In article 1@grandcanyon.binc.net,  Chuck Dillon <spam@nimblegen.com> writes:
>Keith Dancey wrote: 
>
>(I beg the pardon of the group for this short off-topic diversion. ced)
>
>First the paper didn't make that claim, except maybe as gut feeling of
>the authors.


Yes they did.


>  -- They claimed 98k *additional* deaths versus their baseline prior
>to the war.

Quite.


>  -- They didn't adjust for deaths of Iraqi military folks and guess
>what that's who we were shooting at.


Yes they did.

("we"?  You were there?)


>  -- They based it all on minimal data, 998 I believe, all of which
>came from unreliable and biased sources.

They choose a representative sample of households.  You were not there,
so you don't know *anything* about the reliability or otherwise of the
people questioned.


>   ...    None of the data was verifiable.


Yes it is.  You are free to go there and ask again.

>                                                      ... Even ignoring
>the bias such a small sampling could be heavily skewed by polling only
>a handful of areas that were heavily hit as compared to the rest of the
>country.    Given that the military was made up primarily of folks from
>the Sunni regions you know going in that there would be a bias there
>but was it adjusted for?

They specifically ignored Fallujah - the Sunni region that saw the most
intense fighting.  They choose representative areas from as much of
the country as they could visit.  Because of the ommission of Fallujah,
the results are acknowledged as *conservative*.


>  -- Strangely the report was released a few days prior to the '04
>election.

Not strange at all.  What '04 election?  Do you think EVERYBODY has to
live their life according to your US-centric concerns?   Do you know
where The Lancet is published?



>  -- Strangely Iraqi's who lost civilian lives during the war due to
>explosions tended to blame the invaders when in reality they most often
>had no way of knowing where the munitions came from.

Of course, you know more about deaths in Iraq than any Iraqi!



>  -- Strangely since the invasion, when there's been time to look at
>records in detail and conduct a far more thorough study there's no
>better study out there?

Tommy Franks said "We don't do body counts".  Why is that?


Cheers,

keith





---
Iraq:  6.5 thousand million pounds, 90 UK lives, and counting...
100,000+ civilian casualties, largely of coalition bombing...
London?...

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