(Updated: Originally posted January 3, 2007)
This was in regard to a report claiming that over a million Iraqis had been killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003:
"Last year, a team of American and Iraqi public health researchers for the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that 600,000 civilians had died in violence from the 2003 American invasion until last summer....
But it was an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426, 369 to 793,663 deaths. The study used samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.
Researchers came up with the figures after surveying 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence.... American and Iraqi governments, as well as other groups, including the Iraq Body Count... disputed the validity of the study's findings.
It is the second study by the researchers from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.... The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized (New York Times January 3, 2007)."
Really? That's not what was reported at the time.
Interesting, because the John Hopkins/Lancet studies were described as such:
"Making conservative assumptions," they estimated 100,000 civilians killed, and that included "many women and children killed in coalition airstrikes... and airstrikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths."
The initial report "went through formal academic review by peers.... Researchers... were impressed with the team's thoroughness under difficult working conditions.... They were careful and conservative in making their estimates... excluding all deaths in Fallujah.... Statistics experts in the United States who were able to review the study said the methods used by the interviewers looked legitimate (Boston Globe October 29, 2004)."
I have so had it with the New York Times and their damn lies, readers!
