FireGarden said:
If their own survey of Anbar was so good, then why did they use IBC data to fill in the gaps?
I didn't say the NEJM survey was perfect. I just said it was statistically far better than either John Hopkins (Lancet) survey. By a large margin both in terms of number of clusters in Anbar and numbers of households surveyed. Which totally invalidates your suggestion that the reason the number of violent deaths in the NEJM study is so much smaller than in the Lancet studies is that they under-surveyed Anbar in comparison to the Lancet studies. That suggestion is just plain FALSE. Plus, the NEJM surveyors don't appear to have had an axe to grind against Bush, the military, the war and America. They haven't done what those associated with the Lancet reports did ... make politically charged public statements, misstate facts, campaign as democrats, etc.
FireGarden said:
And then you imply that Lancet-2 picked dangerous areas in Anbar to make Bush look bad -- as if the current figures (which you accept?) don't make Bush look bad.
They don't. Do you know the number of Iraqis the anti-Bush community insisted were dying in Iraq every year before we ever invaded? There are many estimates. But I think its CONSERVATIVE to conclude that under the policy of containment after the first Gulf War, at least 200,000 excess Iraqis died at the hands of the regime or as a direct consequence of its policies.
Prior to the war, the UN and WHO, in studies that were championed by the folks now on the anti-war side of this issue, said that Iraqis were dying at
the rate of many, many thousands a month, principally because they weren't getting the food, clean water, sanitation and medical treatment they needed ... things that the Coalition has worked hard to provide since Saddam was toppled. Make no mistake, Saddam deliberately held back billions of dollars in resources that could have saved many of those lives. He deliberately engaged in policies to increase the toll amongst certain ethnic groups ... both to solidify his hold on Iraq and use as a bargaining chip in trying to get the sanctions removed. In three years time, since the invasion, surely several hundred thousand more innocent people would have died regardless of whether we invaded or not. To think otherwise is purely delusional.
You cannot ignore what your side was saying before the invasion. The United Nations before the war conducted a large study (which was blessed by the Lancet, by the way) that found the overall death rate was well over 7 per 1000 per year. The World Health Organization said it was 8 per 1000 per year. Compared to the John Hopkin's claims of 5 and 5.5 per 1000. Compared to NEJM's claim that only 3 per 1000 were dying each year.
Even more persuasive are figures from UNICEF, which in a 2002 study of 24,000 households found the infant mortality rate in Iraq in 2002 was 102 deaths per 1000 infants. That compares to the John Hopkins study claim of 29 per 1000. This is a rate more than three times higher than the John Hopkin's surveys claimed. And even after the invasion, JH claimed rate is STILL less than UNICEFs. I have a hard time believing that after the war, with the billions of dollars in resources (medical, food, water, sanitation, etc) thrown at Iraq that the infant mortality rate didn't drop from what it was pre-war. That is far more logical than the left's current claim that it increased. But then logic never has been the left's strong point.
FireGarden said:
What a coincidence, then, that the places Lancet-2 picked for their deception ended up being the places NEJM couldn't visit.
Go ahead. Prove that the 1 Anbar cluster in the Lancet 1 study or the 3 Anbar clusters in the Lancet 2 study were not visited in NEJM study ... which visited 37 clusters in Anbar. I bet you can't. You want to know why I know you can't? First, because the Anbar clusters in the both Lancet reports were located in Falluja, which almost certainly was surveyed by the NEJM study.
And do you know what the Lancet 1 researchers ended up doing with their one Falluja data point? They threw it out of their study results because it was such an obvious flyer. They didn't ask why ... or question whether the reasons it was a flyer might not have also influenced their other data points ... they just threw it out. So it turns out that they didn't even include Falluja data in the first Lancet study. The truth is that they just GUESSED a death rate for Anbar province in the Lancet 1 report. And obviously guessed VERY high, based on their own biases. 
And curiously, the public Lancet 2 report gives no details as to the location of it's Anbar clusters. I did find this source, however ... http://cran.r-project.org/doc/vignettes/lancet.iraqmortality/mortality.pdf which states that "Cluster 51 was in Falluja. The other two Anbar clusters are 30 and 31. Burnham (2007) mentions that they sampled three clusters in Falluja (which is in the Anbar province) even though the plan called for only one cluster. They did this because the Falluja data from Roberts et al. (2004) was such an outlier that they wanted a better estimate for this violent city. Having interviewed in three clusters, the authors then selected one of the three randomly. The selected cluster was the least violent of the three. This was cluster 51. The other two clusters in Falluja were numbered 50 and 52. The authors have declined to release the data for these two clusters. Rather than picking one of the three clusters to use, averaging over all three would generate a more precise estimate of the change in mortality." So here again, John Hopkins only sampled in Falluja in Anbar and for some reason again played games with the data, treating two of the results as outliers.
And I'll bet you when they release the raw data we will learn that the NEJM survey, in addition to surveying Falluja also surveyed some other locations in Anbar. Again, a big improvement over the John Hopkins surveys.
FireGarden said:
And the CIA listed yet another figure.
Go ahead ... tell us the source of the CIA figure. Bet you can't.
FireGarden said:
Saddam was a bad man, and America should never have supported him.
So we should have just let the mullahs in Iran dominate the region? Is that going to be your party's foreign policy in the future too? We supported Stalin in WW2 even though we knew he was a "bad man". Are you suggesting we shouldn't have? The world is not neat and tidy like those on your side of the fence seem to believe. There are no black and whites. Yes, some of what we did with Saddam was a mistake ... but had we not invaded Iraq that "bad man" would still be in power killing hundreds of thousands of people. And right now he might have a reconstituted WMD program. And then what would you suggest? You need to live in the present and deal with present problems.
FireGarden said:
Quote:
And how many might have died in Saddam's next military adventure? Keep in mind how many died in Iran and Kuwait or in suppressing Iraqis in Northern and Eastern Iraq. Iraq might not have had a half million extra dead (assuming it's even that much) but a million or two extra dead.See above. You're all spin.
Your own source proves my point. Saddam was a very bad man, attacking not only other countries (Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) but his own people. And not just developing but using WMD on them. Do you know that they found tapes of him ordering his generals in the 1991 war to launch chemical weapon attacks on all major Israeli cities had we tried to topple his government? Israel was not even a combatant in that war. Allowing Saddam to remain in power and reconstitute his WMD arsenal (which even Bush's critics now admit he fully intended to do once the sanctions were gone and those sanctions would have soon been gone or ignored had we not invaded), would have undoubtedly led to far more Iraqi and foreign deaths than any number of Iraqis that have died since the invasion. Furthermore, a large number of those deaths, both due to direct violence and other causes, can be laid squarely at the feet of al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists who have been waging a war against the Iraqi people in Iraq since the invasion. Not just murdering tens of thousands but destroying the infrastructure needed to reduce the numbers dying due to living conditions. Plus, you overlook the fact that there is a wider war going on than just Iraq. And if those terrorists weren't killing innocents in Iraq, they'd be doing it somewhere else. There will be a battlefield SOMEWHERE. And clearly those terrorists fear Iraq becoming successful. That should give you and the rest of the America-bad/abandon-Iraq now movement a clue. But I guess that's asking too much.
FireGarden said:
The match with Lancet-1 is very close.
NONSENSE. Lancet 1's results were no closer than Lancet 2's to the NEJM results. Lancet 1 claimed 100,000 died (mostly due to violence) over an 18 month period following the invasion. The NEJM results cover a 40 month period (they don't break it down by period), and in case you didn't notice, the Lancet 2 results claimed the most violent periods were AFTER the initial 18 month period. Or don't you agree with that assertion?
FireGarden said:
But you don't seem to have noticed what this thread is about. It was started to compare Lancet-1 and NEJM -- not Lancet-2 and NEJM.
Is that why the linked article in the opening post discusses the Lancet 2 results rather than the Lancet 1 results? Don't worry, I saw your calculation comparing NEJM to Lancet 1. You totally overlooked the fact that Lancet 1 said most of those (59%) were due to violence while NEJM concluded only about 15 percent were. The cause matters a great deal. And yes, I know you now don't want to talk about Lancet 2 which was touted to be an IMPROVED study over Lancet 1 ... by the John Hopkins researchers. But we will anyway.
FireGarden said:
So if they investigated 7% of the deaths, they confimred most of the deaths they investigated.
Is that new math?
FireGarden said:
Assuming they picked at random from among all the deaths reported, then that says something.
Two points. The first is that Richard Garfield and Les Roberts were outright dishonest. They tried to make interviewers and their audience think that they confirmed ALL the deaths with death certificates. That is simply not true. And second, if the statistics are valid, why weren't anti-Bush sources like the LATimes able to confirm even 10 percent of the death certificates Roberts and Garfield claimed? Why have the Lancet researchers been unable to provide statements from doctors who wrote death certificates that weren't recorded? Why haven't copies of any of the death certificates they claim been shown to other researchers? In fact, how in the world could such a high percentage of those surveyed (over 90%) even manage to produce a death certificate in the 15 minute window that supposedly each one of these interviews took? And they were only asked about a death certificate at the very last moment. So they had mere minutes to locate and show it to the researchers. That sounds more than a little suspicious alone.
FireGarden said:
But then you go on to show that data has been released.
No, as the source I provided said, only a small portion of the Lancet 2 data has been released and only to non-critics ... and only recently after more than a year of trying to get any released. And if we're just talking about Lancet 1 then should I point out that Les Roberts has refused to release ANY raw data on that study?
FireGarden said:
The Lancet study haven't released the addresses they visited.
ROTFLOL! Do you know that Burnham admitted that they may not even know all the names and addresses they visited? That's how utterly sloppy their study was conducted.
FireGarden said:
I found this comment to be useful:
Maybe you'll find these to be useful too:
http://politicscentral.com/2006/10/11/jaccuse_iraq_the_model_respond.php "I am a sociologist who has been looking closely at the Lancet study and wanted to say that I find many of the comments useful here, as I craft a critique of the Lancet study. ... snip ... From what I know about this sampling, the gravest error was that they should have seperated Iraq into three regions and then sampled the same way within these regions: Kurdistan, Central Iraq, an Southern Iraq. They would have found virtually no excess death in Kurdistan (in fact, maybe even an overall improvement), in Central Iraq, probably something of the order of magnitude they actually did discover, and in Southern Iraq, much less than in Central Iraq. To have 25% of the sample be from Baghdad and extrapolate to, say, Kurdistan, is like taking the crime rate from Washington DC and extrapolating to Montana. This is very bad methodology ... "
http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/2006_10_08_archive.html#116069912405842066 "The claim is 654,965 excess deaths caused by the war from March 2003 through July 2006. That's 40 months, or 1200 days, so an average of 546 deaths per day. To get an average of 546 deaths per day means that there must have been either many hundreds of days with 1000 or more deaths per day (example: 200 days with 1000 deaths = 200,000 dead leaves 1000 days with an average of 450 deaths), or tens of days with at least 10,000 or more deaths per day (example: 20 days with 10,000 deaths = 200,000 dead leaves 1180 days with an average of 381 deaths). So, where are the news accounts of tens of days with 10,000 or more deaths?" Yes ... where are the news accounts of the many days that should have seen more than a 1000 or even 10,000 deaths? They just don't exist and it's not because reporters weren't in Iraq or had no interest in showing such slaughter. In your heart, you know the reason.
http://politicscentral.com/2006/10/11/jaccuse_iraq_the_model_respond.php "At the very least, The Lancet should have asked the authors to acknowledge their bias in their conflict of interest statement. Unfortunately, the Editor of the journal, one Richard Horton, is a more outspoken critic of the Iraq War and what he calls the "axis of Anglo-American Imperialism" than even the authors of this political paper. And so he let slide the journal's policy of full disclosure of potential conflicts of interest." And so did MIT.
http://www.iq.undp.org/ILCS/PDF/Analytical Report-English.pdf Dr Jon Pedersen, who headed that study, is quoted in both the NYTimes and WaPO saying the Lancet numbers are "high, and probably way too high. I would accept something in the vicinity of 100,000 but 600,000 is too much." Here is more on what Dr Pedersen thinks about the John Hopkins work: http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/...-with-jon-pedersen-on-iraq-mortality-studies/
Debarati Guha-Sapir (director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels) was quoted in an interview for Nature saying that Burnham's team have published "inflated" numbers that "discredit" the process of estimating death counts. (http://www.prwatch.org/node/5339 And according to another interviewer, "She has some methodological concerns about the paper, including the use of local people — who might have opposed the occupation — as interviewers. She also points out that the result does not fit with any she has recorded in 15 years of studying conflict zones. Even in Darfur, where armed groups have wiped out whole villages, she says that researchers have not recorded the 500 predominately violent deaths per day that the Johns Hopkins team estimates are occurring in Iraq."
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/314/5798/396 Madelyn Hicks, a psychiatrist and public health researcher at King's College London in the U.K., says she "simply cannot believe" the paper's claim that 40 consecutive houses were surveyed in a single day. "There is simply not enough time in the day," she says, "so I have to conclude that something else is going on for at least some of these interviews." Households may have been "prepared by someone, made ready for rapid reporting," she says, which "raises the issue of bias being introduced." Dr. Hicks published (http://www.hicn.org/research_design/rdn3.pdf ) a clarification of these concerns titled "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Were valid and ethical field methods used in this survey?", which concluded that, "In view of the significant questions that remain unanswered about the feasibility of their study’s methods as practiced at the level of field interviews, it is necessary that Burnham and his co-authors provide detailed, data-based evidence that all reported interviews were indeed carried out, and how this was done in a valid manner. In addition, they need to explain and to demonstrate to what degree their published methodology was adhered to or departed from across interviews, and to demonstrate convincingly that interviews were done in accordance with the standards of ethical research. If the authors choose not to provide this further analysis of their data, they should provide their raw data so that these aspects can be examined by others. Even in surveys on the sensitive and potentially risky subject of community violence, adequately anonymized data are expected to be sufficient for subsequent reanalysis and to be available for review. In the case of studies accepted for publication by the Lancet, all studies are expected to be able to provide their raw data." But as I noted, they haven't or can't.
Beth Daponte, senior research scholar at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, after reading the Lancet article told Fred Kaplan "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." http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/1818 "So the pre-war CDR that the two Lancet studies yield seems too low. It may not be wrong, but the authors should provide a credible explanation of why their pre-war CDR is nearly half that of the UN Population Division. If the pre-war mortality rate was too low and/or if the population estimates were too high – because, for example, they ignored outflows of refugees from Iraq – the resulting estimates of the number of Iraqi "excess deaths" would be inflated."
Professor Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway's Economics Department, and physicists Professor Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley of Oxford University published a highly detailed paper ("http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Economics/Research/conflict-analysis/iraq-mortality/BiasPaper.html ). They claim (http://www.rhul.ac.uk/messages/press/message.asp?ref_no=367 ) the John Hopkin "study’s methodology is fundamentally flawed and will result in an over-estimation of the death toll in Iraq. The study suffers from "main street bias" by only surveying houses that are located on cross streets next to main roads or on the main road itself. However many Iraqi households do not satisfy this strict criterion and had no chance of being surveyed. Main street bias inflates casualty estimates since conflict events such as car bombs, drive-by shootings, artillery strikes on insurgent positions, and market place explosions gravitate toward the same neighbourhood types that the researchers surveyed." More on their work can be found here: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Economics/Research/conflict-analysis/iraq-mortality/index.html .
And then there's an article in Science magazine by John Bohannon which describes some of the above professors criticisms, as well as the response from Gilbert Burnham. Burnham claimed that such streets were included and that the methods section of the published paper is oversimplified. Bohannon says that Burnham told Science that he does not know exactly how the Iraqi team conducted its survey; and that the details about neighborhoods surveyed were destroyed "in
case they fell into the wrong hands and could increase the risks to residents." Michael Spagat says the scientific community should call for an in-depth investigation into the researchers' procedures. "It is almost a crime to let it go unchallenged," says Johnson. In a letter to Science, the John Hopkins authors claim that Bohannon misquoted Burnham. Bohannon defended his comments as accurate, citing Burnham saying, in response to questions about why details of selecting "residential streets that that did not cross the main avenues" that "in trying to shorten the paper from its original very large size, this bit got chopped, unfortunately." Apparently, the details which were destroyed refer to the "scraps" of paper on which streets and addresses were written to "randomly" choose households". Such a well conducted survey. ROTFLOL!
http://magicstatistics.com/2006/10/...aths-is-statistically-unsound-and-unreliable/ "By StatGuy ... snip ... I put on my professional statistician's hat and had a good long look at the study. In my opinion, it is statistically unsound and unreliable. The study violates the basic principle of good statistical practice by relying on a non-random sample survey. Also, the article's description of survey operations raises reliability, and perhaps even credibility, questions." Read the rest of that article ... it's just full of questions about the validity of the John Hopkins work. And here's another article by the same author you might like to read: http://magicstatistics.com/2006/10/18/lancet-researchers-ignored-superior-study-on-iraqi-deaths/ "Lancet researchers ignored superior study on Iraqi deaths" . And another: http://magicstatistics.com/2006/10/22/main-street-bias-in-lancet-study/ "'Main street bias' in Lancet study".
And how about some of the members of Iraq Body Count? How about John Sloboda or Joshua Dougherty (AKA joshd)? They've made pretty strong criticisms of the John Hopkins' work. Want to try an smear them too?
Give it up. The John Hopkins studies on Iraq mortality are BOGUS.
FireGarden said:
Just a moment ago you were talking about the difficulty of finding a pre-war death rate. How does this difficulty arise if the Iraqis were so meticulous in keeping records?
There was no difficulty before the war. The UN, WHO and UNICEF conducted large studies in Iraq, using Iraqi records, no doubt. And found rates that are starkly at odds with those found by a method where surveyors (who were openly anti-American and anti-war) depended on honesty from folks who likely were hostile to the US and toppling of Saddam.
FireGarden said:
Quote:
And if the doctors went to the trouble of providing relatives with a death certificate, then the act of passing that certificate on to higher authorities would have been the easy step in the process.Says who
Again, provide us with the name ONE Iraqi doctor who says he wrote out hundreds of death certificates (because each Iraqi doctor would have had to do given the numbers that the John Hopkins researchers claimed) and did not report those deaths to the hospitals, morgues or the health ministry. And where are the bodies, FireGarden? Were are the mass graves?
FireGarden said:
Why does a central count of issued death certificates always under-count the number of deaths in war-zones?
By 90%? Prove that's the case.
FireGarden said:
Because then the NEJM would have to be bogus too. It agrees with Lancet-1.
No, it does not. But nice try at rewriting history. I leave you with this;
http://www.seixon.com/blog/archives/2006/10/science_exit_le.html
"Just using Occam's Razor here, you can believe either:
1. A small team of researchers, two of which are American Democrats who oppose the war in Iraq, have stated for the record that they wished to influence a US election, who carried out a survey in Iraq only under their own supervision; and a vast conspiracy by Iraqi authorities to hide 500,000 death certificates.
2. That the small team of researchers either deliberately made up data, cooked the methodology to ensure urban areas were overrepresented, calculated their numbers incorrectly, and willingly misled the Lancet peer reviewers and the world public; and have confidence in the thousands of people working for the Iraqi government in morgues and government offices all over the country of Iraq.
Occam's Razor says #2. Sorry guys. I'm not into believing the whole "vast government conspiracy conducted by thousands of individuals and miraculously kept secret" type of thing. I'm more into believing the "small group of political partisans conduct a sham of a study to influence world opinion and a US Congressional election".
