655,000 deaths in Iraq?! A new report by Johns Hopkins researchers puts the number of fatalities from Dubya’s Baghdad debacle at over twenty times what other sources such as Iraq Body Count have been reporting (making it roughly comparable to the fatality rate in Darfur.) Dear Lord, can that really be right? (Also noted at Ed Rants.) Update: The study’s author explains its methodology.
4 thoughts on “655,000?”
Comments are closed.
AP, NYT Report Inflated Number of Deaths in Iraq (Updated)
Hmmm. Admittedly, 655,000 sounds dismally high, and it’d seem strange if Iraq Body Count, among others, were off by such a huge factor.
By the way, I went ahead and HTML’ized your comment, Lawrence. Hope that’s alright.
“roughly comparable to the fatality rate in Darfur”
We must send troops to iraq immediately!
As to that link above, see crookedtimber for a good discussion. The figure seems high, but i would expect iraq body count to be much too low considering it relies on press reports, and we know how hard of a time jounralists have now a days.
It’s amazing how rightwingers like the media research center assume that a statistical sample with a range is ‘exaggerated’ when in fact it could just as easily be *under* estimating–i.e. the true number of deaths may be in the higher end of the range.
As to the political bias of the scientists, that is a potentially more serious charge, but not enough to throw out the numbers necessarily.