The Lancet is a very well-respected medical journal, based in Britain. In 2006, three weeks before the American election, Lancet published a report on "excess mortality" in Iraq. The report put forth numbers of civilian Iraqi deaths directly due to the war (i.e., excess mortality) that were many times higher than the estimates of the Bush Administration and the U.S. military. The U.S. estimated 30,000 deaths. The Iraqi health ministry estimated 50,000. Most other accepted estimates fell in that range. The Lancet Report put the excess mortality at between 392,979–942,636, and for good measure called it 654,965. In that report, almost all of those deaths were attributed to the U.S. military.
The report was, of course, was circulated by the mainstream American and British press without criticism, and war critics now cite it as gospel. I recall an episode of This American Life that was devoted solely to the Lancet Study. It also aired just before the 2006 election. I mention it in large part because This American Life is one of my favorite radio shows. This is how a currently uncorrected blurb describes the episode:
Recently, the British medical journal The Lancet published an study which updated their estimate of the number of Iraqis who've died since the U.S. invasion. With that in mind, we revisit a show we did in 2005 about the earlier study published in Lancet estimating the number of Iraqi deaths. That study was mostly ignored in the U.S. Alex Blumberg revisits the original study and looks at the new one.
I seem to recall Ira Glass, the host, informing us at the beginning that the numbers in the study really were true. Well, if the 2004 study was ignored, the same cannot be said about the pre-election special. This is how a devastating critique of the study in the National Journal puts it:
CBS News called the report a "new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq." CNN began its report this way: "War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports." Within a week, the study had been featured in 25 news shows and 188 articles in U.S. newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
There is, however, a problem with the Lancet Report. It was a snow job. That is my ungenerous, but I think accurate, reading of the conclusions reached by the National Journal. The latter, by the way, is one of the most respected guides to American government. You can find it in almost any public library. Here is how they put it.
Over the past several months, National Journal has examined the 2006 Lancet article, and another [PDF] that some of the same authors published in 2004; probed the problems of estimating wartime mortality rates; and interviewed the authors and their critics. NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros's Open Society Institute.
Allow me to unpack that. The study based its very large estimates on a very small sample consisting of surveys given to 47 "clusters" of households. In short, it worked like an opinion poll. There is no consensus that such a procedure is reliable in this sort of research. Second, when authors of the study were pressed to release their basic data, they refused. Now anyone in virtually any branch of science can tell you that when someone refuses to release their data, that is the surest sign of fraud. The dog ate my homework. So in addition to using questionable research methods, they were very probably cooking the books. And finally, the study was funded by George Soros, a man who once boasted that he would spend millions of his own money to defeat President Bush in 2004.
It gets better. One of the authors of the study, Riyadh Lafta, was part of Saddam's government.
Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease, or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
In other words, the chief item on this guy's resume was precisely the job of cooking the books for the old regime, in order to advance its political interests. Small wonder then that the activities of this man, solely responsible for the study's basic data, remains shrouded in secrecy.
Both Lancet studies of Iraqi war deaths rest on the data provided by Lafta, who operated with little American supervision and has rarely appeared in public or been interviewed about his role. In May, Lafta and Roberts presented their study to an off-the-record meeting of experts in Geneva, but other attendees declined to describe Lafta's remarks. Despite multiple requests sent via e-mails and through Burnham and Roberts, Lafta declined to communicate with National Journal or to send copies of his articles about Iraqi deaths during Saddam's regime.
This post provides only highlights of the National Journal article. Read the whole thing. When it is done, there is not enough left of the Lancet report to bury in a coke spoon.
The question here of course is not whether the Iraq war was justified. If it was not, then one death, let alone 30,000, was way too many. The question is whether institutions with long histories and decades of prestige can be trusted to be free of political corruption. CNN and CBS are notoriously shameless. But Lancet, and the John Hopkins School of Public Health, enjoy the sort of reputations that are acquired only with decades of scrupulous care. Yet they put all that aside to push a politically jaundiced pseudo-study just before an American election. That is political corruption, and it is worth knowing about.
Recent Comments