Other's Have Noticed

Cursor.org picked up this post from Left I on the News disputing the UN report on Iraqi civilian casualties in 2006. There is a telling "update" following the post:

• "A friend heard an NPR report on the U.N. report this morning. After an expert guest explained the limitations of the U.N. report (e.g., some deaths go unreported), he then explained the "better method" of actually surveying the population and how it had been done twice. But, here's the kicker...no mention of Johns Hopkins or the Lancet, and no mention of the actual numbers produced by those studies! And, you won't be surprised to hear, no follow-up question from the NPR interviewer to ask what those numbers were."

It was even worse on Morning Edition that day. Renee Montagne said, "The UN reports more than 34,000 civilians died in Iraq last year, another 36,000 were wounded....the figures are a sharp increase from those previously reported. Earlier in the month the death toll was put at slightly more than 12,000 by the Iraqi government."

No Renee, the figures are a decrease from the approximately 200,000 a year estimate of the Hopkins/Lancet study, which as Left I's friend noted doesn't even get a mention. To see earlier critiques of NPR's assaults on the Lancet study click on the "civilian casualties" label below.

Passive Attack

This morning offered an interesting contrast between coverage of a story by BBC radio and NPR. I woke up to hear Dan Damon of the BBC interviewing one of the authors of the latest study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health--the study, published in The Lancet, concludes that between 426,369 to 793,663 violent deaths of Iraqi civilians have occured since the US invasion of Iraq.
Then about twenty minutes later I heard Anne Garrels of NPR discrediting the report by noting "that the timing and methodology are being scrutinized," that the previous Lancet Report in 2004 was "criticized as high" and that this current study has numbers that are "more than ten times Iraq Body Count."
This offered a real study. Dan Damon is one of the BBC characters that really irks me--he is hard-hitting and aggressive in his questioning with guests whose politics he is at odds with. At times he is even self-righteous and sarcastic. BUT, in this case, his highly skeptical questions about the report were directed at one of the authors of the report, who answered his questions knowledgably and carefully--frequently explaining the methodology and why the numbers differ from other estimates. It was INFORMATIVE--and listeners could draw their own conclusions. Anne Garrels, by contrast, simply provided the negative reactions of nameless critics (who clearly have a stake in keeping the numbers low).
For thoses wanting more, Juan Cole offers a far more cogent look at the report and how it will be attacked.

Body Counts

"...75,000 people have died on both sides of the Iraq War" asserts Christopher Fettweis, assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. And does John Ydstie mention that this figure is grossly understated based on the respected Lancet Study -which found IRAQI CIVILIAN deaths as high as 655,000 back in October of 2006. No surprise, really, since NPR has made a practice out of savaging the Lancet numbers (numbers which even the Blair government secretly acknowledged as accurate).

Fettweis was trying to make the point that the US loss in Vietnam was a greater "moral" failure than Iraq is - but, hey, there's still a few more years for the US to match the slaughter it achieved in Vietnam.

I will say that Fettweis was at least on to discuss the obvious fact that the US effort in Iraq is a failure.