[lit-ideas] Re: Civilian casualties in Iraq
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 09:08:25 -0500
Generally, I like Newsweek.and think they're pretty reliable, but sometimes
they need to be second guessed. For example, they did a cover story on Dr.
Weill, the nutrition guy, and didn't mention that Weill is a money making
machine. They linked to his site to buy supplements without disclosing the
very large amount of money he makes off of his supplements. I wondered
even as I was reading it if it wasn't a paid advertisement. Likewise, the
Newsweek crew is embedded with the military. There's Stockholm syndrome in
there if nothing else. Don't get me wrong, Newsweek is good but not
unbiased. The NYT is all but a complete waste for factual information. I
heard a reporter from Mother Jones interviewed on CSPAN and he sounded very
good. I'm thinking about not renewing Newsweek and taking out a
subscription to them instead. Check out this story:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/01/holy_warrior.html
> [Original Message]
> From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 2/6/2006 5:20:20 AM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Civilian casualties in Iraq
>
> This from Newsweek,
> http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8679662/site/newsweek/page/3/
>
> Truth is the First Civilian Casualty
> July 25, 2005
>
> More pernicious still is the now-famous Lancet
> report, ( "Mortality before and after the 2003
> invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey" at
> http://www.thelancet.com/ journals/lancet/article/
> PIIS0140673604174412/abstract) which the respected
> British medical journal billed as "the first
> scientific study of the effects of this war on
> Iraqi civilians." Produced by epidemiologists and
> public-health professionals and based on a hastily
> taken field survey in various locations in Iraq
> led by Johns Hopkins' School of Public Health
> researcher Les Roberts, this peer-reviewed article
> purported to show that 98,000 more Iraqis died
> in the 18 months after the war, based on death
> rates in the same areas in the year before the war.
>
> Further, the leading cause of death was violence,
> and Iraqis (other than those in Falluja) were 1.5
> times more likely to die after the invasion, than
> before it. Few of the news reports on this study,
> however, noted what even the study itself did:
> that the margin of error for these statistics
> renders them practically meaningless. In the case
> of the death toll of an additional 98,000 persons,
> the authors call this a "conservative estimate"
> based on the data, but also report a 95 percent
> Confidence Interval (CI), of from 8,000 to
> 194,000, essentially a range of error. In other
> words, there is a 95 percent chance that the
> excess deaths were between 8,000 and 194,000. And
> the CI or Confidence Interval was 95 percent that
> the risk of death had increased by from 1.1 times
> to 2.3 times after the invasion; 1.5 times being a
> midpointâ?? again, a range that renders it
> meaningless. That CI was so broad simply because
> the survey's sample was relatively small. As one
> of the report's peer reviewers, Sheila Bird, wrote
> in a comment in The Lancet, "Wide uncertainty
> qualifies the central estimate of 98000 excess
> deaths, so that the survey results are consistent
> (just) with the true excess being as low as 8000
> or as high as 194000." But she goes on to say that
> outside data and expert opinion make the 98,000
> figure more likely, citing specifically the data
> from (where else?) Iraq Body Count.
>
>
> Again this is before even considering whether
> those killed might have been civilians or
> civilian-dressed insurgents. The Lancet report
> does confirm for instance, that, "Many of the
> Iraqis reportedly killed by U.S. forces could have
> been combatants." And it added "it is not clear
> if the greater number of male deaths was
> attributable to legitimate targeting of combatants
> who may have been disproportionately male, or if
> this was because men are more often in public."
> Take another much-cited study, by the group CIVIC
> headed by anti-war activist Marla Ruzika, who was
> herself killed in Iraq by a suicide bomber (a
> detail not usually mentioned in the many anti-war
> websites that laud her work). CIVIC's field
> surveys counted 1,573 men killed compared to 493
> women in the first 150 days of the war â?? and 95
> percent of them died in the first two weeks.
>
> All of these reports are far too politically
> motivated for their researchers to use their own
> data fairly. The Lancet for instance took the
> unusual step of posting its study on its Web site
> in advance of publication, on Oct. 29, 2004,
> clearly in order to be disseminated in advance of
> the U.S. electionsâ??as the journal even implicitly
> acknowledges. In a way, the U.S. administration
> has itself to blame. The military has refused to
> issue estimates of Iraqis killed in military
> operationsâ??as Gen. Tommy Franks famously declared,
> "we don't do body counts." (Mindful no doubt of
> how in the Vietnam War, U.S. body counts of Viet
> Cong dead at some point exceeded the country's
> population.) And when there have been killings of
> civilians by U.S. troops, military investigations
> have typically been whitewashes, usually with no
> effort even made to interview Iraqi eyewitnesses.
> This was the case, for instance, in a military
> review of the aerial bombing of a wedding party in
> Qaim, Iraq, on May 19, 2004. Survivors
> interviewed by journalists included some of the
> wedding musicians and numerous relatives of the
> bride and groom, who both were among the 40 dead.
> The military insists to this day that they hit an
> insurgent staging area out in the desert, based on
> "actionable intelligence", and it concluded its
> investigation without having interviewed any of
> the Iraqi eyewitnesses. Small wonder so many
> people are willing to believe the nonsense being
> peddled by anti-war statisticians about the human
> cost of this awful war.
>
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