Iraqi death researcher censured

An academic whose estimates of civilian deaths during the Iraq war sparked controversy has been criticised for not fully co-operating with an inquiry.

Gilbert Burnham said in the Lancet medical journal in 2006 that 650,000 civilians had died since 2003 - a figure far higher than other estimates.

Gilbert Burnham said in the Lancet medical journal in 2006 that 650,000 civilians had died since 2003 - a figure far higher than other estimates.

As I said over and over again on here when the MSM was spouting that crap.

This study was the cornerstone of anti American war arguments for the past three years. It was a lie when it came out and now that Obama is in, it is finally acknowledged for the fraud that it was.

Anti American war activists should not be recognized as having prima facie credibility. They should always be viewed as initially deceptive.

This study killed dozens of American soldiers by promoting a caricature of American power useful for galvanizing militant opposition to our deployment.

The researchers and those who willfully used this information should be considered propagandists of the most dangerous sort.

Trust me, I'm a doctor. Really. You can pull crap like this on Newsweak or some other POS rag but in Medicine when you publish something you have to be able to show folks everything, the place you did the work, the folks who helped you, the records you kept. Everything. You can pull crap like this exactly one time and if someone "calls BS" and you can't cough it up you are done. Stick a fork in this turd because he is gonna get flushed. Lancet doesn't have a big sense of humor. Lancet ain't Newsweak. This moron has traded it all for a headline, I hope it was worth it.

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

Burnham et al were spewing crap in the Lancet long before 2006. I blogged about their 2004 "findings" published in the Lancet. Short version: they derived their count through statistical analysis. Nothing wrong with that at all... but even if you disregard their highly questionable methodology, even if you ignore the real possibility of recall bias and wave aside concerns that their sampling wasn't random, even if you assume that they did everything perfectly, well, the fact remains that any result derived from statistical sampling will have a margin of error.

And what was the margin of error in the sampling performed by Burnham and friends? 92 percent. NINETY-TWO PERCENT. This isn't me making something up to attack them, this isn't me twisting their findings, this is what they openly admitted in their paper. Their result found, with 95% confidence, that the civilian death toll in Iraq was somewhere between 8,000 and 192,000... and again, that's if we ignore the rather serious flaws in their methodology.

I was disgusted that a supposedly reputable journal like the Lancet would publish such tripe. I was equally disgusted but much less surprised when Burnham was allowed to reprise his comedy schtick in the same journal in 2006.

Nonsense. The Lancet knew this was a wildly unreliable and politically motivated exercise in statistical guesstimating, and chose to publish it anyway, because the editors liked the political point it was trying to make. The article itself spelled out its “methodology” clearly enough for anyone to see that it lacked any scientific validity. Needless to say, it was also clear from the article itself, that there was no medical point to it whatsoever.

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