From Michael Fumento, writing for the Scripps-Howard News Service (), some important information about the propaganda jihad:
The Bush campaign survived three October Surprise attacks from abroad. The alleged missing munitions allegation has deservedly died, and The Osama bin Laden Show probably actually helped the President. But the third attack, malicious and false though it be, may survive to be used by both Iraqi rebels and war opponents. That’s the report in the British medical journal The Lancet claiming the U.S. has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the invasion.
To come up with that figure, lead author Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and fellow researchers sent Iraqis to interview 998 families in 33 neighborhoods across the country. They asked how many people in each household had died and of what, then extrapolated to Iraq as a whole. Thence the 100,000 figure, which they said came mostly from airstrikes and insisted was “conservative.” But try “worthless.”
Consider just this: Because the sample size was so small, the range for deaths was wider than Mick Jagger’s mouth: 8,000 to 194,000. So Roberts and company just split the difference. They said the tiny sample size was necessary because the interviewers were in constant danger. No doubt they meant being caught in the crosshairs of an F-16, rather than any possible threat from those jolly terrorists who routinely kidnap civilians and slowly saw off their heads.
Further, the researchers didn’t feel bound by anything official like death certificates. Interviews were fine. “In the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths,” they wrote.
Such faith in the honesty of Iraqis is touching. But these are the people who gave us “Baghdad Bob” and are quoted daily saying U.S. airstrikes killed only innocents. It’s as if we had developed a chip that makes our weapons zero in on civilians.
Read it all.