The Lancet's Political Hit

Wall Street Journal ^ | 1/9/8

[ZGuy]

Three weeks before the 2006 elections, the British medical journal Lancet published a bombshell report estimating that casualties in Iraq had exceeded 650,000 since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. We know that number was wildly exaggerated. The news is that now we know why.

It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also turns out the timing was no accident.

Skeptics at the time (including us) pointed to the Lancet study's manifold methodological flaws. What the National Journal adds is that the Lancet study was funded by billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute. The two co-authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University opposed the war from the outset and sent their report to the Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election.

Then there is Lancet Editor Richard Horton, "who agreed to rush the study into print, with an expedited peer review process and without seeing the surveyors' original data. He has also made no secret of his politics, 'This axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease.'"

We also learn that the key person involved in collecting the Lancet data was Iraqi researcher Riyadh Lafta, who has failed to follow customary scientific practice. Mr. Lafta had been an official in Saddam's ministry of health.

In other words, the Lancet study could hardly be more unreliable. Yet it was trumpeted by the political left because it fit a narrative that they wanted to believe. And it wasn't challenged by much of the press because it told them what they wanted to hear. The truth was irrelevant.

[Jacquerie]

Rathergate.

A new low, now largely forgotten of course. For the first time a small group of self styled objective “journalists” decided to take down a sitting President with a 100% fabricated story. Their fraud was timed for maximum effect. They did everything they could to make their crime appear legitimate.

I haven’t watched SeeBS since the early 1980s and do not understand why anyone else would. Ever.

[PeterFinn]

The way the lefties wanted to believe this report echoes the way they want to believe anything about Global Warming.