Thursday, July 14, 2005
CORRECTION #3
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Alan Ramsey a few months ago:
On October 29 - just four days before polling in the US election - The Lancet published, on the internet, the result of a study carried out by a research team from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in association with researchers at Baghdad’s Al-Mustansiriya University. The study was based on a door-to-door survey in September of 8000 people in 33 randomly selected locations across Iraq and it concluded that a minimum 98,000 civilians had died in the violence, and its aftermath, since the US-led invasion 18 months earlier, in March 2003 ...
Here in John Howard’s Australia, as in official Washington, the study cut no ice whatever. Our newspapers barely mentioned it.
But in a circumstance last Saturday where he might have mentioned the Lancet report himself, Ramsey avoided an overall Iraq estimate and cited lower numbers specific to Baghdad:
Civilian casualties of war. Bali in October three years ago (202 deaths). Madrid in March last year (191 deaths). London two nights ago (at least 52 deaths). Baghdad for the past 27 months (18,000 to 40,000 deaths minimum).
That might be as close as we ever get to a Lancet correction from grouchy Al.