I have been fighting an allergy-induced chest cold and not in the mood
to reply before now, but there is new analysis on the carnage in Iraq, for both
Iraqi civilians and US soldiers.
Almost a week after it was reported, the ‘swiftboating’ by pundits and
others that the MIT-sponsored Lancet Report on Excess Iraqi Civilian Deaths
since 2003 is “baloney” and a political ploy to influence the US midterm
elections has run aground. In fact, there has been no authoritative
professional challenge, only confirmation by experts.
Again, for those who want to read the report before denouncing it, here
is the Lancet’s PDF. Methodology begins at the
bottom of page 1. http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf
KwC
101806 Associated Press: “The
military says the sharp increase in U.S. casualties — 70 so far this month — is tied to Ramadan and a security crackdown that has
left American forces more vulnerable to attack in Baghdad and its suburbs.
Muslim tenets hold that fighting a foreign occupation force during Islam's holy
month puts a believer especially close to God.
The spiking
American death toll has compounded a period of intense violence among Iraqis.
If current trends continue, October will be the deadliest month for Iraqis
since the AP
began tracking deaths
in April 2005. So far this month, 775 Iraqis have been killed in war-related
violence, an average of 43 a day.
That compares to an
average
daily death toll of about 27 since April 2005. The AP count includes civilians, government officials and
police and security forces, and is considered a minimum based on AP reporting. The actual number is likely higher,
as many killings go unreported.
Just north of
Baghdad, in the city of Balad for example, at least 95 people died in a five-day sectarian slaughter that began
Friday. On Wednesday, key tribal, religious and government officials brokered a
20-day truce in the region, hoping to work through Sunni and Shiite grievances
during the cooling off period. Balad is a majority Shiite town, but is
surrounded by territory that is mainly populated by Sunnis.” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061019/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq
Part II: Iraqi Death Rate May Top
Our Civil War -- But Will the Press Confirm It?
The press, after its initial coverage, has
turned away from the shocking Johns Hopkins study which estimated 400,000 to
800,000 deaths in the Iraq war since 2003. One of the authors of the study has
issued a challenge: Check out their findings in the field -- and then confirm or
debunk it.
By Greg Mitchell, editor, Editor & Publisher, Oct. 16, 2006
With mass killings occurring every day in Iraq, and Americans falling
at one of the highest daily rates of the entire war, it’s no wonder that
support for the conflict in the U.S. continues to slip. What the American
press, public and political figures have yet to grasp or acknowledge, however,
is the true human catastrophe in Iraq, a 21st century holocaust, if I may put
it that way. This inconvenient truth -- suggested, if not proven, by the Johns
Hopkins study released last week -- seems to be too horrible for many to face,
considering the mild or negative reaction to the report in the days following
the broad attention it did receive at first.
Would it surprise you to learn that if the Johns Hopkins estimates of 400,000
to 800,000 deaths are correct -- and many experts in the survey field seem to
suggest they probably are -- that the supposedly not-yet-civil-war in Iraq has
already cost more lives, per capita, than our own Civil War (one in 40 of all Iraqis alive in 2003)? And that
these losses are comparable to what some European nations suffered in World War II? You'd never know it from
mainstream press coverage in the U.S.
"Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain
lied," Leonard Cohen once sang. The question the new study raises: How
many will go down with the ship, and will the press finally hold the captain
fully accountable?
When I completed a column on the Johns Hopkins study last week, it
was too early to gauge the reaction, beyond President Bush standing by his
estimate of 30,000 civilian casualties. Since then, a few pundits have weighed
in, pro and con, but America’s role in possibly triggering a
Darfur-on-the-Euphrates is now sinking out of sight.
Do the study’s numbers seem that far out? Many experts on such work, in fact,
seem to support the
methods used by the surveyors, and their work was peer-reviewed up the wazoo. Les Roberts, one of the co-authors of the
study, has even challenged newspapers to send reporters to far-flung Iraqi
provinces to check on local mortuaries and confirm or contest the findings. The
Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and possibly others,
have checked with one or more mortuaries in the past, but someone ought to now
answer the wider challenge.
Roberts, appearing on the “Democracy Now” radio program, said, “it’s going to
be very easy for a couple of reporters to go out and verify our findings,
because what we’ve said is the death rate is four times higher. And a reporter will only have to go to
four or five different villages, go visit the person who takes care of the
graveyard and say, ‘Back in 2002, before the war, how many bodies typically
came in here per week? And now, how many bodies come in here?’ And actually,
most graveyard attendants keep records. And if the number is four times higher,
on average, you’ll know we’re right. If the numbers are the same, you’ll know
we’re wrong.
“It is going to be very easy for people to verify this and get all of this talk
about whether it’s political out of the way, because the fundamental issue is -
a certain number of Iraqis have died, and if our leaders are saying it’s ten
times lower than it really is, we are driving a wedge between us and the Middle
East.”
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson commented a few days ago: “If the study's findings are
flawed, then its critics should demonstrate how and why. But no one should
dismiss these shocking numbers without fully examining them. No one should want
to.” No one should want to, but many seem to be doing just that.
The same John Hopkins group had asked for an independent study of its similar
survey in 2004, which also came in with a death toll well above other
estimates. It never happened.
The new study, published last week in the respected British medical journal
Lancet, drew on data obtained by eight Iraqi physicians during a survey of 1,849 Iraqi families -- 12,801 people -- in 47 neighborhoods of 18 regions across the
country. The researchers based the selection of geographical areas on
population size, not on the level of violence. How strict were their standards?
They asked for death certificates to prove claims -- and got them in 92% of the cases. I'd suggest that everyone
go to the Lancet site and decide for yourself on their protocol, rather than
rely on newspaper articles or talk radio.
Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention for many years, told the Washington Post the
survey method was “tried and true.” He said that “this is the best
estimate of mortality we have.” Frank Harrell Jr., chairman of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University, told the Associated
Press the study incorporated “rigorous, well-justified analysis” of the data. Other death counts have been based on
media or government reports, not door-to-door surveys.
“I loved when President Bush said ‘their methodology has been pretty well
discredited,’” Richard Garfield, a public health professor at Columbia University who
works closely with a number of the authors of the report, told the Christian
Science Monitor. “That’s exactly wrong. There is no discrediting of this
methodology. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s been involved in mortality
research who thinks there’s a better way to do it in unsecured areas. I have never heard of any argument in
this field that says there’s a better way to do it.”
The sampling "is
solid. The methodology is as good as it gets,” said John Zogby, whose polling agency, Zogby International, has done
several surveys in Iraq since the war began. “It is what people in the
statistics business do.” Zogby said similar survey methods have been used to estimate casualty
figures in other conflicts, such as Darfur and the Congo.
Some critics have charged that the research was politically motivated or that
its release was timed to come shortly before US elections. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the paper and a public health professor at
Johns Hopkins, has called that charge “bunk.” He said his “goal was to get this
out in July or August, just so people wouldn’t say this was tied somehow to elections”
but that peer review and other administrative issues slowed up publication.
The sad truth is: People who don’t want to face this sort of death toll won’t
ever want to face it.
Critics of the survey -- from the president all the way down to National Review
Online -- have continually cited the much lower number numbers gathered from
press accounts and mortuaries, which is known as “passive surveillance.” The Johns Hopkins study notes: “Aside from Bosnia, we can find no
conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the
deaths measured by population-based methods. In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by
facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates.
Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala
correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5%
in years of highest violence.”
Yet Richard Nadler, writing at National Review Online,
complained that "the Hopkins researchers don’t record 655,000 extra
casualties - they extrapolate them." Nadler, I’d bet, rarely attacks the
validity of US opinion polls which base their findings on interviews with about
1,000 Americans – in a country of 300 million.
On “Democracy Now, ” Les Roberts explained that “this cluster survey approach is the
standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government
isn’t very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF
goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they
do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at
the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death
rate, this is how
they did it. And most
ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year,
through something called the Smart Initiative,
to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in
times of wars and disasters.”
Even so, press response to the new survey has been muted, at best. “You know, I
think that -- this is just my opinion -- the U.S. press sort of follows public
opinion,” Roberts said. “It doesn’t necessarily lead it, except in a few
circumstances, like AIDS in Africa. And the public is ready to think, ‘Wow,
things might be going badly in Iraq.’ And I don’t think the public was ready to
say that two years ago. .. No one asked George Bush about how many civilians
had died or about our study for 14 months after the study came out. And then,
when he was asked, it was just by a member of the public in a forum in
Philadelphia.
“And now, within about four hours of the study coming out, he was asked
directly, he was forced to respond, there was a dialogue going on. So I think
that the nation, as a whole, is more ready to honestly talk about Iraq, and that's led the press to be more able to
honestly talk about Iraq.” But will anyone take up the challenge to confirm or deny the 600,000
dead?
Finally, it should be noted that Iraq Body
Count, which has chronicled, on a daily basis, the civilian
casualties in that country since the start of the war in an ongoing, questions
the Johns Hopkins count, but concludes: "Do the American people need to
believe that 600,000 Iraqis have been killed before they can turn to their
leaders and say 'enough is enough'? The number of certain civilian deaths that
has been documented to a basic standard of corroboration by 'passive
surveillance methods' surely already provides all the necessary evidence to
deem this invasion and occupation an utter failure at all levels."
http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003255073&imw=Y
Excerpt from Part 1: Iraqi Death Rate – Will the Media Finally Report It?
by Greg Mitchell, E&P Oct. 11, 2006
Here is a list of 11 American cities with a population of just under or
just over 600,000. Think of them disappearing - and imagine the US one-tenth
its current size. Then you've got the possible toll in Iraq:
|
Austin
Baltimore
Denver
Boston
Seattle
Milwaukee
|
Memphis
Washington, D.C.
Ft. Worth
Portland
Las Vegas
|
Relating to the above, NBC correspondent Jane Arraf posted the
following at the network's Blogging Baghdad site (at msnbc.com):
"Some readers and viewers think we journalists are exaggerating
about the situation in Iraq. I can almost understand that because who would
want to believe that things are this bad? Particularly when so many people here
started out with such good intentions.
"I'm more puzzled by comments that the violence isn't any worse
than any American city. Really? In which American city do 60 bullet-riddled
bodies turn up on a given day? In which city do the headless bodies of ordinary
citizens turn up every single day? In which city would it not be news if
neighborhood school children were blown up? In which neighborhood would you
look the other way if gunmen came into restaurants and shot dead the customers?
"Day-to-day life here for Iraqis is so far removed from the
comfortable existence we live in the United States that it is almost literally
unimaginable. "It's almost impossible to describe what it feels like being
stalled in traffic, your heart pounding, wondering if the vehicle in front of
you is one of the three or four car bombs that will go off that day. Or seeing
your husband show up at the door covered in blood after he was kidnapped and beaten.
"I don't know a single family here
that hasn't had a relative, neighbor or friend die violently. In places where
there's been all-out fighting going on, I've interviewed parents who
buried their dead child in the yard because it was too dangerous to go to the
morgue.
"Imagine the worst day you've ever had in your life, add a regular
dose of terror and you'll begin to get an idea of what it's like every day for
a lot of people here."
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003251404
