[Vision2020] tony's worries for american women

[Andreas Schou]

On 12/16/06, g. crabtree <jampot at adelphia.net> wrote:
> From Slate magazine (no friend to conservatives)
>
> 100,000 Dead-or 8,000How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the
> war?
> By Fred Kaplan
> Posted Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, at 6:49 PM ET
> The authors of a peer-reviewed study, conducted by a survey team from Johns
> Hopkins University, claim that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a
> result of the war. Yet a close look at the actual study, published online
> today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is
> so loose as to be meaningless.
>
> The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died
> in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how
> many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those
> surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference-the number
> of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion period-signifies the war's toll. That
> number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more
> fully:
>
>   We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during
> the post-war period.
>
> Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the
> set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you,
> I'll spell it out in plain English-which, disturbingly, the study never
> does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused
> deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in
> plain language-98,000-is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast
> range.)
>
> This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.
>
>
>
> You can read the rest of the article at http://www.slate.com/id/2108887/

G --

This is in reference to a mortality study done in 2004; a different
study than the one done in 2006. The one in 2006 used a sample size of
4,000, spread across the country, had a 99.9% confidence interval, and
required people claiming deaths in their families to produce death
certificates. The main difference is in the number of cluster points
(that is, physical locations where families were surveyed) used to
survey families, which was limited by the fact that travel in Iraq is
so difficult.

Of course, if the US government was collecting numbers on civilian
mortality, as they have in every conflict since World War II, we
wouldn't have to rely on investigators from Johns Hopkins. But,
peculiarly, they have decided that they just don't want to know how
many civilians are dying in this war. One would think that that number
would be relevant to someone.

-- ACS