Need Help on 655,000 Dead Iraqi's

Arguing with some dumass freeps who say this report is a lie.

Can anybody get me some "real simple" answers as to why its not?

Thanks.

conducted the study? I imagine Dem. Now has a transcript up by now at the link below.


Dem. Now today: Author defends study estimate on Iraqi casualties

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/12/145...



Thursday, October 12th, 2006
Co-Author of Medical Study Estimating 650,000 Iraqi Deaths Defends Research in the Face of White House Dismissal

The White House is dismissing the findings of a medical study that says 650,000 people have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion. The study was conducted by American and Iraqi researchers and published in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet. We’re joined by the report’s co-author, epidemiologist Les Roberts. More than 650,000 people have died in Iraq since the U.S. led invasion of the country began in March of 2003. This is according to a new study published in the scientific journal, The Lancet. The study was conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Researchers based their findings on interviews with a random sampling of households taken in clusters across Iraq. The study is an update to a prior one compiled by many of the same researchers. That study estimated that around 100,000 Iraqis died in the first 18 months after the invasion.

Les Roberts joins us now from Syracuse, New York -- He is one of the main researchers of the study. He was with Johns Hopkins when he co-authored the study but has just taken a post at Columbia University.

* Les Roberts. Co-author of the study on civilian mortality in Iraq since the invasion. He was with Johns Hopkins when he co-authored the study but has just taken a post at Columbia University.

Ask your acquaintaince would it not be good news to conservatives that so many "ragheads" were slaughtered by their great leader? I chuckle at the notion that "conservatives" find such a high number bad news.

this method is widely accepted and has been used successfully in the past. It has not been discredited, as the lying Pukes are saying.

So, if you gather the other atrocities which have been measured using the methodology, you can ask your Puke friends, "So, do you deny these things happened, too?"

The number could be half that. Ask your buddy how many innocent lives he's willing to accept, considering one of Bush's many, many attempts to justify his invasion was that we were "liberating Iraqis from the muderous Saddam Hussein." By any estimates, we have slaughtered or caused the slaughter of a hell of a lot more people than Hussein did or would have. 655K, 300K, 1 Mil... who really knows? But our flag is dripping with the blood of innocent children.

proceedures used for many mass casualty calculations.

Numbers from this type of estimate are good enough for * when talking about sunami victims, just lies if they look bad for bush.

various factors. The real number is somewhere between 497,000 and 765,000. They took the average. So it could be even higher.

The bio of the group that took the poll shows them eminently qualified.

now, lets see if this computes. Don't know why I bother really. Except its fun to watch them squirm.

Informed Comment. He is the best. I go there when I don't want spin on Iraq news.

http://www.juancole.com/

If they have a problem with the report, they can go get PhDs, and then prove to scientists why it's wrong.

you might also want to point out bush has killed more people than saddam....

655,000
The latest study in the Lancet about Iraqi deaths is staggering: they calculate that 655,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003, about 500 per day since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Critics will quibble about the methodology used in the study. The authors themselves say that the range of deaths runs from 426,369 to 793,663. I'm willing to take the low-end. So more than 426,000 Iraqis have been killed by George W. Bush's war.

I can't resist pointing out that even Saddam Hussein's worst detractors estimate that 300,000 Iraqis died during his reign. I happen to believe that that number is wildly inflated, and certainly it isn't based on any sort of research. It's just a number promoted (before the invasion in 2003) to demonize Saddam. But even if it's true, George Bush has surpassed in three bloody years what took Saddam three decades in power to accumulate.



http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/10/655000.html

This study is the best scientific estimate of deaths attributable to the invasion. Instead of extrapolating the death toll from police reports or media coverage, Iraqi scientists fanned out over the country and asked people about the number of deaths in their household. All other methods for estimating the number the number of deaths in a war are poor substitutes for a large, randomized, door-to-door survey.

Public health scientist Cervantes explains the methodology behind the Lancet study. As he notes, the scientists observed standard protocols for investigating questions of this type:

So, the researchers set out to estimate deaths by means of a household survey using area probability sampling methods. This is a method used all the time in health surveys. It's a method I have used myself, in fact. To begin, you just need census data -- it actually doesn't even have to be highly accurate as long as any errors are essentially random, or unrelated to your study questions. Then, you pick geographic areas based on probability proportionate to the population they contain. This is usually done in stages. In the Iraq study, they first determined the number of clusters they would select in each province based on population size (Baghdad, with its population of over 6 million, got 12; Muthanna, with a population of 570,000, happened to get none.) Then, towns, blocks, and starting households were selected at random. For each household selected, the 39 nearest houses were also included. This survey had a total of 47 clusters, including 12,801 persons.

The researchers interiewed adult household members between May and June, 2006, to learn about births, deaths, and migration since January 1, 2002. They also asked people to report if an entire neighboring household had been wiped out, to account for households with no-one left to speak for them. They report that for 92% of reported deaths, the respondents were able to produce a death certificate. A substantial omission in the report, I must say, is the failure to state the response rate. The investigators also refer to procedures for substituting areas which were too unsafe to visit. They do not say how often this happened, but if anything, it would tend to bias the results downward.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/42926/

How stupid do you have to be to deny this is happening?