Burying the Lancet report . . . and the children

Over a year ago, an international team of epidemiologists headed by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health completed a "cluster sample survey" of civilian casualties in Iraq. Its findings contradicted central elements of the narrative of the war that politicians and journalists had presented to the American public and the world. After excluding the results from Anbar province as a statistical anomaly and half the increase in infant mortality as possible "recall bias," they estimated that at least 98,000 Iraqi civilians had died in the previous 18 months as a direct result of the invasion and occupation of their country. They also found that violence had become the leading cause of death in Iraq during that period (51 percent or 24 percent with or without Anbar). However, their most significant finding was that the vast majority (79 percent) of violent deaths were caused by "coalition" forces using "helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry," and that almost half (48 percent) of these were children, with a median age of eight...

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