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Originally Posted by Undertoad
So is accepting the data. It's bullshit on its face, and you want to believe it so hard.
All it takes is a little numeracy and a functioning bullshit detector, not a degree in statistical analysis.
At one point they claim to have seen death certs for a majority of the dead. If there are certs, the information has been documented and can be confirmed. Where are the hospitals with this information? How do they have time to process the injured and dead to the point where they can document them? This is a similar number of dead in an area much smaller than the area affected by the tsunami. Hussein required mass graves to bury a similar number over many years. Where are the graves? Where are the fuckin' wounded? Where are the fuckin' bodies already???
"On the 25th of September my focus was about how to get out of the country," he recalls. "My second focus was to get this information out before the U.S. election."
I wonder why the pundits say it was political?
May I add, "DUH" ?
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You may indeed add "DUH." Only about 1/3 of Iraqi war related deaths occur in hospitals. When checking data from funeral homes or morgues the problem is that these entities do not list whether the dead were combatants or members of the civilian population. Your questions about the reliability of both hospital records and about what the Iraqi government might say about the percentage of death certificates that were for innocent civilians are valid points. This is why the researchers used the technique of having Iraqi surveyers go door to door and ask detailed questions of the respondents. This study was scrupulous in its evaluation techniques to seperate out combatant versus civilian dead.
A major concern has also been whether there has been a rise in infant mortality rates pre and post Saddam's rule and the advent of the war. Many women no longer go to hospitals to give birth due to security reasons and the researchers wished to see what, if any, impact this has had on infant death rates.
Finally, why do you assume that voters of whatever political persuasion would have no interest in a valid estimate of Iraqi civilians killed in the war? Perhaps you are concerned that the researchers' conveying the information that US soldiers who had accidently killed civilians actually went to the families of the deceased and apologized, would have swung voters to the Republican side? Good thing this was not widely reported and Kerry got elected after all.
