PJ Media

Unfortunately you failed to ask the most obvious question: In their 2004 study with the same methodology they found over 200.000 killed in Falujah alone. This was obviously too large, so they just removed the Falujah cluster. But the researchers did no attempt what so ever to explain what bias gave rise to this absurd figure, and used the same method to get the 655.000 figure.

To me this is clearly unscientific. If their method worked, why would you get 200.000 dead in Falujah? Since they seem to believe in their study, do they actually believe half of the city was killed, without anyone noticing? Why don’t they offer a reasonable explanation of the bias? The most likely explanation of the 655.000 figure is that the same bias is in place, absurdly inflating the deaths.

By the way I am hardly convinced by the answer to several of the questions.

1. “What makes you believe that Iraq is deadlier than the American Civil War?

Burnham: What we are reporting is cumulative deaths over a 40 month period throughout an area of 26.1 million, not a 1-2 day battle field event.”

The civil war was fought over 4 years, and in area with a 32+ million population.

2. “Do you have any specific information about where these 97,000 people were killed?

Burnham: We did not report on suicide bombers”

They sample 300 violent death postinvasion, of whom 38 died from car bombs and 42 “Other explosion/ordnance”. This makes for 27% of the 601 000 violent deaths reported by the study, that is 160.000 killed in explosions (655.000 includes more non-violent deaths as well).

Regardless if the car bombs and explosions were “suicide” bombings or not 160.000 is 10-20 times more than all reported killed in bombings (Brookings Iraq index has a figure of 8300).

This translates to about 130 civilian Iraqis killed every day by explosions EVERY DAY since the war began! Given that the arab and western media gives a lot of attention to these bombings, how do we explain that we miss almost all of these bombs? Which is more likely, that the study is flawed, or that 90-95% of massive car bombs/explosions simply go unnoticed?

Instead of answering the question Burnham doges it on a linguistic technicality, because they don’t report on “suicide” bombings, just bombings.

3. It is true that in this study they “only” report 80,000 killed by airs strikes (more than those killed directly in Nagasaki). This still does not answer the question of how we get so many killed by airs bombings, largely AFTER civilian bombings stopped.

This “scientific” estimate of Iraqis killed from air strikes is twice that of those killed during the Blitz, where the reinforce of Nazi Germany was intentionally trying to kill as many people as possible. No attempt is made to explain the bias, expect noting that the people speak English.

Whatever bias is driving the Falujah deaths to 200.000 is probably driving the rest of the study.