Friday, January 11, 2008
George Soros Funds Phony Lancet Study,
Dems Eat Up And Spread The Lies
So it comes as no surprise - at least to those of us not in the Democrat Party or those of us who contain even a molecule of objectivity - that the Big Sugar Daddy of the Left, George Soros - aka real name György Schwartz - funded a false study that erroneously over-estimated the number of dead Iraqi people and was intentionally meant to be misleading.
It was just a bit before the 2006 U.S. Election that the Lancet proclaimed 650,000 or more deaths of Iraqis. Huh - how about that timing and release of that study, just before the election.
The New York Post story calls the Soros-Lancet study a "sham":
Anti-Bush billionaire George Soros helped finance a dubious study of Iraqi casualties that was rushed into print on the eve of the 2006 elections, according to a new report.
Soros, who gave more than $20 million to prevent President Bush's re-election, contributed $45,000 of the $145,000 that was spent on the study, the National Journal disclosed.
The study, which The Lancet, a British medical journal, published three weeks before the midterm elections, made major headlines around the world with claims that some 650,000 Iraqis died in the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and the ensuing chaos.
Two of the study's co-authors told the National Journal that they opposed the war and submitted their findings to Lancet with the insistence that it appear before the election.
[...]
The 650,000 figure was regarded with skepticism when the study appeared because it was vastly higher than estimates by the US government (30,000) and the Iraqi government (50,000).
Even an antiwar activist group, Iraq Body Count, claimed 45,000 dead, a fraction of the Lancet figure.
Many anti-war activists received the Lancet numbers with glee, and touted it as an example of US lying.
But the National Journal found that some of the methods used to gather data seemed designed to boost that death count
The researchers interviewed far fewer people than were spoken to for other casualty studies, and seemed to focus on places where people were more likely to be killed, it said.
CBS News called the report a "new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq." CNN began its report this way: "War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports." Within a week, the study had been featured in 25 news shows and 188 articles in U.S. newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
[...]
Over the past several months, National Journal has examined the 2006 Lancet article, and another [PDF] that some of the same authors published in 2004; probed the problems of estimating wartime mortality rates; and interviewed the authors and their critics. NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros's Open Society Institute.
[...]
The Lancet study was based on techniques developed by public health experts to determine rates of illness and death from epidemics and famines in large populations. This "cluster" sampling is a relatively new methodology that attempts to replicate the logic of public opinion polling in Third World locales that lack a telecommunications infrastructure.
Riyadh Lafta [was] to recruit and oversee researchers who could conduct field surveys in Iraq.
Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease, or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In 2000, Lafta authored at least two brief articles contending that U.N. sanctions had caused many deaths by starvation among Iraqi children. In one article, he identified malnutrition as the main contributor to 53 percent of deaths among hospitalized children younger than 2, during a 1997 survey carried out at Saddam Central Teaching Hospital. The article cited no health data from before the sanctions, yet it asserted, "We can conclude from results that the most important and widespread underlying cause of the deterioration of child-health standards in Iraq is the long-term impact of the nonhumanized economic sanction imposed through United Nations resolutions."
Do yourself a favor and click on the above link to the National Journal story that debunks the Lancet study. Do this, because the MSM isn't going to report on this and the Liberals and Progressives certainly aren't going to do an about-face and admit they were wrong and that they were lying. No, the Left still stands by the absurd number of 650,000 or more dead.
It's funny how much the rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth-Left worships György Schwartz. If he were a Republican, the Left would be calling him a "neocon" because he's Jewish and the Far Left simply hates Jews and Israel. György also profited personally from war - he's a war profiteer - which is something the Left claims they disdain. But I guess they can subvert their reality when they have a rich Jew on their side that hates Bush and Cheney as much as they do.
It doesn't take much to be a Democrat these days. You don't need character, you don't need principles or morals, you don't need logic or facts. No, to be a Democrat you only need to live in denial and appeasement. You need only to hate any political ideology that isn't handed down from Democrat Politburo Central. You have to hate America and the U.S. Military, even though you'll espouse the opposing rhetoric when questioned. You need to be a hypocrite of the most worst and shallow kind. And hatred, unbound and unlimited Hatred for any ideology that is not yours. This is what it takes to be a Democrat.
©2008
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: 4:59 PM, January 11, 2008 
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