Wednesday, October 11, 2006

How is the administration going to spin this?

From Editor & Publisher.com
NEW YORK A new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates. This far exceeds normal media counts and is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December.

The study by [Dr. Gilbert] Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and others is to be published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal.

The timing of the survey's release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to says it is "way too high," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He criticized the way the estimate was derived and noted that the results were released shortly before the Nov. 7 election. "This is not analysis, this is politics," Cordesman said.

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added, speaking to The Washington Post, that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have."

I've answered my own question, haven't I. Anthony Cordesman, a John McCain functionary and DoD waterboy,is always an objective observer. We can rest assured that we, the American sheeple, can ignore a scientific study by one of the nation's top research universities.

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