Monday, October 25, 2010

Undercounting the Iraq War Dead

By Nicolas J S Davies
October 25, 2010

The documents on the U.S. War in Iraq published by WikiLeaks contained data on 15,000 Iraqis killed in incidents that were previously unreported in the Western media or by the Iraqi Health Ministry, and therefore not counted in compilations of reported Iraqi war deaths by Iraqbodycount.org.

Read on.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Epidemiologist Dr. John Burnham of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University - highly regarded co-author of the studies published in Lancet - was severely punished by his academic institution for having 'violated' the confidentiality of a tiny number of respondents among the thousands who were surveyed. An academic board of his cowardly 'peers' publicly rebuked him for ineffectively coding the Arabic names of a few respondents. Prof. Burham does not speak or read Arabic. The humiliating public rebuke and punishment - preventing him from engaging in independent research for 5 or 10 years - was unprecedented in its vindictive severity and effective as an object lesson to any other American academic tempted to engage in research activities unflattering to the military empire. This assignment to 'non-personhood' was designed to discredit Burnham and, by extension, the results of the most in depth and courageous surveys in violent civilian deaths in Iraq since the US invasion. The major science, like Science, and medical journals, like the NEJM, have parroted the administration-orchestrated discrediting of Roberts and Burnham. Burnham has paid the biggest professional price.