In the WSJ yesterday, they point to where that overinflated 650,000 number of dead Iraqis that the anti-war people cite came from.

British medical journal Lancet published a bombshell report estimating that casualties in Iraq had exceeded 650,000 since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. We know that number was wildly exaggerated. The news is that now we know why.

It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also turns out the timing was no accident. You can find the fascinating details in the current issue of National Journal magazine, thanks to reporters Neil Munro and Carl Cannon.

With the original data unavailable, a resistance to revealing their methodology, a key test of scientific rigor would be for others to verify the findings. It’s the scientific method! But apparently, just as in the case of global warming, this was a one-shot deal, in order to manage a political outcome from hysterical numbers that have no basis in fact.

…the authors have declined to provide the surveyors’ reports and forms that might bolster confidence in their findings. Customary scientific practice holds that an experiment must be transparent — and repeatable — to win credence. Submitting to that scientific method, the authors would make the unvarnished data available for inspection by other researchers. Because they did not do this, citing concerns about the security of the questioners and respondents, critics have raised the most basic question about this research: Was it verifiably undertaken as described in the two Lancet articles?

“The authors refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data,” said David Kane, a statistician and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Statistics at Harvard University. Some critics have wondered whether the Iraqi researchers engaged in a practice known as “curb-stoning,” sitting on a curb and filling out the forms to reach a desired result. Another possibility is that the teams went primarily into neighborhoods controlled by anti-American militias and were steered to homes that would provide information about the “crimes” committed by the Americans.

Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center and a past president of the American Statistical Association, said, “They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication.” The weakest part of the Lancet surveys is their reliance on an unsupervised Iraqi survey team, contended Scheuren, who has recently trained survey workers in Iraq.

This stinks out loud, but we’re aware of today’s Lysenko-style “science”…it doesn’t follow the ’scientific method’ at all.

Source

Gateway Pundit posted on this on January 4, quoting Ayatollah Al-Sistani:

“Be as a great mountain – he added – immovable before the attempts of some media to attack our unity, exaggerating the number of the victims and speaking of confessional war”.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani
Asia News
September 26, 2007

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