Not that anyone pays attention to the Washington Post or anything. I'm sure Andreas must have pulled the bizarre numeric out of his magician's hat. I guess the WA Post got a couple decimal figures off. Of course, if it goes against your opinions, it must be a lie. Please see the quote below the excerpt, even if you don't read the excerpt. Truth matters. _http://tinyurl.com/usq4x_ (http://tinyurl.com/usq4x) Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000 By David Brown Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, October 11, 2006; A12 A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in _Iraq_ (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/countries/iraq.html?nav=el) since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government. It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group. The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war. Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country. The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet. The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then -- a finding likely to be equally controversial. Both this and the earlier study are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. The technique, called "cluster sampling," is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters. While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods. The great majority of deaths were also substantiated by death certificates. "We're very confident with the results," said Gilbert Burnham, a Johns Hopkins physician and epidemiologist. A Defense Department spokesman did not comment directly on the estimate. "The Department of Defense always regrets the loss of any innocent life in Iraq or anywhere else," said Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros. "The coalition takes enormous precautions to prevent civilian deaths and injuries." He added that "it would be difficult for the U.S. to precisely determine the number of civilian deaths in Iraq as a result of insurgent activity. The Iraqi Ministry of Health would be in a better position, with all of its records, to provide more accurate information on deaths in Iraq." Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have." This viewed was echoed by Sarah Leah Whitson, an official of Human Rights Watch in New York, who said, "We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy" of the survey. "I expect that people will be surprised by these figures," she said. "I think it is very important that, rather than questioning them, people realize there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq." The survey was conducted between May 20 and July 10 by eight Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each. One person in each household was asked about deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after. The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates. According to the survey results, Iraq's mortality rate in the year before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the post-invasion period it was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The difference between these rates was used to calculate "excess deaths." Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old. Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said. Burnham said that the estimate of Iraq's pre-invasion death rate -- 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people -- found in both of the Hopkins surveys was roughly the same estimate used by the CIA and the U.S. Census Bureau. He said he believes that attests to the accuracy of his team's results. He thinks further evidence of the survey's robustness is that the steepness of the upward trend it found in excess deaths in the last two years is roughly the same tendency found by other groups -- even though the actual numbers differ greatly. An independent group of researchers and biostatisticians based in England produces the Iraq Body Count. It estimates that there have been 44,000 to 49,000 civilian deaths since the invasion. An Iraqi nongovernmental organization estimated 128,000 deaths between the invasion and July 2005. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core: Hannah Arendt - Political philosopher, was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906 = "When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind,as to suscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe;he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."~Thomas Paine"The Age of Reason" 1793 = "The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.": Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918- ) Russian writer, Soviet dissident, imprisoned for 8 years for critizing Stalin in a personal letter, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1970 ========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Re: comments the DEMs must defend Date: 2/13/2007 6:43:56 P.M. Central Standard Time From: _lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx) To: _lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on: Hah! I was wondering if some logically challenged Leftist was going to do that. I accuse Andreas of lying because he uses the false figure of 600,000 Iraqi dead. Simon jumps in with the illogical “maybe even just 30,000, and that amount of innocent Iraqis surely doesn’t matter at all,” he says ironically. Since he doesn’t believe in Logic he will have no idea what I’m talking about, but I’ll explain just for the record. If I say Andreas has lied by using the false number 600,000 as the number of Iraqis killed since the beginning of the invasion and Simon disputes that by saying even 30,000 killed would be a bad thing, he has said nothing to dispute my assertion that Andreas has lied. His response does not relate to my assertion that anyone claiming that 600,000 have been killed since the invasion is lying. Here, I’ll help. A legitimate response might be, “Andreas meant 60,000 and misplaced the decimal; therefore he wasn’t lying. I would have to accept that. Another legitimate response would be Andreas was just confused. He heard 600,000 some place and didn’t bother to check it out. But now he stands corrected. I would accept that as well. I can’t of course accept Simon’s irrelevancy. Simon expresses befuddlement about what I mean when I accuse Leftist of Lying by using the false figure of 600,000. I’ll demonstrate by accusing Simon of lying. Notice in his note that he implies that all the Iraqi dead are “ innocent.” Simon’s implication is that none were enemies of American or the Iraqi government. None were Baathist holdouts. None were Saddam supporters with no place else to go and nothing to lose. All were innocent civilians. This is false. This is a lie. Simon is lying. Yes, some innocent people are in that 30,000 number: those killed by the insurgents; the Iraqi policemen, and the civilians and soldiers blown up by IEDs and suicide bombers. But the larger number I suspect are of the guilty, those who supported Saddam Hussein and now support Al Quada’s attempt to disrupt the Iraqi government, throw Iraq into turmoil, incite civil war and perhaps acquire a new Islamist state or region from which to launch terrorist attacks – perhaps even a new home for Osama bin Laden himself. Leftist arguments are in support of bin Landen’s goals for Iraq, and that’s no lie! Lawrence ____________________________________ From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Simon Ward Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 2:37 PM To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: comments the DEMs must defend "You can strongly disapprove of Bush without all this hyperbole. It undermines your arguments." A mantra that surely should be applied to what ever political crede you're attacking or indeed whoever is doing the attacking. Take this from Lawrence (recently back from the land of allegory): "Do Leftists just like to lie? Is that behind their preoccupation with lying? Is lying for a good (i.e. Leftist) cause okay?" Just whether Lawrence's vision of Leftists like to lie we should leave to Lawrence to sort out, he's the [only] authority on just what makes up his fiction, but we should perhaps dwell on whether those on the right need to lie. Certainly, Bush et al (surely representitive of that political faction) could only get the US to war by deceiving Congress and the people. Whatever they knew about what weapons Saddam had, they knew that the '45 minute claim' was a lie and they knew that what intelligence they had need to be 'sexed up' before it could approach what was necessary to make a case for a war that was never reliant upon intelligence, never reliant upon the UN, never reliant upon the actions of Saddam, but was always the fruit of the Bush administration's desire to wage war in Iraq. And didn't the right (doesn't it still) just love it. You can hear it in the tone of their ranting. They just love meating out a bit of death and destruction where it's easy and they just love shouting down whoever tries to tell them that it isn't right. And the justification? Well that's only just coming out. It was so they could gather all the nasty people in one place and vaporize them. And perhaps a few hundred innocents might get vaporized at the same time, but what does it matter, after all, we're not talking about 600,000 are we. Just a couple of hundred thousand, maybe even just 30,000, and that amount of innocent Iraqis surely doesn't matter at all. So that's alright then. What a relief, for a moment I thought the US government had done something really bad. See Eric, absolutely no hyperbole. None at all. Seriously though what's the point. If the right can't accept as fact the views of 2,500 scientists from 130 countries, what hope is there in establishing facts elsewhere. We might as well all just mythologise and enjoy it. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric" <_mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxxx (mailto:mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx) > To: <_lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) > Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 7:42 PM Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: comments the DEMs must defend > Andreas: 600,000 Iraqi will still be dead because of lies. > 4,000 Americans will still be dead because of lies. > The US economy will still be wrecked because of lies. > > > > If we cannot agree on basic facts, we won't be able to fix the blame. > (Granted it's better to fix the problem than the blame.) > > The major cause of Iraqi deaths is not American force, but you want to > blame Bush so you do so with dubious numbers. The major cause of > American deaths is the action of the groups we collectively label > "insurgents," but you want to blame Bush so you ignore the actual > murderers. The US economy is far from wrecked* but you want to blame > Bush, so you pin the economy to his war policy, rather than, say, > Clinton's ridiculous trade deals with China, current oil prices, or the > nearsighted US automotive sector.** > > You can strongly disapprove of Bush without all this hyperbole. It > undermines your arguments. > > > > > ____ > * _http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8N8BQR02.htm_ (http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8N8BQR02.htm) > The Treasury Department reported Monday that the deficit for the budget > year that began Oct. 1 totals $42.2 billion, down 57.2 percent from the > same period a year ago. > > > **http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publish/article_10009069.shtml > Petroleum, China and automotive products account for about 85 percent of > the trade deficit, and no solution is possible without addressing issues > particular to these segments. > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, > digest on/off), visit _www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html_ (http://www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html) >