Iraq's disappearing, melting bodies. posted by Richard Seymour

I just wanted to point up some devastatingly ill-informed commentary from the highest echelons of BBC News about the Lancet report. Asked why they refused to refer to the report in discussing Iraq mortality, part of their reply was:

We do not usually use the Lancet's figure in standard news stories because it is so far out of line with other studies on the same issue. There are also some questions over the validity of the Lancet study in the case of measuring casualties in Iraq. The technique of sampling and extrapolating from samples has been criticised in this case because the pattern of violence in Iraq has been so uneven.

The first sentence is straightforwardly wrong, as I've pointed out here. But the remainder of the argument is even more ignorant. Because I knew full well that Fallujah had been excluded precisely to avoid any gross errors on that front and smelling a rat, I contacted Les Roberts, one of the authors of the Lancet report. His response was concise:

[T]he pattern of very uneven mortality between clusters creates no inherent skew high or low, it just results in a wider than expected confidence interval which is reflected in out report.

In other words, the BBC are rejecting the report's surveys on two false grounds: one, that it is 'out of line' with other reports (it isn't); two, that its method is somehow inappropriate because uneven patterns of violence skews the results. Both criticisms are identical to those deployed by the UK government, and both are ridiculously wrong. Even the right-wing Economist did better than the BBC.

Incidentally, I suppose this is a side-note, but it was also pointed out in the context of Roberts' reply that Fred Kaplan's early criticisms, aside from being thoroughly inaccurate, actually contained a misquotation. Kaplan excerpts the following from the detailed summary: "We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the
post-war period." The statement, lifted from the detailed summary (normally available here, but the server appears to be down), is cut off early and interpolated with a full-stop. The sentence in fact reads "We estimate that there were 98 000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000–194 000) during the post-war period in the 97% of Iraq represented by all the clusters except Falluja." Small point - it just means that a ubiquitous rendering of the findings is wrong: 98,000 is not the figure for the whole of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Italian television broadcasts evidence that the US used white phosphorous on civilians:

Shocking revelation RAI News 24. Use of chemical weapons by the US military in Iraq. Veteran admits: Bodies melted away before us.

White phosphorous used on the civilian populace: This is how the US "took" Fallujah.

New napalm formula also used.

You can watch the video here.