The BBC just obtained internal British government documents regarding the internal response to the Johns Hopkins study published in the Lancet that estimated that 654,965 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion in 2003 (601,027 due to violence, most commonly gunfire). The study was immediately dismissed by widely acknowledged statistical experts like Tony Blair and George Bush, of course, as the BBC reports:
Shortly after the publication of the survey in October last year Tony Blair's official spokesperson said the Lancet's figure was not anywhere near accurate.
He said the survey had used an extrapolation technique, from a relatively small sample from an area of Iraq that was not representative of the country as a whole.
President Bush said: "I don't consider it a credible report."
As I mentioned in my last posting on this topic, it was only some know-nothing "pollsters"--like Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who previously worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Frank Harrell Jr., chairman of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University--who deemed the Johns Hopkins study a "rigorous, well-justified analysis of the data" and "the best estimate of mortality we have." But according to the BBC, the British apparently have some uninformed pollsters of their own:
A memo by the MoD's [Ministry of Defense's] Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, on 13 October, states: "The study design is robust and employs methods that are regarded as close to "best practice" in this area, given the difficulties of data collection and verification in the present circumstances in Iraq."
One of the documents just released by the Foreign Office is an e-mail in which an official asks about the Lancet report: "Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies."
Luckily, this so-called "Chief Scientific Adviser" wasn't allowed to deter Tony Blair from setting the record straight.
Strangely, the lead author of the Johns Hopkins report had much more positive responses from the statistical experts when he was examining mortality in the Congo rather than looking at their own crimes:
Mr. Roberts has studied mortality caused by war since 1992, having done surveys in locations including Bosnia, Congo, and Rwanda. His three surveys in Congo for the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental humanitarian organization, in which he used methods akin to those of his Iraq study, received a great deal of attention. "Tony Blair and Colin Powell have quoted those results time and time again without any question as to the precision or validity," he says.
In the world of the ideologue and the patriot (or is that redundant?), information is to be judged based on how well it accords with your desired world view, and entirely independent of its accuracy or validity. Take the words I cited recently from Ran HaCohen with a few appropriate substitutions and you see just how universal was the truth that he was expressing: "Iraqi suffering is not perceived as a human catastrophe, but as a political argument. Dead Iraqis are merely an attack on US (and UK) righteousness, and they are confronted as such."
Comments