The "600,000 Iraq Death Toll" Debunked…..Again?

New Critique of the Lancet’s Civilian Death Claims

In 2004, British medical journal The Lancet released a study in the final days leading up to the US presidential election. Their attempted October Surprise was heavily promoted by international media and the international left (there’s a difference?), and claimed the US was responsible for more than 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. Then, in 2006, they published another study with even more wildly inflated claims.

Today Michelle Malkin has posted a new critique of the Lancet’s 2004 study, a statistical analysis by David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University—who identifies serious problems in the Lancet’s methodology: Document drop: A new critique of the 2004 Lancet Iraq death toll study.

Much of the math here is mind-numbingly complicated, but Kane’s bottom line is simple: the Lancet authors “cannot reject the null hypothesis that mortality in Iraq is unchanged.” Translation: according to Kane, the confidence interval for the Lancet authors’ main finding is wrong. Had the authors calculated the confidence interval correctly, Kane asserts that they would have failed to identify a statistically significant increase in risk of death in Iraq, let alone the widely-reported 98,000 excess civilian deaths.

An interesting side note: as Kane observes in his paper, the Lancet authors “refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data (or even a precise description of the actual methodology).” The researchers did release some high-level summary data in highly aggregated form (see here), but they released neither the detailed interviewee-level data nor the programming code that would be necessary to replicate their results.

Note: Of course the left will refute any new statistical analysis of the Lancet Study regarding the claimed 600,000 Iraq death toll.

Clarity in analyzing studies is a primary goal of any researcher and should be part of the critical analysis of a given subject overall.

The fact that the Lancet Study has been refuted in the past, due largely to their refusal to provide the data they used for drawing their conclusions should immediately produce “red flags” with regard to unbiased truth and authenticity. Yet today this study is widely accepted as fact.

Critical thinking supported by all…..I say again ALL the…factual data and then made readily available to researchers leads to clarity on any subject.

So draw your own conclusions.

In my opinion, the Lancet Study is seriously flawed in it’s attempt to provide a meaningful analysis of the actual data available. As has been stated elsewhere…2 + 2 does NOT equal 5, at least not in any of the math classes I had while studying Electrical Engineering……….

Dean