Not that the moonbats will pay much attention, but the Lancet report from 2004 claiming a hundred thousand civilian casualties in Iraq as a result of removing Saddam has been further discredited.

Why should the truth keep them from conducting business as usual?

Like a newspaper correction on page 14 three weeks later the damage has already been done and the news of the retraction will not get the same exposure.

I think the Lancet study decision makers understood this when they released faulty statistics in the first place. They went political and the people that like Lancet will forgive them because of the "underlying truth" or whatever nonsense Dan Rather said.

I think the Lancet study decision makers understood this when they released faulty statistics in the first place. They went political and the people that like Lancet will forgive them because of the "underlying truth" or whatever nonsense Dan Rather said.

I think that's correct. If you look at blog posts defending the Lancet report, they are mostly arguments from authority, based ultimately on something that someone like Tim Lambert or Daniel Davies wrote, and written by people who haven't read the Lancet article or the critiques and who don't even make an attempt to understand the issues. The bogus "100k civilian deaths" figure continues to be quoted widely, and the study authors subsequently released a follow-up that alleges 600k civilian deaths -- an absurd number if you think about it, but very clever as propaganda because it shifts the death-count baseline upward and makes 100k seem reasonable.

For me, the deciding factor was that their estimates for people who died by explosion were out of whack. One can claim with some justification that death certificates aren't properly recorded by the government or that the newspapers don't record all shootings. But death by explosion is a very visible and well-tracked form of death. It's highly unlikely IMHO that sites such as the Iraq Body Count would get things that wrong.

To be clear, the Lancet studies said nothing about whether the casualties were civilian or not. It was a straight-up excess mortality estimation exercise.

To be clear, the Lancet studies said nothing about whether the casualties were civilian or not.

Did they say whether the casualties were humans or not? Chordate animals or not? Maybe that's the source of the discrepancy. Probably a lot of mice and frogs have been snuffed by all that heavy armor driving around.