There's a report in National Journal today that demolishes the credibility of the 2006 Lancet survey of Iraq war casualties. According to the report, the failures are threefold:
1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros's Open Society Institute.
On the first count, there are numerous examples provided, including an estimate that "two months before the start of the second major American military operation to restore order," 52 deaths in 29 households were used to extrapolate a casualty estimate for the city of 50,000 to 70,000 dead. That in a city of 250,000. The result was so absurd that the Lancet "dropped it from the study."
As for the lack of transparency:
The authors refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data," said David Kane, a statistician and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Statistics at Harvard University. Some critics have wondered whether the Iraqi researchers engaged in a practice known as "curb-stoning," sitting on a curb and filling out the forms to reach a desired result.
Combine the fact that George Soros funded the study and the timing of its release, just days before the 2006 election--it can't be claimed that this survey, which boasts a figure for Iraqi deaths an order of magnitude greater than any other figure out there, was anything but a fraud.
Update: A fried writes, "but you didn't mention many other ridiculous features of the Hopkins studies, such as the first study's claim that 30 Iraqis were killed each day in road accidents with US vehicles, or Cluster 33 in the second article, or Lafta's work for Saddam and Allah, or Roberts' acknowledgment that high-death claims would aid jihadis…" Yes, there's a lot more in the piece. It's worth plodding through the whole thing.
