Posted on 01/13/2008 9:39:28 AM PST by OCCASparky
A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.
The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.
New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.
“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.
The Lancet study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led by Les Roberts, an associate professor and epidemiologist at Columbia University. He reportedly opposed the war from the outset.
His team surveyed 1,849 homes at 47 sites across Iraq, asking people about births, deaths and migration in their households.
Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 (£23,000) of the approximate £50,000 cost of the study had come from Soros’s Open Society Institute.
Roberts said this weekend: “In retrospect, it was probably unwise to have taken money that could have looked like it would result in a political slant. I am adamant this could not have affected the outcome of the research.”
The Lancet did not break any rules by failing to disclose Soros’s sponsorship.
...Not for Rosie O'Donnell.
And yet the results were 400% overstated. Another fake but true? OK, if you say Soros money didn't slant the research than it must have been the bias of the researchers themselves, because the fact remains that the study is seriously wrong.
Honestly. I find zero rational reason to even assume that any attempt at conducting this survey ever actually took place.
There’s no way in hell that anyone can convince me that anyone wandered around in Iraqi towns, knocking on strangers doors, during the heights of the violent times in Iraq.
If it had been attempted, we’d have read and heard constant reportage of the surveyors being slaughtered.
No youtube vids of beheaded surveyors, no survey took place.
Give me a set of Iraqi phone books and 4 or 5 native Iraqi speakers, and I could easily manufacture such a “survey” without ever leaving my living room.
Take a short hop into Iraq to get the passport stamp and a hotel receipt, and walla, impeachable evidence of proper conduct.
So?
I want to know how it got into the Lancet. This Journal has been around for centuries and is peer reviewed. This demonstrates a total breakdown of the editorial and peer review process I believe is unprecedented. It would be a fitting punishment if the editor(s) responsible for this travesty were fired and the reviewers were removed from the list of contributors. What an abrogation of medical ethics! It seem science is becoming inexorably intertwined with politics and ideology. Lets not forget about money, although I pray not.
You MISS the point....
At no point was this ever about accuracy. It was about PROPOGANDA. And it worked.
It had the desired effect, and it has been repeated and cited over, and over, and over by the Anti-War left.
But, the left has lost The-War-Against-The-War.
No. Actually. I got the point long ago when this first came out and was discussed to pieces at Tim Blair’s blog, long ago.
My point is that there’s no reason to even assume that the thing ever happened at all. The proclivity toward bad practice and blatant manipulation by those on the left is grotesque in it’s extremity and no limits should be assumed to their malfeasance.
I also shake my head in wonder at those who assume that simply because it appeared in print, it must have actually taken place.
“Tolerating this tripe is akin to supporting it.”
Amen.
Yet no one from the MSM ever applied simple logic and observation to this number when asserted by its champions.
What a surprise and shock! NOT.
Soros isn’t “anti-war,” he’s anti-freedom. I’m quite sure he has fully supported wars that furthered his own interests.
ping
The Lancet????!!!!??????!!!!
That publication's reputation up until now has been impeccable. What were the editors thinking, rushing this into print without proper peer review . . .
It doesn't take much to trash a good name that has been stellar since 1823 . . . and they're working on it. And you never really get it back.
Support Our Military. And pray for the sanity of our Commander In Chief.
he is not anti-war. he is anti-American.
It is a technic perfected by Hitler and addopted by Stalin.
“The Big Lie” technic of propaganda.
The idea is that people will believe it because nobody would be so flagrant...
And it works with the uninformed...
Yep, it’s also the angle of lie consistently enough, long enough and the lie will eventually become accepted as truth by simple agreement fatigue.
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