“Who is says?” Apparently wingnuts don’t even put stuff out in English.

Note that I never said that Arabic language sources are always not simultaneously, to some degree, available in English in some respect as well. Do you need me for this conversation, or are you content to respond to things I’ve never said?

All I said is that I doubted it was a source, since when I was following the IBC, they refused to use non-English sources, and they didn’t use sources not on the internet. If your citation is accurate, then it was being used a single time as a source two full years after I stopped following it, so I accept on this that I was wrong. However, as to what they’re now doing, I don’t know and neither do you, so all this talk of translation services is so much chaff and frankly irrelevant.

What’s more irritating is that you consistently miss the point: using this source to critique the Lancet study is misapplied because a) they have undercounted Iraqi deaths, regardless of how carefully they’re doing it now and b) this undercounting was most in evidence when the war was at its height and c) therefore their numbers can, at best, only be a minimum level for Iraqi war dead. That is a minimum, not maximum.

No, one doesn’t. You see, this is because the papers were presented in the context of a medical journal, where it is assumed that the readers are capable of thinking.

When you are estimating something as important as the number of people dead and your estimate suggests there’s 10 times more dead people than anyone can find, you’d wanna make that explanation a good one.
So far, zip. Nothin. That sound reasonable to you does it ?

Yes, it does. One is not likely to miss deaths due to natural causes, particularly when there are doctors around to sign a death certificate. However, you are not often going to find death certificates for the victims of sustained bombing campaigns, because the deaths cover a much broader area and any doctors which have not already been killed or incapacitated are going to want to be as far away from where the bombs are falling as possible. Therefore, in any situation inside a war zone suffering from heavy bombing, the deaths by natural causes are going to be overrepresented compared to the deaths by bombings in those cases for which documentary evidence (i.e. the death certificate) exists, and the heavier the bombing, the greater the degree of divergence. Any competent statistician could have come up with that.

What I really love about the arguments here is the light it shines on wingnuts’ unwillingness to engage in any substantative way with the data on hand. Instead, it’s all insinuation, arguments from ignorance, and a panoply of embarrassing gaffes (like the assumption of a unimodal model for assessing death rates, which leads to the zombie threat in Iraq) that would make even the most minimally self-aware being hang its head in shame.

Stat boy 2 : No, I reckon we just killed a big number of innocent people here, don’t get carried away.

SB1 : I’ve done some checking and seriously, vast…

SB2 : No, I reckon you’re still wrong, it is just a bit huge, not vast, nowhere near vast. Why not check again?

SB1 : Well, I would go back and check again but I’d be afraid of being killed by roving gangs of kidnappers, murderers, Islamist nutjobs, Militias, Trigger happy occupiers, or just pissed off relatives.

SB2 : Well, you’re in a pretty weak position then aren’t you. I’m going to have to declare your conclusion invalid.

*Meanwhile in Iraq*

Newly minted Iraqi orphan : Who’s going to look after me now?

Islamist militia : Come here little one.

Enraged Iraqi Ex-Dad : While you’re here, can I get some explosives and perhaps maps of US convoy routes?

IM : No problem, plenty for everyone.

*Meanwhile*

George Bush : Watch this drive!

jade said, July 29, 2007 at 10:04

You live in an outlying suburb of Baghdad. Your child dies. Do you…

a) Cart his body across town, through several roadblocks, to the morgue, to get a piece of paper, or…

b) Bury him
Let’s see if you can figure it out. Okay?

Clearly you’re not going to bury anything until you collect the body.
The 9/10 figure I’ve been referring to is violent deaths. Are you still not bothering to go to the hospital for that same piece of paper that entitles you to compensation, death benefits and estate claims if that’s where your dead child is located ? Where you need to go to collect it ?

You know what looks good when you try to look smart, fail miserably and succeed in only making yourself look stupid, twice. Talking about how small other people’s brains are. Really.

The key issue is whether the Iraqi government or a network of researchers has more credibility. To address this concern, we ask ourselves questions like
(1) Which source of information is propped up by an occupying army?

Neither. Iraqi hospitals aren’t under the control of the US military or the Iraqi government.

(2) Which source of information is cobbled together from a tangle of opposing interest groups, ranging from the merely venial to those that operate torture chambers as part of the Ministry of the Interior?

As the guy pointed out above, the primary source for these records and the incentive for them to be kept are the family of the deceased.

So while you’re asking yourself questions, ask whether you think that Iraq-wide (as this survey was) that there’s not only “opposing interests” among the family members of the dead who are claiming bodies (that the police find and are delivered to hospitals) to this degree that it could account for such an anomaly, but that it has also done so in completely the opposite trend that the survey itself suggests.
Your answer ?
Yes, that’s right, you don’t buy that bullshit either.

IMO, there are sufficient reasons not to take official Iraqi govt. death statistics seriously. I am not saying that they are completely divorced from reality, just that they are undergoing a trial separation.

Except that we’re not talking about “official figures” from the government.
And that places like the LAT have surveyed regional hospital records vs those reported by the government and found no such massive manipulation.

Nullifidian said, July 29, 2007 at 10:07
Here’s the difference between a survey and a complete tally: you don’t have to catch everything in a survey; that’s what makes it a survey. The numbers for the percentage of recorded surveyed deaths and the percentage of the total recorded deaths do not have to be equal. At all. Ever.

No shit. You do however have to bridge those two poles with an explanation when your source samples show one extreme and your extrapolations of those samples show the opposite extreme.
When you are estimating something as important as the number of people dead and your estimate suggests there’s 10 times more dead people than anyone can find, you’d wanna make that explanation a good one.
So far, zip. Nothin. That sound reasonable to you does it ?

Every country? The Iraq Body Count website is based off of the figures reported in the Western media. “There is a world elsewhere” and when it’s in one’s backyard, the reporting tends to be a bit more detailed.

Bullshit. All they do is collate deaths info from newspapers. WTF kind of odds did you think the odds were that after 4 years they hadn’t figured out the arabic for “dead” and “killed” and been using local papers ?

While the war was on, and thereafter, I read articles in the Arab language media which were not recorded in the Iraq Body Count website, to such a degree that I simply gave up on the site entirely. I have no idea what its current “count” is, but you can be damn certain that it’s underreported.

Based on what can I be certain of this ? Your assurance that you read something once as opposed the the fucking endlessly repeated statements to that effect by IBC ?
You remember IBC…. it was that source I didn’t refer to.

Um, it’s on the iraqbodycount database page, under the heading “sources”. The list you posted is obviously not an exhaustive one of everything they use, and it even says so. It was probably put there in 2003 when they first wrote up the notes you drew it from.

“particularly since they explain that they go to sources in English (Al-Taakhi is in Arabic, for example) and that they use sources which are consistently available via the internet (which is not the case for Al-Taakhi either).

Who’s says sources in Arabic don’t put out stuff in English as well? And what about translation services? The fact that something is primarily in Arabic doesn’t mean that it can’t also be made available in English by various means.

I did a search for the term on the db and found this:

k2852
4 Apr 2006 -5 Apr 2006 -
Basra
professor Salah Abdul-Aziz
gunfire 1 1
AP 05 Apr
Al-Taakhi 06 Apr

That’s the only one i saw there with that term, but clearly it’s been used as a source. I also doubt the listing on their page lists every one of their sources that reports each incident. They seem to list two most of the time, but I’m sure that for many of these things there’s a lot more. For example, they list the notorious Haditha massacre as k2171, but they list just two sources: NYT and WP, but that has been talked about all over place, and by most of the sources they use a lot elsewhere. But they still list just two for it.

It’s pretty clear you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Your list must be way out of date, and it says in your link that “Further sources will be added”.

Okay, I’ve taken a look at it, and it doesn’t seem as if this list is established as the sources for the Iraq Body Count, particularly since they explain that they go to sources in English (Al-Taakhi is in Arabic, for example) and that they use sources which are consistently available via the internet (which is not the case for Al-Taakhi either). I don’t really have to explain what it’s doing there, because it’s clear enough this list includes sources which, by their own stated standards, they wouldn’t use.

I guess this because you obviously don’t know what sources they use, and say false things about it.

But I do, and I provided the list. And even if your argument were accurate, what does that have to do with what I read in the Arabic language press?

Given this i find it hard to believe you’ve been reading the Arabic press and then meticulously sifting that big database cross-checking them, let alone to this large “degree” you say.

Strawman alert! In fact, all I said is that I had been reading the Arabic-language press, would find things that were not included in the Iraq Body Count, and would then file that away mentally as a personal data point against them, which led me to stop following the website very early in 2004. Perhaps they’ve improved their research since then, taking in non-English and non-internet resources, but even so that doesn’t make their numbers in the least bit reflective of overall reality. For one thing, it doesn’t account for the deaths that don’t get reported in the press, and it doesn’t overcome their initial deficiency in reporting numbers. At best, it simply establishes a lower limit for the deaths in Iraq. Using it to critique the Lancet study, therefore, is an exercise in stupidity.

I think you’re making all this stuff up just to trash Iraq Body Count because you wan’t people to disregard it and believe the Lancet study, iow, lying.

Well, you’re wrong, and you’re an idiot if you think so. In fact, that’s a bit superfluous–you’re just an idiot.

If I had wanted to try to convince people to believe the Lancet study, then I would have gone into a great deal of discussion about the robustness of their methodology and how it’s the same well-established one that has been used to estimate deaths from genocides in Rwanda, Sudan, Kampuchea, etc.

The fact is that I simply do not trust the Iraq Body Count as a resource, and was saying why.

I guess this because you obviously don’t know what sources they use, and say false things about it. Given this i find it hard to believe you’ve been reading the Arabic press and then meticulously sifting that big database cross-checking them, let alone to this large “degree” you say. I think you’re making all this stuff up just to trash Iraq Body Count because you wan’t people to disregard it and believe the Lancet study, iow, lying.

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/sources.php

Take a look at it. I just copied-pasted a bunch of the obviously non “Western” sources listed near the beginning of that list.

Your list must be way out of date, and it says in your link that “Further sources will be added”.

Well, it appears the Iraq Body Count site agrees with me:

ABC – ABC News (USA)
AFP – Agence France-Presse
AP – Associated Press
AWST – Aviation Week and Space Technology
Al Jaz – Al Jazeera network
BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation
BG – Boston Globe
Balt. Sun – The Baltimore Sun
CT – Chicago Tribune
CO – Commondreams.org
CSM – Christian Science Monitor
DPA – Deutsche Presse-Agentur
FOX – Fox News
GUA – The Guardian (London)
HRW – Human Rights Watch
HT – Hindustan Times
ICRC – International Committ of the Red Cross
IND – The Independent (London)
IO – Intellnet.org
JT – Jordan Times
LAT – Los Angeles Times
MEN – Middle East Newsline
MEO – Middle East Online
MER – Middle East Report
MH – Miami Herald
NT – Nando Times
NYT – New York Times
Reuters – (includes Reuters Alertnet)
SABC – South African Broadcasting Corporation
SMH – Sydney Morning Herald
Sg.News – The Singapore News
Tel- The Telegraph (London)
Times – The Times (London)
TOI – Times of India
TS – Toronto Star
UPI – United Press International
WNN – World News Network
WP – Washington Post

Out of all of these, only five are media from the Arab world. The inclusion of two Indian newspapers doesn’t change the overall Western thrust of their count, and of all the sources they have listed, they’re all in English or also available in English.

I don’t know where you got your list, but I can see why you didn’t cite it. It seems like you just compiled it out of thin air from a listing of Arabic language media.

As for your “Yeah, right.”, how do you know what I have and haven’t read?

Thanks for summarizing the Deltoid discussion, Herr Doktor. dsquared has a new post at Crooked Timber if you’re interested and haven’t seen it yet.

Actually, too generous. I should have pointed out that the “a” in Null’s false dichotomy was just wrong to begin with. The above indicates that you don’t need to “cart the body” around to obtain the “piece of paper” that Lancet says people do obtain for 90% of deaths. You need a medical report and the person’s id documents.

Death certificates
Death certificates, needed in order to obtain retirement benefits for the spouse or children as well
as for inheritance purposes, are issued by the MoH Births/Deaths Administrative Offices located in Public Hospitals. Death certificates are usually issued within two days.

The issuance of a death certificate is free.

Let’s see if you can figure it out. Okay?

If the 90% death certificate rate in Lancet is right, people do “a” about 90% of the time.

Checking the sources brings up:
Al-Zaman
Al-Zaman
Al-Alam TV
Al-Alam TV
Al-Arab
Al Arabiya TV
Al-Furat
Al-Furat
Al-Ittihad
Al-Ittihad
Al-Jaz
Al Jazeera (Web)
Al-Jaz TV
Al Jazeera TV
Al-Shar
Al Sharqiyah TV
Al-Taakhi
Al-Taakhi
ALB
Al-Bawaba
Arab N
Arab News
Arabic N
Arabic News
ArN
Arabic News
AS
Asahi Shimbun
Asharq Al A
Asharq Al Awsat
ASB
As-Sabah
AST
Asia Times
AT
Arab Times

etc. etc. etc.

I don’t know what Null thinks constitutes the “Western media”, but it seems to not be what anyone else would mean by the term.

“I read articles in the Arab language media which were not recorded in the Iraq Body Count website, to such a degree that I simply gave up on the site entirely.”

Yeah, right.

Kilo, otoh, seems to have a brain in his head:

“Lancet states their surveyed deaths correlate with official death certificates to a 90% degree. Those estimates are the ones that suggest only 1 in 10 violent deaths in Iraq is recorded by any means at all, let alone official records.”

Exactly. The Lancet numbers are obviously horse-hockey unless you buy a huge conspiracy to suppress and hide all this paper trail (and all those bodies), and which has completely fooled everyone everywhere except the Lancet. Please. The Lancet is a fluke or a fraud.

IMO, there are sufficient reasons not to take official Iraqi govt. death statistics seriously. I am not saying that they are completely divorced from reality, just that they are undergoing a trial separation.