1.2 Million Iraqis killed in war

Byrnzie

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2170237,00.html

Greenspan admits Iraq was about oil, as deaths put at 1.2m


Peter Beaumont and Joanna Walters in New York
Sunday September 16, 2007
The Observer


The man once regarded as the world's most powerful banker has bluntly declared that the Iraq war was 'largely' about oil.
Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and retired last year after serving four presidents, Alan Greenspan has been the leading Republican economist for a generation and his utterings instantly moved world markets.

In his long-awaited memoir - out tomorrow in the US - Greenspan, 81, who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, writes: 'I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.'

In The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, he is also crystal clear on his opinion of his last two bosses, harshly criticising George W Bush for 'abandoning fiscal constraint' and praising Bill Clinton's anti-deficit policies during the Nineties as 'an act of political courage'. He also speaks of Clinton's sharp and 'curious' mind, and 'old-fashioned' caution about the dangers of debt.

Greenspan's damning comments about the war come as a survey of Iraqis, which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.

More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials. The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1,461 adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency, ORB, which asked a random selection of Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.

Previous estimates gave a range between 390,000 and 940,000, the most prominent of which - collected by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and reported in the Lancet in October 2006 - suggested 654,965 deaths.

Although the household survey was carried out by a polling organisation, rather than researchers, it has again raised the spectre that the 2003 invasion has caused a far more substantial death toll than officially acknowledged.

The ORB survey follows an earlier report by the organisation which suggested that one in four Iraqi adults had lost a family member to violence. The latest survey suggests that in Baghdad that number is as high as one in two. If true, these latest figures would suggest the death toll in Iraq now exceeds that of the Rwandan genocide in which about 800,000 died.

The Lancet survey was criticised by some experts and by George Bush and British officials. In private, however, the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser Sir Roy Anderson described it as 'close to best practice'.

Bu2

And I have to say, this quote stood out, for me: "Alan Greenspan has been the leading Republican economist for a generation and his utterings instantly moved world markets.

His utterance that the Iraq war is all about oil tells me that Alan isn't the leading Republican economist any longer, heh heh....

But as for his utterings instantly moving world markets -- Yes! That has long been the case. Interesting that he spoke about a sitting president so bluntly, for all the world to see.....I like it!!

Byrnzie

Bu2 wrote:

And I have to say, this quote stood out, for me: "Alan Greenspan has been the leading Republican economist for a generation and his utterings instantly moved world markets.

His utterance that the Iraq war is all about oil tells me that Alan isn't the leading Republican economist any longer, heh heh....

But as for his utterings instantly moving world markets -- Yes! That has long been the case. Interesting that he spoke about a sitting president so bluntly, for all the world to see.....I like it!!

I'd say that the more significant aspect of the article is that the latest survey of Iraqi deaths puts the figure at over 1.2 Million, wouldn't you?

Bu2

but I already knew that.

Byrnzie

http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/sep2007/orb-s15.shtml

RolandTD20Kdrummer

Hey they trumped the Iran Iraq war already by a quarter mill.

Only another QM to go before they edge out Vietnam now.

I wonder if they have one of those telethon thermometers in the pentagon?

Only a few more million to go!

Byrnzie

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/sep2007/orb-s15.shtml

British polling agency: More than one million Iraqi deaths since US invasion
By Patrick Martin
15 September 2007

As part of its campaign to justify a long-term US occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration has increasingly resorted to warning of chaos and even genocide in the wake of a withdrawal of American troops. But a new report suggests that something akin to genocide is already taking place, under American auspices.

The British polling agency ORB reported Thursday that the death toll in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion has passed the one million mark.

According to ORB, US-occupied Iraq, with an estimated 1.2 million violent deaths, has “a murder rate that now exceeds the Rwanda genocide from 1994 (800,000 murdered),” with another one million wounded and millions more driven from their homes into internal or external exile.

ORB (Opinion Research Business), which has conducted polls in Iraq since 2005, released the findings of a survey of 1,461 adults across the country. Among other questions, it asked: “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (i.e., as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.”

Of those responding, 78 percent said their households had experienced no violent deaths, 16 percent had experienced one death, 5 percent two deaths, 1 percent three deaths or more. Given the number of households in the country, 4,050,597 according to 2005 census figures, this works out to nearly 1.2 million deaths.

By far the worst death rate was in Baghdad, where nearly half of all those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household. The reported death rate in Diyala province (Baquba) was 42 percent, and in Ninewa province (Mosul), 35 percent.

The survey found that 48 percent of the violent deaths were due to gunshot wounds, 20 percent to car bombs, 9 percent to aerial bombardment, 6 percent to other ordnance or explosions, and 6 percent to accidents.

The figure for aerial bombardments is particularly noteworthy since such deaths—numbering well over 100,000 according to the ORB study—go virtually unreported in the American media. This is doubtless because such killings are entirely the work of the US and British occupation forces, the only ones equipped with helicopters and warplanes.

The ORB survey found a far higher death rate than the figures released by Western media outlets, the US-established Iraqi government in Baghdad, or the United Nations. But it dovetails with the public health survey conducted last year by a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins University and published in the British medical journal Lancet, which estimated the death toll (as of early 2006, nearly 18 months ago), at about 665,000.

The Lancet figures were denounced by the US and Iraqi governments and dismissed by the American media, and the ORB figures are likely to face the same fate. The study’s findings were reported only in passing in Friday’s daily newspapers, most prominently by the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe, not at all by the New York Times or Washington Post.

None of the network evening news broadcasts on Friday even mentioned the ORB report.

Opinion Research Business is not a left-wing or antiwar group, but an established polling organization, founded in 1994 by Gordon Heald, who headed Gallup Britain from 1980 to 1994. Its customers include the huge mining concern Anglo American, the Bank of Scotland, and the Conservative Party. Its non-executive director is Geoffrey Martin OBE, currently special adviser to the secretary general on strategic relationships of the British Commonwealth.

The ORB survey was based on face-to-face interviews conducted between August 12 and August 19 among a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults (of whom 1,461 responded), with a standard margin of error of 2.4 percent. Random sampling was used to select those interviewed in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces.

For security reasons, no interviews were conducted in Al Anbar or Karbala provinces, or in the province of Irbil, where Kurdish authorities refused to allow field interviews. Since Anbar and Karbala are among the bloodiest battlefields of the war, and Irbil among the quietest, the exclusion of the three provinces would more likely to lead to an underestimation of the death toll than an exaggeration.

The ORB study was made public on the same day that President Bush went on national television to deliver a report on conditions in Iraq that was nothing short of delusional. With a million Iraqis dead, a million wounded, and four to five million displaced, Bush hailed the return of “normal life” to the devastated country. “Sectarian killings are down, and ordinary life is beginning to return,” he said.

The next day Bush and Vice President Cheney appeared before hand-picked audiences to press their campaign for an unlimited US occupation of Iraq. Bush spoke at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia and Cheney at the Gerald Ford Museum in Michigan and the headquarters of the Central Command in Florida.

Cheney claimed that the result of a rapid US troop withdrawal would be “chaos” and “carnage,” declaring, “In all the calls we’ve heard for an American withdrawal from Iraq, these negative consequences haven’t really been denied, they’ve simply been ignored.”

Cheney raised the specter of Iranian intervention in a post-US Iraq, which “would unloose an all-out war, with the violence unlikely to be contained within Iraq. The ensuing carnage would further destabilize the Middle East and magnify the threat to our friends throughout the region.”

Bush, speaking before an audience of 250 Marines and their families in Quantico, claimed, “We got security in the right direction and we are bringing our troops home.”

Also Friday, the State Department quietly released a report noting that religious freedom has sharply deteriorated in Iraq over the past year because of the upsurge in sectarian killings, with minority religions (Sunnis in Shiite areas, Shiites in Sunni areas, secular Iraqis, Christians and smaller groups in all areas) subjected to systematic persecution.

The report cited “frequent sectarian violence including attacks on places of worship,” as well as “harassment, intimidation, kidnapping, and killings,” adding that “non-Muslims (are) especially vulnerable to pressure and violence, because of their minority status and, often, because of the lack of a protective tribal structure.”

The Democratic Party is fully complicit in the creation of conditions of near-genocide in Iraq, since the congressional Democratic leadership has refused to cut off funding for a war which has cost the lives of more than one million Iraqis, as well as over 3,700 American soldiers.

In response to Bush’s Thursday night speech, there were renewed professions of impotence by leading Senate Democrats. Barack Obama, who began his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination touting his antiwar credentials, said the Democratic-controlled Congress could not force Bush to accept a deadline for ending the war.

“One way of ending the war would be setting a timetable,” he said in a speech in Iowa. “We’re about 15 votes short. Right now it doesn’t look like we’re going to get that many votes.”

Obama was referring to the 67 votes required in the Senate to override a presidential veto. He was silent on the fact that there are other constitutional methods of ending the war, such as refusing to appropriate the funds to finance it, which the Democratic congressional leadership has rejected.

Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, told Congressional Quarterly, “The truth is we don’t have the votes to end the war.” He said Senate Democrats would seek to “move the things that we can move on domestic issues” in order to “have tangible accomplishments,” rather than persist in debates on Iraq.

Other senators endorsed this view, including Charles Schumer of New York, who said, referring to the upcoming 2008 campaign, “This election is shaping up to be about change. Not only change in Iraq, but change at home.” Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado said, “The Democratic message has to focus on things that are good for the middle class. The war should not be the only issue.”

In the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not scheduled any vote on Iraq war policy this month, although the defense authorization bill still remains to be adopted for the fiscal year beginning October 1. All indications are that the congressional Democrats will rubber-stamp both the authorization and the emergency funding bill for the war, expected to approach $200 billion, which has not yet been sent to Congress by the Bush administration.

The silence from the Democratic and Republican parties and the media on the latest evidence of mass killing and social devastation in Iraq as a result of the US colonial war and occupation underscores the complicity of the entire American ruling elite and all of its official institutions in a war crime of catastrophic proportions.

Byrnzie

The silence from the Democratic and Republican parties and the media on the latest evidence of mass killing and social devastation in Iraq as a result of the US colonial war and occupation underscores the complicity of the entire American ruling elite and all of its official institutions in a war crime of catastrophic proportions.

The silence on this message board about these latest survey findings also raises a lot of questions.

Kann

Byrnzie wrote:

If true, these latest figures would suggest the death toll in Iraq now exceeds that of the Rwandan genocide in which about 800,000 died.

The Lancet survey was criticised by some experts and by George Bush and British officials. In private, however, the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser Sir Roy Anderson described it as 'close to best practice'.[/b]

That's really really incredible. It's strange, we've been hearing about deaths in Iraq everyday for 4 years now and it's almost become a part of the day of some sort. But these numbers are still incredibely wrong. I wonder, if this ends one day, if their will be some sort of investigation a trial for what happened and is happening there.
Oh, and who actually takes Bush's, who seems to have extremely limited knowledge in any field and goes to Iraq once in a while to claim victory, criticism seriously?

Byrnzie

Kann wrote:

That's really really incredible. It's strange, we've been hearing about deaths in Iraq everyday for 4 years now and it's almost become a part of the day of some sort. But these numbers are still incredibely wrong. I wonder, if this ends one day, if their will be some sort of investigation a trial for what happened and is happening there.
Oh, and who actually takes Bush's, who seems to have extremely limited knowledge in any field and goes to Iraq once in a while to claim victory, criticism seriously?

Seems like a lot of people take his criticism seriously. All it takes is for the media to play these reports down - no network t.v channel even mentioned it.
As I said in another thread a few days ago; America is now very much resembling 1930's Germany.

'The Lancet figures were denounced by the US and Iraqi governments and dismissed by the American media, and the ORB figures are likely to face the same fate. The study’s findings were reported only in passing in Friday’s daily newspapers, most prominently by the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe, not at all by the New York Times or Washington Post.'

None of the network evening news broadcasts on Friday even mentioned the ORB report.'

jlew24asu

making up stuff is fun

Abuskedti

jlew24asu wrote:

making up stuff is fun

You prefer sticking with the unrealistically low number?

Truthmonger

jlew24asu wrote:

making up stuff is fun

Well, I reckon you Yanks would know about making shit up.

jlew24asu

Truthmonger wrote:

Well, I reckon you Yanks would know about making shit up.

even flow?

Nothing but death for the cost of change. Just ask the people, or their families who were involved in 911 how fun forced change can be. Nobody wins and we can all have fun with both sides can't we!!

my2hands

jlew24asu wrote:

um, not really that funny

ask the dead

LikeAnOpeningBandForTheSun

wait a minute. these numbers are from a pole asking households how many people they knew died?

how is this remotely scientific? i get that many deaths don't get reported to hospitals but this sounds very vague.

Abuskedti

MrSmith wrote:

wait a minute. these numbers are from a pole asking households how many people they knew died?

how is this remotely scientific? i get that many deaths don't get reported to hospitals but this sounds very vague.

Not much science in Iraq... Just projectiles.

Polling can be very effective if done properly. In this case it is the best we can hope for, while the poeple bent on keeping this horrifying secret are patroling the streets with the authority to kill anyone they view as an insurgent. Surely those searching for facts to dispute the propaganda of the war machine are insurgents.

jlew24asu

my2hands wrote:

um, not really that funny

ask the dead

I didnt say it was funny. I was simply acknowledging the fact that I agree Bush and co lied about the invasion to Iraq.

Byrnzie

jlew24asu wrote:

making up stuff is fun

I think it's disgusting that you can take such a blase attitude to these reports. Both surveys were conducted by highly respected institutions whose findings in many fields have been praised and accepted by the same people who denounce their findings in Iraq.
Your comment is an insult to all those men women and children who have died and are dying over there, including Americans.

Byrnzie

MrSmith wrote:

wait a minute. these numbers are from a pole asking households how many people they knew died?

how is this remotely scientific? i get that many deaths don't get reported to hospitals but this sounds very vague.

The survey '...asked a random selection of Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.'

But anyway, In answer to your question...

http://medialens.org/alerts/06/061031_lancet_co_author.php

LANCET REPORT CO-AUTHOR RESPONDS TO QUESTIONS

October 31, 2006
http://medialens.org/alerts/06/06103..._co_author.php

As described in our October 18 Media Alert, 'Democracy And Debate - Killing Iraq' , a recent study published in The Lancet medical journal estimated that 655,000 Iraqi people have been killed as a result of the March 2003 US-UK invasion of Iraq.

The media coverage has been appalling - the words 'Lancet' and 'Iraq' have appeared in national UK newspaper articles some 30 times, with many of these mentions in passing. There has been no serious attempt to examine the Lancet's figures, to explain how they compare to earlier findings from different studies. Anyone aspiring to understand the issue could do so only by visiting small, alternative websites, such as those run by Tim Lambert (http://www.scienceblogs.com/deltoid) and Stephen Soldz (http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/
2006/10/24/iraq-body-count-finds-a-task-worth-their-time/), and our own message board.

To its credit, the BBC website has tried harder than most mainstream media to report the issue honestly. In particular, BBC world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds - who has frequently engaged with Media Lens readers - responded to complaints by agreeing to invite questions from members of the public and to forward them to the authors of the Lancet report. On October 30, the BBC posted an edited version of answers from Les Roberts:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/6099020.stm

Below, we are publishing Roberts' unedited answers. We have also added Roberts' response to an editorial by Steven Moore in the Wall Street Journal.

1. How do you know that you are not reporting the same fatality multiple times?
For example if you were to ask people in the UK if they know anyone who has been involved in a traffic accident most would say they do. Applying your logic that means there are 60 million accidents every year.
Andrew M, London, UK

Les Roberts: That is an excellent question. To be recorded as a death in a household, the decedent had to have spent most of the nights during the 3 months before their death "sleeping under the same roof" with the household that was being interviewed. This may have made us undercount some deaths (soldiers killed during the 2003 invasion for example) but addressed your main concern that no two households could claim the same death event.

2. It seems the Lancet has been overrun by left-wing sixth formers.
The report has a flawed methodology and deceit is shown in the counting process. What is your reaction to that?
Ian, Whitwick, UK

LR: Almost every researcher who studies a health problem is opposed to that health problem. For example, few people who study measles empathize with the virus. Thus, given that war is an innately political issue, and that people examining the consequences of war are generally opposed to the war's conception and continuation, it is not surprising that projects like these are viewed as being highly political. That does not mean that the science is any less rigorous than a cluster survey looking at measles deaths. This study was the standard approach for measuring mortality in times of war, it went through a rigorous peer-review process and it probably could have been accepted into any of the journals that cover war and public health.

The Lancet is a rather traditional medical journal with a long history and is not seen as "left-wing" in the public health and medical communities. The types of different reports (medical trials, case reports, editorials) in the Lancet have been included for scores of years. The Lancet also has a long history of reporting about the adverse effects of war, and the world is a more gentle place for it.

3. Why is it so hard for people to believe the Lancet report?
I am an Iraqi and can assure you that the figure given is nearer to the truth than any given before or since.
S Kazwini, London, UK

LR: I think it is hard to accept these results for a couple of reasons. People do not see the bodies. While in the UK there are well over 1000 deaths a day, they do not see the bodies there either. Secondly, people feel that all those government officials and all those reporters must be detecting a big portion of the deaths. When in actuality during times of war, it is rare for even 20% to be detected. Finally, there has been so much media attention given to the surveillance-based numbers put out by the coalition forces, the Iraqi Government and a couple of corroborating groups, that a population-based number is a dramatic contrast.

4. Why do you think some people are trying to rubbish your reports, which use the same technique as used in other war zones for example in Kosovo?
Another group, which uses only English-language reports - Iraq Body Count - constantly rubbishes your reports. Again, why do you think that is?
Mark Webb, Dublin, Ireland

LR: I suspect there are many different groups with differing motives.

5. Can you explain, if your figures are correct, why 920 more people were dying each day than officially recorded by the Iraqi Ministry of Health - implying huge fraud and/or incompetence on their behalf?
Dan, Scotland

LR: It is really difficult to collect death information in a war zone! In 2002, in Katana Health Zone in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) there was a terrible meningitis outbreak, where the health zone was supported by the Belgian Government, and with perhaps the best disease surveillance network in the entire country. A survey by the NGO International Rescue Committee showed that only 7% of those meningitis deaths were recorded by the clinics and hospitals and government officials. Patrick Ball at Berkeley showed similar insensitivity by the press in Guatemala during the years of high violence in the 1980s. I do not think that very low reporting implies fraud.

6. As an analyst myself I would like to know how reliable the method itself actually is.
Les Roberts and his colleagues claim to have used the same method to estimate deaths in Iraq as is used to estimate deaths in natural disasters. Is there any evidence that the method is accurate? By this I mean a comparison of the number actual deaths after a natural disaster with estimates of the number of deaths.
Rickard Loe, Stockholm, Sweden

LR: That is a good question. There is a little evidence of which I am aware. Note that the 2004 and 2006 studies found similar results for the pre- and initial post-invasion period which at least implies reproducibility. I led a 30 cluster mortality survey in Kalima in the DRC in 2001. The relief organization Merlin did a nutritional survey and measured mortality in the same area and with a recall period that covered part of our survey. Both were cluster surveys, Merlin used a different technique to select houses and we obtained statistically identical results. In a couple of refugee settings, cluster surveys have produced similar estimates to grave monitoring.

In 1999, in Katana Health Zone in the Congo, I led a mortality survey where we walked a grid over the health zone and interviewed 41 clusters of 5 houses at 1km. spacings. In that survey, we estimated that 1,600 children had died of measles in the preceding half year. A couple of weeks later we did a standard immunization coverage survey (30 clusters of 7 children but selected totally proportional to population) that asked about measles deaths and we found an identical result.

I suspect that Demographic Health Surveys or the UNICEF MICS surveys (which are both retrospective cluster mortality approaches) have been calibrated against census data but I do not know when or where.

7. My understanding is that this study reports ten times more deaths attributable to the war than other studies because this is the only one to use statistical methods to make inferences about the mortality rate across the whole population.
Other studies only record verifiable deaths, which one would expect to constitute only a small part of the total number. Am I correct?
Matthew, Appleton

LR: Yes.

8. It seems to me that the timing of the publication of the 2004 and 2006 reports - in both cases shortly before a U.S. election - was a mistake.
Does Mr Roberts regret the timing of the release of the two reports or does he feel they achieved some benefit?
Mik Ado, London, UK

LR: Yes. Both were unfortunate timing. As I said at the time of the first study, I lived in fear that our Iraqi colleagues and interviewers would be killed if we had finished a survey in mid-September and it took two months for the results to get out. This notion has been widely misquoted as saying we wanted to influence the election..as if the two parties somehow had different positions on the war in Iraq. I think in Iraq, a post-election publication in 2004 would have been seen as my colleagues knowing something but keeping it hidden. It was also unfortunate that the attention span of the U.S. media is short during election seasons.
More detailed questions from Joe Emersberger


9. Lancet 2 found a pre-invasion death rate of 5.5/ per 1000 people per year. The UN has as estimate of 10? Isn't that evidence of inaccuracy in the study?

LR: The last census in Iraq was a decade ago and I suspect the UN number is somewhat outdated. The death rate in Jordan and Syria is about 5. Thus, I suspect that our number is valid. Note that if we are somehow under-detecting deaths, then our death toll would have to be too low, not too high. Both because a) we must be missing a lot, and b) the ratio of violent deaths to non-violent deaths is so high.

I find it very reassuring that both studies found similar pre-invasion rates, suggesting that the extra two-years of recall did not dramatically result in under-reporting..a problem recorded in Ziare and Liberia in the past.

10. The pre-invasion death rate you found for Iraq was lower than for many rich countries. Is it credible that a poor country like Iraq would have a lower death rate than a rich country like Australia?

LR: Yes. Jordan and Syria have death rates far below that of the UK because the population in the Middle-east is so young. Over half of the population in Iraq is under 18. Elderly populations in the West are a larger part of the population profile and they die at a much higher rate.

11. A research team led by physicists Sean Gourley and Neil Johnson of Oxford University and economist Michael Spagat have asserted in an article in Science that the second Lancet study is seriously flawed due to "main street bias.". Is this a valid, well tested concept and is it likely to have impacted your work significantly?

LR: I have done (that is designed, led, and gone to the houses with interviewers) at least 55 surveys in 17 countries since 1990.most of them retrospective mortality surveys such as this one. I have measured at different times, self-selection bias, bias from the families with the most deaths leaving an area, absentee bias..but I have never heard of "main street bias." I have measured population density of a cluster during mortality surveys in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Dem. Republic of Congo, and the Republic of Congo, and in spite of the conventional wisdom that crowding is associated with more disease and death, I have never been able to detect this during these conflicts where malaria and diarrhoea dominated the mortality profile.

We worked hard in Iraq to have every street segment have an equal chance of being selected. We worked hard to have each separate house have an equal chance of being selected. I do not believe that this "main street bias" arose because a) about a 1/4th of the clusters were in rural areas, b) main streets were roughly as likely to be selected, c) most urban clusters spanned 2-3 blocks as we moved in a chain from house to house so that the initial selected street usually did not provide the majority of the 40 households in a cluster and d) people being shot was by far the main mechanism of death, and we believe this usually happened away from home. Realize, there would have to be both a systematic selection of one kind of street by our process and a radically different rate of death on that kind of street in order to skew our results. We see no evidence of either.

12. In Slate Magazine, Fred Kaplan has alleged that:

"....if a household wasn't on or near a main road, it had zero chance of being chosen. And "cluster samples" cannot be seen as representative of the entire population unless they are chosen randomly." Is Kaplan's statement true?

LR: His comment about proximity to main roads is just factually wrong! As far as cluster surveys go, they are never perfect; however, they are the main way to measure death rates in this kind of setting. See the SMART initiative at http://www.smartindicators.org.

13. Madelyn Hicks, a psychiatrist and public health researcher at King's College London in the U.K., says she "simply cannot believe" the paper's claim that 40 consecutive houses were surveyed in a single day. Can you comment on this?

LR: During my DRC surveys I planned on interviewers each interviewing 20 houses a day, and taking about 7 minutes per house. Most of the time in a day was spent on travel and finding the randomly selected household. In Iraq in 2004, the surveys took about twice as long and it usually took a two person team about 3 hours to interview a 30 house cluster. I remember one rural cluster that took about 6 hours and we got back after dark. Nonetheless, Dr. Hicks concerns are not valid as many days one team interviewed two clusters in 2004.