The random political thoughts thread (Part Deux)

[Alex]

Whoa, deja vu. (In the sense of a high death toll number, that time in relation to the sanctions following the first Gulf War gets the press while the more legitimate methodologies don't get much play.)

I know counting the excess dead is hard to do, but I find it hard to believe that the organizations that actually try to count bodies are missing 13 out of 14 of them.

And there are obvious methodolical concerns with establishing how many people have died based solely on interviews rather than hard counts so I'd be interested in seeing the nitty gritty details on their methodologies.

And if, as the CNN version says, the study authors in a previous version admitted to doing it with specific political goals, then they aren't doing research, they are engaging in activism which should rightly cast a pall over their result.