Air America Bankrupt!

[Alex]

Many people on the left do not accept the WSJ as legitimate because of the conservative position of its editorial page.

The Lancet is certainly an authority and respectable publication. But that does not mean that everything it prints has the golden glow of received truth. The 2004 version of the report (published in The Lancet as well) certainly did not and had significant issues.

I read the whole article earlier today and feel better about some issues. One issue I have is that in the caveats section the authors seem to ignore, dismiss, or overlook some significant motivations for lying or exaggeration by interviewees and the report also says that 92% of the reported deaths had death certificates in support but then doesn't explain why these official documents are not part of the government agency death counts.

I did learn more about where their number for the pre-war mortality rate came from. It is from the same survey results but would be subject to some of the same reporting biases (that is, exaggeration of post-war fatalities would likely go hand-in-hand with minimization of pre-war fatalities) and the authors do not address why their resulting pre-war mortality rate (5.5/1000/year) is so much lower than the results of similar quantifications done before the actual war (generally 6.5 or higher).

It is also confusing in that it simultaneously mentions that the biggest cause of violent death recently is car bombs but then offhandedly mentioned that coalition forces are reported to shoot indiscriminately on crowds.

One thing that gets overlooked in the Right's rush to denounce is that the report lays most of the blame on the insurgency and terrorism. The authors obviously feel that this is the fault of the coalition as well but the Right does not and I would think much political hay could be made (at least in Iraq) by emphasizing just how much damage the insurgency has done to Iraqi civilians.

I still have problems with what I read (where are the 600,000 bodies, or more since the authors feel their results are conservative, that they think have died that doe not show up in any official counts. That is a lot of bodies). But they are somewhat muted from this morning and do address several issues I had with the first survey.