, a nd a spokesman said yesterday there is no way to validate estimates by o thers. The spokesman said that the past 18 months of fighting in Iraq ha ve been "prosecuted in the most precise fashion of any conflict in the h istory of modern warfare," and that "the loss of any innocent lives is a tragedy, something that Iraqi security forces and the multinational for ce painstakingly work to avoid." Previous independent estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq were far lower, never exceeding 16,000. Other experts immediately challenged the new es timate, saying the small number of documented deaths upon which it was b ased make the conclusions suspect. "The methods that they used are certainly prone to inflation due to overc ounting," said Marc E Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Right s Watch, which investigated the number of civilian deaths that occurred during the invasion. The estimate is based on a September door-to-door survey of 988 Iraqi hou seholds -- containing 7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods -- selected to pr ovide a representative sampling. Two survey teams gathered detailed info rmation about the date, cause and circumstances of any deaths in the 14. The project was designed by Les Roberts and Gilbert M Burnham of the Cen ter for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies at the Joh ns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore; and Riyadh Lafta and Jamal Kudha iri of Baghdad's Al-Mustansiriya University College of Medicine. Based on the number of Iraqi fatalities recorded by the survey teams, the researchers calculated that the death rate since the invasion had incre ased from 5 percent annually to 79 percent. That works out to an excess of about 100,000 deaths since the war, the researchers reported in a pa per released early by the Lancet, a British medical journal. The researchers called their estimate conservative because they excluded deaths in Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad that has been the scene of pa rticularly intense fighting and has accounted for a disproportionately l arge number of deaths in the survey. "We are quite confident that there's been somewhere in the neighborhood o f 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher," Roberts said. When the researchers examined the causes of the 73 violent deaths collect ed in the study, 84 percent were due to the actions of coalition forces, although the researchers stressed that none was the result of what woul d have been considered misconduct. Ninety-five percent were due to airst rikes by helicopter gunships, rockets or other types of aerial weaponry. Forty-six percent of the violent deaths involving coalition forces were m en ages 15 to 60, but 46 percent were children younger than 15, and 7 pe rcent were women, the researchers reported. The researchers and the Lancet editors acknowledged that the study has cl ear limitations, including a relatively small sample of violent deaths t hat were examined directly and the researchers' reliance on individual m emories for some information. But the researchers said the findings repr esent the most reliable estimate to date. The paper was "extensively peer-reviewed, revised, edited" and rushed int o print "because of its importance to the evolving security situation in Iraq, Richard Horton, the journal's editor, wrote in an accompanying ed itorial. But Garlasco of Human Rights Watch said it is extremely difficult to esti mate civilian casualties, especially based on relatively small numbers. "I certainly think that 100,000 is a reach," Garlasco said. In addition, his group's investigation indicated that the ground war, not the air war, caused more of the deaths that have occurred. Staff writer Josh White and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report. |
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| www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/05/19/galloway/index.html LONDON, England -- British MP George Galloway returned to London to a sta nding ovation after a fiery showdown with US senators who have accused him of profiting from the UN's defunct oil-for-food program in Iraq. Galloway said he was "absolutely" convinced he had been vindicated from a llegations that he received vouchers for 20 million barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein's regime. "These people think they can smear people without them having the right t o speak back and this time I got that right and I knocked them for six," he told reporters before leaving Washington. He said after his appearance before the Senate panel Tuesday that his acc users had little credibility "outside of Washington." Norm Coleman of Minnesota, hit back, telling media after the session that Galloway's credibility was "v ery suspect." On his return to London Wednesday night, Galloway appeared at a packed ra lly to celebrate his recent parliamentary election victory. Galloway told the crowd of hundreds he would become "the enemy within" an d said he had received e-mails from around the world about his Senate pe rformance. "There was a worldwide audience out there waiting for someone to speak th e truth," he said. Referring to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he said: "We are the enem y within, Mr Blair, the enemy of all your wars, the enemy of all your b etrayals, the enemy of all your lies." Galloway, an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, told CNN that while Sad dam's regime shared a "lot of responsibility" for deaths in Iraq, so too did the policies of Washington and London. He called the Senate panel's investigation the "mother of all smokescreen s" used to divert attention from the "pack of lies" that led to the 2003 invasion. "I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have weapon s of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that I raq had no connection to al Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your cl aims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11, 2001," he tol d Coleman. "Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and y ou turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have paid with their lives -- 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of li es, 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever, on a pack of lies." He added: "Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are tryin g to divert attention from the crimes that you supported." The Respect MP said he would continue to demand the withdrawal of US an d UK forces from Iraq following his appearance in Washington. He told CNN the US and British governments were no longer believed in t heir statements on Iraq and that their forces could not be part of any s olution there. Galloway's appearance before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee was th e first by a politician allegedly involved in the oil-for-food corruptio n scandal. In a report last week, the subcommittee stated that deposed Iraqi dictato r Saddam granted Galloway vouchers for 20 million barrels of oil between 2000 and 2003. "I am not now or ever been an oil trader and neither has anyone on my beh alf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf," Galloway testified. He also said he did not own a company that trades in oil. "If you had any evidence of that I had ever engaged in any actual oil tra nsaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, i t would be before the public and before this (committee today)," Gallowa y said. Coleman, a former district attorney, told Galloway before his sworn testi mony that "senior Iraqi officials have confirmed that you, in fact, rece ived oil allocations and that the documents that identify you as an allo cation recipient are valid." Galloway challenged that accusation in his opening statement. "Now, I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washi ngton, but for a lawyer, you're remarkably cavalier with any idea of jus tice," he told Coleman. Rumsfeld comparison Galloway, 51, is a leading critic of Blair and his alliance with US Pre sident George W Bush in the war in Iraq. He was re-elected on an anti-w ar platform earlier this month. He said he was "friendly" with former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz a nd met him many times but that he met with Saddam only twice -- in 1994 and in 2002 -- the last time to persuade Saddam to allow UN weapons in spectors into the country. He said he had met with Saddam "exactly as many times as Donald Rumsfeld has met with him." "The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and give him maps," Galloway said in his heated opening statement. "I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second occasion, I met him to try and persuade him to allow Hans Blix and UN inspectors back into country." Rumsfeld visited Baghdad to meet Saddam as President Reagan's Middle East envoy in the 1980s, when the US sided with Iraq in its war with Iran. Blix was chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq before the war. Galloway complained that the panel had determined his guilt without speak ing to him. by the convicted bank robbe r and fraudster and con man Ahmed Chalabi, who many people, to their cre dit, in your country now realize played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq," Galloway told the panel. Europeans implicated In addition to Galloway, the panel also implicated former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who allegedly was allocated 11 million barrels . "I wrote to Mr Coleman," Pasqua said Sunday, "and I told him that all al legations about myself are false." Russian Deputy Parliament Speaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who was accused M onday of receiving 76 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil, denied the acc usation. "I've never signed any contract and never received a cent from Iraq," Zhi rinovsky told a Russian TV interviewer. |
| www.gulf-news.com/Articles/news.asp?ArticleID=84438 The Pentagon said on Monday that it has no plans to determine how many Ir aqi civilians may have been killed or injured or suffered property damag e as a result of US military operations in Iraq. The statement followed passage Saturday of a congressional measure callin g on the Bush administration to identify and provide "appropriate assist ance" to Iraqi civilians for war losses. The congressional action stopped short of requiring military forces to co nduct a formal assessment of all individuals who may have suffered from the war, as some human rights activists have sought. But it made clear that Congress supports compensating innocent Iraqis to buttress US claims that the war wasn't directed against the Iraqi peop le and that US forces tried to avoid civilian deaths and destruction o f civilian property. In language from a Senate-House conference agreement, lawmakers explained their intention that the State Department and the Agency for Internatio nal Development, coordinating with the Pentagon and non-governmental org anisations, "seek to identify families of non-combatant Iraqis who were killed or injured or whose homes were damaged during recent military ope rations, and to provide appropriate assistance." The provision was inserted in the bill by Senator Patrick Leahy in the fi nal day of negotiations, according to congressional sources. Similar lan guage was included in a 2002 supplemental spending bill covering Afghan war costs and again in the 2003 omnibus appropriations law passed earlie r this year. "Innocent civilians have suffered grievous losses," Leahy said in a state ment Monday. "As we help rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq, we should do what we can to assist the innocent, to show that we were not at war against them and that the United States does not walk away. It is the right thin g to do, and it is in our own national interest." Timothy Rieser, who works for Leahy on the foreign operations subcommitte e of the Appropriations panel, stressed that the conferees didn't intend to create a formal claims process or saddle the military with an obliga tion to identify every individual or community that suffered injury. Rather, he said, the aim was to provide resources when there's sufficient evidence that military action caused injuries or serious property damag e "We're trying to move the ball a bit," Rieser said. Asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesman issued a two-sentence statement M onday night taking note of the new funding but saying the department "ha s no plans" to determine the total civilian casualty toll. Before its demise, the Iraqi government reported 1,254 civilian deaths as of April 3 The Bush administration has offered no estimates of its own . "We really don't know how many civilian deaths there have been, and we do n't know how many of them can be attributed to coalition action, as oppo sed to action on the part of Iraqi armed forces as they defended themsel ves," Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a BBC interview Sunday. Historically, the Pentagon hasn't attempted to count civilian casualties and losses resulting from US military action. Military officials have given various reasons for this, citing principal ly the time and resources involved and the difficulty of separating dama ge caused by US forces from damage caused by the enemy. But this time, the Bush administration is facing greater pressure to unde rtake at least some kind of accounting for what military authorities cal l "collateral damage." Before and during the war, US officials repeatedly stressed the extent to which American forces were trying to avoid civilian losses by employi ng precision weapons, computerised target planning and restrictive rules of engagement. More than 70 per cent of the bombs and missiles used in this war were either satellite or laser-guided, according to the Pentago n "Because this administration has put so much emphasis on the care that it has taken, it would be very difficult for them to avoid coming to some kind of assessment of how they did in this regard," said Sarah Sewall, w ho served in the Pentagon during the Clinton administration and now dire cts a study on civilian suffering in war being conducted under the auspi ces of Harvard University. Sewall added that it would be "unrealistic" to expect the Pentagon to com e up with "a reliable figure" for civilian casualties given the "size, i ntensity and speed" of the US campaign. But she said investigating at least some incidents would not only bolster US credibility but contribute to military planning next time by under standing the actual effects of particular US battlefield decisions. One Air Force general, asked why the military hasn't done such post-war a ccounting in the past, said it has been more cost effective to pour reso urces into increasingly sophisticated weaponry and intelligence-gatherin g equipment. "The best way of limiting collateral damage is knowing what you're going after and being able to hit what you go after," the officer said. He sug gested that once the Pentagon started down the track of studying collate ral damage caused by bombs, it could lead to endless assessments. "I do wonder if we're going to do this every time the Army fires an artil lery shell or every time a Special Forces soldier fires a 50-calibre" gu n, he said. But he also acknowledged the practical value of validating the Pentagon's damage-control models by counting the number of civilians who actually died. "Maybe that's our next task someday - to try to get that kind of informat ion so that we can feed it back into the process," he said. Another senior military officer noted that during the 1999 Kosovo war, U S military officials developed a computer programme to track every weap on employed. This assisted peacekeeping troops who later entered Kosovo, providing the m with information about what munitions had been dropped where - and esp ecially what ordnance may not have exploded. |