Friday, October 13, 2006

Lancet Report & Simple Math

In my comment to Nyarlathotep's post about the Lancet report, I did a quick & simple bit of math to come up with 500+ deaths a day. It sure seemed to completely debunk the issue in my mind. Clayton Cramer has taken it a bit further and further debunked the issue.

So, where are the news accounts of tens of days with 10,000 or more deaths? Where are the news accounts of hundreds of days with 1000 deaths or more? This article claims that there are perhaps 100 Iraqis a day now being killed in sectarian violence--and this is described as escalating violence. This horrifying article talks about 65 bodies found around Baghdad--with the claim that the day was "notable in its number."

Either the news media have been ignoring hundreds of days with 1000 or more deaths--or tens of days with 10,000 or more deaths--or the Lancet article is utterly wrong.

More comes in from other sources
According to the phony survey, they recorded 629 deaths since the start of the war (p4 of the PDF). In 545 cases, they bothered to ask for death certificates, and for those 545 requests, 501 times they were shown the death certificates. So Mr. Pittelli notes, at least 80% of all the deaths in the sample (501/629), and possibly as many as 92% (501/545) were recorded by the government. Let's repeat that: According to the anti-war propagandists who are responsible for this blatant dishonesty, 80 to 92% of all deaths in their sample were recorded in the Iraqi government's own official figures.

What this means, as Pittelli points out, is that the official death figures should record at least 80% of the deaths since the Iraq war. Taking the bogus figures at face value, simply for the sake of argument entertainment, I calculate the estimates based on official figures should be between 314,000 and 867,000. They aren't. The "official figures estimate" is about 49,000.

More here. And the comments are WAY off the wall. I think BDS may be a real frigging disease.
So, in recap, reporters can't do math, don't know history, are ignorant about the military... And we rely on these guys for news. Yikes.

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