Boston Globe right-winger Jeff Jacoby on the Lancet report

Jeff Jacoby's latest column in the Boston Globe claims that the Lancet report claiming 600,000+ Iraqi casualties is fatally flawed. He often defends the Bush administration in his op-eds. I'd like to debunk his claims below, but need a little help. Please help me to set him straight! Thanks.

A war report discredited

Globe Columnist / January 13, 2008

FEW medical journals have the storied reputation of The Lancet, a British publication founded in 1823. In the course of its long history, The Lancet has published work of exceptional influence, such as Joseph Lister's principles of antiseptics in 1867 and Howard Florey's Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on penicillin in 1940. Today it is one of the most frequently cited medical journals in the world.

more stories like thisSo naturally there was great interest when the Lancet published a study in October 2006, three weeks before the midterm US elections, reporting that 655,000 people had died in Iraq as a result of the US-led war.

Hundreds of news outlets, to say nothing of antiwar activists and lawmakers, publicized the astonishing figure, which was more than 10 times the death toll estimated by other sources. (The Iraqi health ministry, for example, put the mortality level through June 2006 at 50,000.)

If The Lancet's number was accurate, more Iraqis had died in the two years since the US invasion than during the eight-year war with Iran. President Bush, asked about the study, dismissed it out of hand: "I don't consider it a credible report." Tony Blair's spokesman also brushed it off as "not . . . anywhere near accurate."

But the media played it up. "One in 40 Iraqis killed since invasion," blared a front-page headline in the Guardian, a leading British paper. CNN.com's story began: "War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the US-led invasion, a new study reports." Few journalists questioned the integrity of the study or its authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Iraqi scientist Riyadh Lafta. NPR's Richard Harris reported asking Burnham, "Right before the election you're making this announcement. Is this politically motivated? And he said, no, it's not politically motivated."

But the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence.

In an extensively researched cover story last week, National Journal took a close look under the hood of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins study. Reporters Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon found that it was marred by grave flaws, such as unsupervised Iraqi survey teams, and survey samples that were too small to be statistically valid.

The study's authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of "data-heaping" - that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud.

"They failed to do any of the things to prevent fabrication," Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center, told the reporters.

Bad as the study's methodological defects were, its political taint was worse:

Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who, as Munro and Cannon point out, "spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004."

Coauthors Burnham and Roberts were avowed opponents of the Iraq war, and submitted their report to The Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election.

Roberts, a self-described "advocate" committed to "ending the war," even sought the Democratic nomination for New York's 24th Congressional District.

"It was a combination of Iraq and Katrina that just put me over the top," he told National Journal.

Lancet editor Richard Horton "also makes no secret of his leftist politics," Munro and Cannon write.

At a September 2006 rally, he publicly denounced "this axis of Anglo-American imperialism" for causing "millions of people . . . to die in poverty and disease." Under Horton, The Lancet has increasingly been accused of shoddiness and sensationalism.

In 2005, 30 leading British scientists blasted Horton's "desperate headline-seeking" and charged him with running "badly conducted and poorly refereed scare stories." The claim that the US-led invasion of Iraq had triggered a slaughter of almost Rwandan proportions was a gross and outlandish exaggeration; it should have been greeted with extreme skepticism.

But because it served the interests of those eager to discredit the war as a moral catastrophe, common-sense standards were ignored. "In our view, the Hopkins study stands until someone knocks it down," editorialized the Baltimore Sun.

Now someone has, devastatingly. But will the debunking be trumpeted as loudly and clearly as the original report? Don't hold your breath.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

and the author makes no secret of his right wing-nutiness.

Hmmm, never heard that one before...?

655,000 Iraq War Deaths:
Watch Ideologues Slander Good Science

10.16.2006

Curren W. Warf, M.D.



Speaking as a medical doctor, I wish to set the record straight.

The Lancet study is sound science. The study followed a strict, widely accepted methodology to arrive at its sobering conclusion. The study is being attacked not on scientific grounds, but for ideological reasons.
People may not realize that The Lancet is the world's most prestigious medical journal. Prior to publication, the Iraq study was subjected to a thorough peer-review by specialists in the field of epidemiology.

Three of the study's authors, Gil Burnham, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, are doctors at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. The fourth author, Riyadh Lafta, is on the faculty of Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Under dangerous conditions, researchers conducted a cross-sectional cluster sample survey involving a total of 1849 Iraqi households, in 47 different neighborhoods, in 18 regions across Iraq. The survey documented a four-fold increase in the crude mortality rate from the pre-invasion to the post-invasion periods and, in addition, characterized the causes of death.

The investigators followed the same methodology in Iraq that has had been used in estimating death and disease in other conflicts such as Darfur and the Congo -- where the Bush administration uncritically accepted their results. The public health tool they employed -- cluster surveys -- has been demonstrated time and again to be the best method of estimating rates of death in areas where vital statistics are not scrupulously maintained. Such bureaucratic vigilance is not the case in present day Iraq.

In a war-ravaged country, an estimate of war-related deaths based on the method of counting bodies will radically underestimate the number of people who have died. In Iraq today, there have been numerous reports of mass graves and of bodies dumped in fields, beside roads, or in the Tigris River. These deaths are, by and large, not reported to authorities, as some of these deaths may be linked to police forces. One must also consider the Muslim practice of burial where internment is swift -- often on the same day. Therefore, relying on media reports of the number killed, morgue logs, or Iraq Ministry or US military counts will not provide an accurate estimate of the death toll. We must also not discount the possibility of bias by government officials; the US and Iraq have much to gain by minimizing civilian deaths.

http://www.prcsd.org/LancetReport.html

But I'm also looking for something a little more recent I can send him via email. I've had one email exhange with him before, which was not entirely pleasant. But downplaying Iraqi deaths and claiming that less deaths morally vindicates our invasion gets me really upset.

The Warf analysis is dated some days after the appearance of the Lancet study, which is the only credible source cited in the original Jacoby hit-piece.

he makes some valid points. Where are the scientists disputing the Study?

<snip>

Since the media has been unable to find a scientist critical of the study, they've turned to policy wonks with literally no expertise in the health sciences. Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Foundation derides the study, but her advanced degree is in international studies. Neither does Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies nor Michael E. O'Hanlon of Brookings have a health background. At his October 11 press conference President Bush asserted "No, I don't call it a credible report." He said he asked the generals and the generals told him it was wrong. When asked to give a precise number of Iraqi war-related deaths the President demurred, saying "I do know that a lot of innocent people have died."

Despite the scientific rigor of the Hopkins' study, there is a danger that the unsubstantiated criticism by administration. In this age, where fact shares equal time with conjecture, critics have attempted to discredit the Hopkins' study without specifically addressing the science whatsoever. If the administration believes the Hopkins' study to be flawed, the federal government should fund its own study of Iraqi mortality, and submit the methodology and results to a medical journal subject to independent peer review. After all the Hopkins' study was funded in large part by a $50,000 grant from MIT; surely the federal government could afford such a study.

I sit on the Board of Directors for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility. We care about the "Medical Consequences of the War in Iraq." In fact, that's the topic of our upcoming conference to be held at UCLA this Saturday, October 21. The conference is co-sponsored by the UCLA School of Public Health and UCLA Extension and is open to the public. Dr. David Rush, past president of the Society of Epidemiologic Research, will discuss The Lancet Iraq study.

but it's the right order of magnitude.

Jacoby is just another highly paid republicon chickenhawk propagandist.

No cred. No talent. No relevance.

It did a great job of covering the issues around this study.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1157

... I've read a couple of his other pieces. Neandrathal would be a kind way to describe him.

He'd fit in over there at the Herald.

a big problem.