RIGHT-WINGERS CAN'T COVER UP IRAQ'S DEATH TOLL CATASTROPHE

The following story dovetails with the story just below it by Dahr Jamail. It speaks volumes about how the American public has been misled by the mainstream media in the United States about the war in Iraq, the "surge" and casualties.

We will continue to update this blog with the latest information we receive from a wide range of reliable news sources which underscore how Americans are not being told the truth about both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Keep coming back if you are truly interested in what 160,000 young Americans face in Iraq and another 30,000 in Afghanistan.

Bill Corcoran, editor and host of this blog which is the ONLY blog in the United States devoted exclusively to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

http://www.alternet.org/story/74263/

By John Tirman, AlterNetPosted on January 21, 2008, Printed on January 21, 2008

RIGHT-WING MEDIA SHIFTS INTO HIGH GEAR TO SMEAR SURVEY FINDINGS

Now I know what Hillary Clinton meant, first hand, by that "vast right-wing conspiracy." When the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Sunday Times in London are going after you -- along with about 100 right-wing bloggers -- rest assured you've hit a nerve.

Or is it just Soros Derangement Syndrome at work?

More than two years ago, I commissioned a household survey of Iraq to learn how many people had died in the war. This topic had been virtually ignored by the news media and the U.S. government. It was important to know for at least three reasons. The first was to try to understand the nature of the violence there, which was steadily growing and creating a humanitarian crisis, possibly a regional conflagration. Second, it might tell us something about how and when to exit. Third, we needed to know for the sake of our national soul. What had we wrought?

So I contacted the people who had done a previous, largely ignored survey-top public health professionals at Johns Hopkins University. They had published a survey in October 2004 that showed 98,000 had died in the first 18 months of the war, which was greeted with disbelief and charges of politicizing science, and quickly dismissed.

I said: 'do a bigger survey to improve the accuracy, and I will make sure it gets the proper attention in the news media.' They did do a bigger survey, and I managed a public education campaign that permitted the results to be considered more broadly, results that estimated total deaths at 600,000 by violence after 40 months of war. The survey was published in The Lancet, the British medical journal. And get attention it did, roundly disbelieved and scorned by war supporters, but spurring a brief but intense debate about the human cost of the war.

Dozens of statisticians and other professionals scoured the study and its data to see if the methods and implementation were proper; a special committee at the World Health Organization was convened to review it, and the Lancet had also subjected it to rigorous peer review. The survey held up to this scrutiny, with quibbles and some lingering "should have done this" and "might have done that." But virtually every competent person agreed that the study provided the best estimate we have.

Go back to the link at the top of this story to read the rest of the story and what happened when the right-wing media pounced on the casualty statistics coming out of Iraq.