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| 2005/7/13-14 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:38601 Activity:moderate |
7/13 So Molly Ivins makes another mistake in her retraction (but to her
credit she did retract it):
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/23493
She claims: "The high-end estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths in this war
is 100,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University study published in
the British medical journal The Lancet last October, but I was sticking
to the low-end, most conservative estimates because I didn't want to be
accused of exaggeration."
But the study she's citing didn't determine whether people who died
were civilians or not, right?
\_ No. it didn't. It studied Iraqi deaths. period. Thus, the number
includes Iraqis who normally would have died of natural causes.
\_ What the hell is the "Lancet"? I've never heard of it, and I'm
pretty sure I've heard of everything. This sounds like something
only NERDS have heard of. Is that a TV show?
\_ No. it didn't. It studied Iraqi deaths. period. But the 98k
estimate was extra-deaths beyond those Iraqis who normally would
have died of natural causes, estimated excluding Falluja deaths.
Additionally, the study concluded 98,000(iirc) deaths during the
time period studied (approx. the first year or so). IOW,
currently, the death count should be about ~200k. -nivra
currently, the death count should be about ~140k. -nivra
\_ First, I'd like to thank you for correcting my (mistaken)
objections the the Lancet study's statistics. Second, I don't
objections wrt the Lancet study's statistics. Second, I don't
think it's reasonable to do a linear extrapolation to 200K now.
-emarkp
\_ Oops. My original extrapolation showed 140k deaths - straight
proportion from iraqbodycount. I pulled 200k out of my ass.
FWIW, here are deaths from IraqBodyCount: -nivra
up till 3/20/03: 4221 - 5406 (major combat operations)
3/21/03 - 9/20/04: 11740 - 12908 (up thru lancet study)
9/21/04 - 7/02/05: 6877 - 7555 (post-lancet study)
\_ I agree with nivra - Ivins misinterprets the report.
But, her 20K number may actually be accurate:
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/database
It's too bad the military doesn't record this data, or there might
be a list of civilian deaths caused by U.S. action in descending
order, sortable by military ID and COs. E.g., PFC x is responsible
for 5 confirmed civilian deaths along with 10 confirmed kills,
LTG y is responsible for this many and that many for all under his
or her command. The military loves data, normally.
\_ Hardly. 20k, no matter which way you hack it, is grossly under-
estimating. Most of this has been hashed out between emarkp and
I in the past, but the lancet study is accurate, if not precise.
So use their low end confidence numbers(eg. from the first
quartile). if you want, that still gives you over 2x the number
dead. -nivra
\_ Yeah, I should rewrite that to "20K number may actually be
accurate as a low-end figure for civilian deaths caused by
both insurgent attacks and coalition activity"
both insurgent and coalition activity"
\_ Ok, I looked up the kais motd thread:
http://csua.com/?entry=38205
At 75% confidence, you can state there have been 108k
Iraqi deaths since the war started. At 90% confidence,
you can state there have been 65k Iraqi deaths since the
war started. (Again, estimates do not include Falluja
deaths due to massive outlier status)
\_ Yeah, yeah, I know. The Lancet report talks about total
extra deaths including combatants and civilians as you
noted. I'm talking about 20K as a low-end figure for
civilians only.
Even that 20K number is probably a lot higher, but
we're talking low-end, and civilians only, right.
Anyways, I know pro-war people would have big issues
with lumping in deaths caused by insurgent bombs too.
\-the only think worse than listening to unfunny and
fat molly ivins is listening to unfunny and fat
jeaninnie garafolo. |
| 4/3 |
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| www.alternet.org/columnists/story/23493 Eminent Development People have the most remarkable ability to convince themselves that whatthey are doing is for the greater good -- if they are also making a grea t deal of money out of it. Molly Ivins The trouble with deregulation is that it always takes some disaster like Enron before we realize there was a reason for the regulation to begin w ith. We are about to repeat one of the huge mistakes of the 1920s and '30s bec ause we have forgotten why PUHCA (pronounced Pooka) was instituted in th e first place. PUHCA is the Public Utility Holding Company Act, passed i n 1935, which prevents concentration of ownership of power plants. Both the House and Senate versions of the energy bill contain a repeal of PUH CA. points out in an article for Truthout, "For 50 years we have had reliable, cheap electric power that has allowed strong econ omic growth, and no PUHCA-regulated energy holding company has ever gone broke." PUHCA was partially repealed in the '90s, and even that much deregulation was part of what led to Enron, Westar and other slight mishaps. PUHCA puts utilities under strict regulation by both state and federal go vernments. It restricts ownership of utilities to public or private comp anies that are in the business of producing power. The most likely candidates to take over power companies are the big oil c ompanies, now awash in cash. There goes the electrical grid: Why fix it when you can charge more for doing nothing? Lynn Hargis, an attorney who spent 10 years at the Federal Energy Regulat ory Commission and is now with Public Citizen, says repeal means a repea t of the same dreary mistakes. In the 1920s, three huge companies owned half of the nation's power plants and built them into speculative power- holding companies that used the reliable money from utilities for flight s of fancy in the stock market. When you are paying your electric bill to ExxonMobil, Halliburton or some Chinese firm, you will see why this is a monumentally bad idea. org, the company is employing its workers in Iraq through its subsidiary in the Cayman Islands. In a column written June 28, I asserte d that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. The only problem is figuring out by how large a factor I was wrong. I had been keeping an eye on civilian deaths in Iraq for a couple of months, waiting for the most conservative estimates to creep over 20,000, which I had fixed in my mind as the number of Iraqi civilians Saddam had kille d The high-end estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths in this war is 100,000, ac cording to a Johns Hopkins University study published in the British med ical journal The Lancet last October, but I was sticking to the low-end, most conservative estimates because I didn't want to be accused of exag geration. I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam's killing of civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, Hussein killed s everal hundred thousand of his fellow citizens. The massacre of the Kurd ish Barzani tribe in 1983 killed at least 8,000; the infamous gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja killed 5,000 in 1988; and seized docu ments from Iraqi security organizations show 182,000 were murdered durin g the Anfal ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurds, also in 1988. In 1991, following the first Gulf War, both the Kurds and the Shiites reb elled. The allied forces did not intervene, and Saddam brutally suppress ed both uprisings and drained the southern marshes that had been home to a local population for more than 5,000 years. Saddam's regime left 271 mass graves, with more still being discovered. T hat figure alone was the source for my original mistaken estimate of 20, 000. Saddam's widespread use of systematic torture, including rape, has been verified by the UN Committee on Human Rights and other human righ ts groups over the years. There are wildly varying estimates of the number of civilians, especially babies and young children, who died as a result of the sanctions that f ollowed the Gulf War. While it is true that the ill-advised sanctions we re put in place by the United Nations, I do not see that that lessens Hu ssein's moral culpability, whatever blame attaches to the sanctions them selves -- particularly since Saddam promptly corrupted the Oil for Food Program put in place to mitigate the effects of the sanctions, and used the proceeds to build more palaces, etc. There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam , though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my compariso n to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong. I was certainly under no illusions regarding Saddam Hussein, whom I have opposed through human rights work for decades. Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings. Report this comment Not that we needed it, but this article is proof positive that Molly's no conservative. No conservative columnist would ever admit that they were wrong and apologize for it - especially not a mistake that would take s ome effort to fact check. Report this comment Thanks for all the great writing over the years... they are not investing in renewable energy sources much, nor in oil exploration, so I'm thinking you are right on target. Report this comment Let's say 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of our actions over the pa st 2 years. If Saddam killed 300,000 over 30 yea rs, that's 10,000 per year. So we're killing Iraqi civilians 5 times fas ter than Saddam did! Even if the actual number is 20,000, that's still 1 0,000 per year, matching Saddam's rate. The administration of George W B ush has, for almost five years now, made one stupid blunder after anothe r on top of too many lies to count. Entire volumes have been written abo ut those lies with more to come I'm sure. At a press conference last yea r the First Fool was asked to name one error of judgement he made during his term of office - just one! Report this comment So, should we sell Unocal to the Chinese. That would really diversify own ership of one of the biggest oil producers in the country. Still I would rather see an American conglomerate own it than have it go into foreign hands where it can be used to manipulate oil prices. Remember how the J apanese lost World War II and then came back to win the economic wars. Report this comment It's depressing how willing even an intelligent author like Molly is to s weep under the rug the fact that the Clinton administration carried on B ush Sr's genocidal sactions and kept the Iraq war going, resulting in th e death of over 1 million people. To only count the deaths that occured during the current administration's stewardship of this insane violence is very dishonest. To deal with this war, the American public needs to c onfront the fact that this war of conquest has been fully supported by b oth parties for over 10 years now, at the cost of millions of lives and billions of dollars. The Iraq war did not stop when Bush Sr left office, and did not start up again from scratch when Bush Jr invaded. Something very signification was gonig on in that time, and it should not be swep t under the rug. Report this comment You gotta hand it to the lady, she even eats CROW with panache! She is right, of course, about repeal of PUHCA and about deregulation in general. Dick Cheney and company, even in the face of Enron and other sp eculative corporate scandals is going full steam ahead with his "neo-cha os" agenda. He is a slimeball among slimeballs, the "Lex Luthor" of Amer ican business and politics. Long before Enron and other speculative robber baron companies were ripping off the electric utilit y rate base in California, Lyndon LaRouche and his friends were warning that this was the inevitable result of energy deregulation. Indeed it ha s been the OBJECTIVE of deregulation all along. Ms Ivins was bang on wh en she wrote that the objective of PUHCA was to staunch the hemmorage of revenues from electric utilities into the hair brained speculative sche mes of a band of blood sucking parasites. But the abuses go well beyond siphoning off of r... |
| www.iraqbodycount.net/database -> www.iraqbodycount.net/database/ 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. News & Comment Archive The IRAQ BODY COUNT Database This is a human security project to establish an independent and comprehe nsive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq resultin g directly from military action by the USA and its allies. This database includes up to 7,350 deaths which resulted from coalition military acti on during the "major-combat" phase prior to May 1st 2003. In the current occupation phase the database includes all deaths which the Occupying A uthority has a binding responsibility to prevent under the Geneva Conven tions and Hague Regulations. This includes civilian deaths resulting fro m the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health ca re or sanitation. IBC counters which m ay be freely displayed on any website, where they will be automatically updated without further intervention. Casualty figures are derived solel y from a comprehensive survey of online media reports. Where these sourc es report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are giv en. All results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least three members of the Iraq Body Count project team before publication. Riyad Abdul Karim, an assistant district police director of emergency services gunfire 1 1 AP 26 Jun AFP 27 Jun k1517 25 Jun 2005 8:00 PM Al-Dhubat, central Mosul motorcade of provincia l police chief suicide car bomb 4 4 REU 25 Jun AFP 26 Jun k1516 25 Jun 2005 4:00 PM Samarra home of Lt. Muthana al-Shaker, special forces officer suicide car bomb 9 11 WP 26 Jun AFP 25 Jun Al-Jaz 26 Jun k1515 25 Jun 2005 PM south of Amarah police gunfire 3 3 AP 26 Jun Al-Jaz 26 Jun k1514 25 Jun 2005 - body found in Baghdad uniformed policeman found tied, strangled 1 1 AP 26 Jun WP 26 Jun k1513 25 Jun 2005 - Tal Afar civilian killed in clashes between US/Iraqi forces and insurgents following a bomb attack gunfire 1 1 AFP 25 Jun Al-Jaz 26 Jun k1512 25 Jun 2005 9:00 PM Shula, Baghdad cafe mortars 5 5 AP 25 Jun NYT 26 Jun k1511 23 Jun 2005 7:10 - 7:25 AM Karrada, Baghdad mosques, police patrol, bathhouse car bombs 17 17 CT 24 Jun NYT 25 Jun AFP 24 Jun k1510 24 Jun 2005 - Mosul police academy, houses hit mortars 1 1 AP 24 Ju n FOX 24 Jun k1509 23 Jun 2005 - Amariyah, Baghdad Lt. " immediately below the incident code links to perso nal information about those killed (when available). Date and Time refer s to the incident, not the date it was reported, and may not always be e xact. This means that occasionally the entry in the Max colum n (if more has been subtracted from it) may be lower than in the Min, as in x096. Refer to incident x073 for an example of our procedures for su ch entries. |
| csua.com/?entry=38205 Assuming a normal(it's not, it's skewed), there's a 90% certainty there were over 40k dead, 85% certainty over 51k dead, 75% certainty over 68k dead. The author's purposely excluded a huge outlier, and the most violent region in all of Iraq in order to form a conservative estimate. the author's are plainly honest about the difficulties inherent in this kind of war-time study. Furthermore, this study estimated the number dead at the time of the study. Extrapolating to today yields: 90%: 65, 85%: 82k, 75% 108k. RE: death certificates: Out of 142 deaths, 78 certificates were asked for, and 63 provided(81%). Additionally, "When households could not produce the death certificate, interviewers felt in all cases that the explanation offered was reasonable" RE: non-war violent crime. war-related conditions cause an increase in overall violent crime, including murder, faction in-fighting, etc. RE: the cluster analysis: "Because the probability that clusters would be assigned to any given Governorate was proportional to the population size in both phases of the assignment, the sample remained a random national sample. This clumping of clusters was likely to increase the sum of the variance between mortality estimates of clusters and thus reduce the precision of the national mortality estimate." That was a call they had to make, to reduce researcher risk. Almost every cause of death is more sereve the less developed you are. I also think certain types of deaths are simply not reported. I would also like to note that your typical 'hellhole middle eastern arab states' all have extremely low death rates for some reason. Post-invasion, excluding Falluja, the Iraqi mortality rate is 79 per 1000 people. According to the CIA World Factbook, the estimated 2005 mortality rate in the US is 825 per 1000. 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 rate--if it is 79 per 1,000--probably does not exceed the peacetime rate by as much as the Johns Hopkins team assumes." Has anybody plotted if the population growth matches birth/death figures in the Middle East? in many areas we're not much better off than the 3rd world places. Iraq was nowhere near as fucked up as some 3rd world places... people are relatively educated and so forth, they have infrastructure. I'm playing GTA: San Andreas right now and based on this research, large crowds of people regularly get shot or run over in downtown areas. I think it smells of your good ol'fashioned Soviet-era underreporting. I'm pretty sure 80-90 year old Americans are going to have a higher death rate than young people in third world countries. Middle eastern countries mostly have very young populations. Well, gee pre-Invasion is "certainly higher" than what the methods in the study indicate. The _logical_ conclusion is that the study's methodology is conservative and under-estimates actual death rate. Of course, Kaplan doesn't understand the definition of "unclear," so I'm just expecting too much of him, I guess. But weren't we getting complaints from the world about how the sanctions were killing Iraqis? Isn't it reasonable to guess that the pre-2001 mortality rate was at least 68? I had assumed ilyas meant "When Saddam Was Ousted," by "Saddam". i think the these kinds of reactions shore up the claim if there were no pix out of abu graib, it would have been a total non- story. instead of a lot of people being outraged, probably at least half the country would have had the "you have to break some eggs to make an omlette" type attitude. what was amazing and depressing is the rush limbaugh types not taking a hard line about what goes on in war but these flip comments about frat hazing and such. Don't American citizens incarcerated in our prisons deserve more humane treatment? i am more contrasting the comments about gitmo no pix, only stories and the "what do you epxect, it is a club med? and certainly there is evidence of beatings and such in american prisons, but i dont think guards wipe their asses with the mexican flag, or tell or dress up black inmates in hooded klan outfits. There is not a simple way to move an enitre thread composed of short responses. In the Iliad thrad, nobody cut and pasted the wikipedia article on "aspect". If they had, that would have been deleted with a request to leave a pointer. A pointer to a sloda file or a URL are functionally the same. Do you have some persecution complex or is it a full on messiah complex? Their methodology punches a lot of holes in a random sampling, and the results aren't valid. the sample remained a random national sample" do you not understand? The authors are clear on both the methodology and the impacts of the methodology: "This clumping of clusters was likely to increase the sum of the variance between mortality estimates of clusters and thus reduce the precision of the national mortality estimate. We deemed this acceptable since it reduced travel by a third." Certainly, it affected the precision of the estimate, but not the accuracy. Yes, they tried to "match" governorates but you /can't do that/ or you bias the data--not just the variance. Yes, it decreases statistical power, but No, it did not compromise randomness. The chose a paired governorate and randomly chose between the two. It wouldn't make a difference if they paired all the fucking country up. Again, look into the wolfram link if you don't understand. No attempt was made to adjust these numbers for recent displacement or immigration. We assigned 33 clusters to Governorates via systematic equal-step sampling from a randomly selected start." The authors simply collapsed 18 into 12, then proceeded randomly. It's the non-random substitution of governorates that is a problem. you're ok with: P1 = P(cluster_init|population_governates) _/ They did: P2 = P(cluster_sampled|population_governates,P1) Why are you ok with P1 and not ok with P2? I'm distrustful of statistical correlative studies in general because they're so hard to get right and so easy to make bad assumptions. The Lancet study was a bit cavalier with adjustments to the sampling. To the authors' credit, they did make effort to decrease possible effects of adjusting the sampling, but I don't think it was sufficient. Random individuals on the net don't make a big diff to me. nivra and emarkp saying two opposite things means something. Instead of 63 death certificates out of 78 requested, shouldn't it be 63 certificates out of 142 deaths (44%)? It was a methodolical decision, but still connsistent with random sampling. Asserting that changing the sampling doesn't lose randomness doesn't make it so. They can't use the clustering as a representative sample just as if the pairs of governorates are exactly equal. They show how they changed the sampling, and if you understood basic probability, you would understand that it doesn't change the randomness of the sample. org/u/cfp (mathworld) \_ No, they did /not/ reassign them randomly. The chose a paired governorate and randomly chose between the two. Did they check what crime was like here in the US before and after the invasion? The estimate of the number dead is an estimate of total dead, regardless of prior death-rate. Furthermore, you don't think the stoppage of electricity, water, food, etc. Especially when they're just dumping the data into software developed by "Save the Children". Secondly, this is exactly what it comes down to: you don't "trust" the results. You have no background in epidemiological studies and are not familiar with software or terminology, yet you don't trust the results from methodologies that are clearly described, checked by two presumably standard statistical packages published in The Lancet. That shows the underlying reason for the "disparity in opinion". They don't provide their source data however so it's pretty much impossible to check their results. The software was designed to measure death-rates on what I presume was a project paid for by "S... |