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"The other day, there was a letter-to-the-editor in my local paper claiming that 79% of the civilian casualties in Iraq - claimed by some anti-war group as about 95,000 - have been caused by US/Coalition forces. That figure strikes me as intuitively false; does anyone have any info on this?"

It’s from the Lancet Report, about a year and a half ago. That total number of civilian war dead is something like 4 times the latest UN report released this month. The methodology is also crap. They apparently identified 33 “random” clusters, some in Fallujah, and asked residents how many people in their family died and by whom. Here’s an interesting critique:

“When asked about the methodological soundness of using a self-report survey of a population that believes Yassar Arafat is a hero, Jews control the world, the US is in Iraq to steal oil, beheading videos are sexier than porn, and that whenever Abu Musab al-Zarqawi kills a hostage 'it's the Yankee imperialist's fault', the authors responded by saying, "Timmy." ”