Former Pink Floyd frontman sparks fury by comparing Israelis to Nazis

The attacks in Lebanon by the Christian Militia commanded by Elie Hobeika, in Sabra and Shatila was claimed to be genocide. No claim of Israels responsibility.

 

And what did the Kahan Commission find? That Ariel Sharon bore "direct responsibility" for the massacres, for not anticipating the clear implications of the spineless IDF allowing the Phalange to enter the camps, and then doing nothing to prevent the killing of the people they were there to protect, when they could easily have done so!

 

I have mentioned the miles of tunnels and the air conditioning of these files kept in Bad arolsen previously, and posted this many times.
I have difficult find this information each and every time to make those ignorant of the facts avail themselves with this very relevant information.
Perhaps in future rather than me finding this information ........ Ach ...., never mind.

Regards
Highlander

 

Not to mention proven to be fabricating evidence and falsely attributing it to the Red Cross. And these people have the gall to allege these fabricated statistics, falsely attributed to the Red Cross were withheld from public view when in fact they just hadn't yet been fabricated.

 

Sooooo Ariel Sharon was alleged BY ISRAEL, not the UN, to be responsible for failing to stop the massacre carried out by Christian Militia, commanded by Elie Hobeika.

 

Sharon was viewed as responsible for sinking Israel in the Lebanease mud, as later records discovered he ran the OP as a snowball, every day Israel sank deeper and against the will of Begin the PM, Sharon was also "caught" lying to Begin in his reports.

I dont think he was innocent as he claimed he was on Sabra and Shatila, he has responsibilty there, but not as much as the ones that carried the massacre and the two shouldnt be confused.

 

It's not my job to make your argument for you, it's yours. And you are unable to do so.

 

I never asked you too. Why would I no point trying to open a locked door!

But keep looking, you never know, you might find a key.

Highlander

 

The guy in charge of the Red Cross said the document was not real so unless you are going to drag out a guy from the Red Cross who has more impressive credentials to say he is lying I'd say your document is not real and, your basing your argument on a lie.

- - - Updated - - -

Facts like a forged document! Shows how bone headed your arguments are.

 

That's why I spend so little effort trying to debate you. But I'd never put you on ignore, I find your posts entertaining

 

Standard fair, been here done this, kindly see yourself out of this conversation:

]Aww we have a holocaust denying propagandist.

Actually there is a searchable database of over 4.2 million names and back stories of Jewish victims of the Shoah compiled by Yad Vashem.

http://db.yadvashem.org/names/search.html?language=en

You people have already been provided the Special Operational Reports of the Einsatzgrupen to the SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) detailing the targeting of Jews, the dates of the killings, where they were killed, and how many:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/sitreptoc.html

You have been shown the authentication of those reports by SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt Lindow chief of subdepartment IV A 1 [of the RSHA] who received them.

http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/german/einsatzgruppen/esg/authenticity.html

You have been provided the Jager report produced by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger, commander of Einsatzkommando 3 detailing the extermination of Lithuanian Jewry including nearly 40,000 children:

http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/DocJager.htm

You have been shown the testimony of Morgen, Kremer, Böck, Hofmann, Hössler, Klein, Münch, and Stark, all high ranking Nazis, none charged with any crimes, who all came forward of their own volition to testify, and to this day have not recanted their testimony to their dying day,

You have been shown the Wannsee Transcripts outlining the Final Solution to the Jewish question.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/wansee-transcript.html

You have been shown the testimony of SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann the man who took the minutes of the conference who confirmed them as authentic during his trial under questioning from his defense attorney's Robert Servatius and Dieter Wechtenbruch:in the German.

http://www.ghwk.de/ghwk/engl/texts/eichmanns-testimony.pdf

[video=youtube;kPFcMy1oLIA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPFcMy1oLIA[/video]

[video=youtube;m3TqRrAK4e0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3TqRrAK4e0[/video]

You have been shown Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler's Poznan Speech of October 4, 1943 proving that Final Solution was a euphemism for extermination and not deportation:

I am now referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It's one of those things that is easily said: 'The Jewish people are being exterminated', says every party member, 'this is very obvious, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, we're doing it, hah, a small matter.' [...] But of all those who talk this way, none had observed it, none had endured it. Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person - with exceptions due to human weaknesses - had made us tough. This is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. [...] We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/

And another on October 6, 1943:

I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men - in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. [...] I felt obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary, as the most superior dignitary of the party, this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly and to say how it has been. The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews that managed to find hiding places will be left over.

You have been shown the comparative World Almanac census statistics for the global Jewish population showing a drop of nearly 5.5 million between 1938 and 1949.

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/ftp.cgi?people//f/freedman.benjamin/background-data

You have been shown the Nazi document showing that an 80,000 cremation capacity per month at Auschwitz was insufficient.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/topf/

You have been shown the details of the mass graves excavated at Belzec:

Grave 3 is 16 meters long by 15 meters wide by 5 meters deep (about 52 feet by 50 feet by 16 feet.)

Grave 10 is 24 meters long by 18 meters wide by 5 meters deep (about 78 feet by 59 feet by 16 feet.)

Grave 20 extends outside the current camp boundaries and so could not be completely measured. The part that could be measured is 26 meters long by 11 meters wide by 5 meters deep (85 feet by 36 feet by 16 feet).

More dishonestly, Mattogno fails to mention at all that Graves 1, 4, 13, 25, 27, 28 and 32 also contain unburned remains.

Therefore, out of 10 graves that held whole human remains, Mattogno only acknowledges 3 of them.

Grave 5 contains "pieces of burnt human bones so densely packed together that the drill could not penetrate further." The grave is 32 meters long by 10 meters wide by 4.50 meters deep (about 105 feet by 33 feet by 15 feet).

Grave 6 is 30 meters long by 10 meters wide by 4 meters deep (about 99 feet by 33 feet by 13 feet). It contains "carbonized wood and pieces of fragments of burnt human bones. At the east end of the grave, the ground is covered with gray sand containing a mixture of crushed pieces of burnt and unburned pieces of human bones."

Graves 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, and 33 all contain fragments of burnt human bones, human ashes and carbonized wood.

Grave 14 is the largest in the camp. It contains "burnt pieces of human bones and fragments of carbonized wood mixed with grey sandy soil to a depth of 5 meters." That is about 16 feet deep.

http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspo t.com/2006/05/carlo-mattogno-on-belzec.html

You have been shown the unrepentant testimony of SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf head of Einsatzgruppen D outlining the rear actions of the Einsatzagruppen regarding the intentional murder of ethnic Jews in the East based on their blood including the women and children:


Q. What were these orders?

A. These orders had as their purpose to make it as easy as possible for the unfortunate victim and to prevent the brutality of the men from leading to inevitable excesses. Thus I first ordered that only so many victims should be brought to the place of execution as the execution commandos could handle. Any individual action by any individual man was forbidden. The Einsatzkommandos shot in a military manner only upon orders. It was strictly ordered to avoid any maltreatment, undressing was not permitted. The taking of any personal possessions was not permitted. Publicity was not permitted, and at the very moment when it was noted that a man had experienced joy in carrying out these executions, it was ordered that this man should never participate in any more executions. The men could not report voluntarily, they were ordered.
Q. Why did you not prevent the liquidations?

A. Even if I use the most severe standard in judging this, I had as little possibility as any of the codefendants here to prevent this order. There was only one thing, a senseless martyrdom through suicide, senseless because this would not have changed anything in the execution of this order, for this order was not an order of the SS, it was an order of the Supreme Commander in Chief and the Chief of State; it was not only carried out by Himmler or Heydrich. The army had to carry it out too, the High Command of the Army as well as the commanders in the east and southeast who were the superior commanders for the Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos. If I could imagine a theoretical possibility, then there was only the refusal on the part of those persons who were in the uppermost hierarchy and could appeal to the Supreme Commander and Chief of State, because they had the only possibility of getting access to him. They were, after all, the highest bearers of responsibility in the theater of operations.

Q. Did you not try in Nikolaev to dissuade the Reich Leader SS from this order?

A. The situation in Nikolaev was especially depressing in a moral sense, because in agreement with the army, we had excluded a large number of Jews, the farmers, from the executions. When the Reich Leader SS was in Nikolaev on 4 or 5 October, I was reproached for this measure and he ordered that henceforth, even against the will of the army, the executions should take place as planned. When the Reich Leader SS arrived at my headquarters, I had assembled all available commanders of my Einsatzgruppe. The Reich Leader addressed these men and repeated the strict order to kill all those groups which I have designated. He added that he alone would carry the responsibility, as far as accounting to the Fuehrer was concerned. None of the men would bear any responsibility, but he demanded the execution of this order, even though he knew how harsh these measures were. Nevertheless, after supper, I spoke to the Reich Leader and I pointed out the inhuman burden which was being imposed on the men in killing all these civilians. I didn't even get an answer.

Q. Now, I cannot pronounce it correctly, the Karaims were another sect whom you encountered in the south of Russia, and this sect had no Jewish blood, but it did share the religious confessions of the Jews. Is that right?

A. Yes.

Q. You submitted to Berlin the question whether the Karaims should be killed, and I understood you to say that the order you got from Berlin was you shall not kill them for they have nothing in common with the Jews except the confession?

A. Yes.

Q. Will you explain to the Court, please, what difference there was between the Karaims and the Krimchaks, except Jewish blood ?

A. I understand your question completely in reference to the eastern Jews, in the case of the Jews who were found in the eastern campaign. These Jews were to be killed-according to the order-for the reason that they were considered carriers of bolshevism, and, therefore, considered as endangering the security of the German Reich. This concerned the Jews who were found in Russia, and it was not known to me that the Jews in all of Europe were being killed, but on the contrary I knew that down to my dismissal these Jews were not killed, but it was attempted at all costs to get them to emigrate. The fact that the Karaims were not killed showed that the charge of the prosecution that persons were persecuted for their religion is not correct, for the Karaims had that Jewish religion, but they could not be killed because they did not belong to the Jewish race.

Q. I think, Witness, you answered exactly what I had antici-

*Sect which refused the Talmud and adopted the Old Testament as sole source of faith.
**Turkish Jews of mixed Semitic and Tartaric blood.

Page 275

pated in the last sentence, "They did not belong to the JewishRace," is that right?

A. Yes, That is right.

Q. They were found in Russia?

A. Yes.

Q. But they participated in the Jewish confession in Russia?

A. The Karaims had the Jewish faith, yes.

Q. But your race authorities in Berlin could find no trace of Jewish blood in them?

A. Yes.

Q. So they came absolutely under the Fuehrer Decree or the Streckenbach Order to kill all Jews?

A. Yes.

Q. Because of blood?

A. Because they were of Jewish origin. For you must understand the Nazi ideology, as you call it. It was the opinion of the Fuehrer that in Russia and in bolshevism, the representatives of this blood showed themselves especially suitable for this idea, therefore, the carriers of this blood became especially suitable representatives of the bolshevism. That is not on account of their faith, or their religion, but because of their human make-up and character.

Q. And because of their blood, right?

A. I cannot express it any more definitely than I stated, from their nature and their characteristics. Their blood, of course, has something to do with it, according to National Socialist ideology.

Q. Let's see, if I can understand it; we've got a lot of time, I hope. What was the distinction except blood?

A. Between whom?

B. Between the Karaims and the Krimchaks?

A. The difference of the blood, yes.

Q. Only the difference in blood, is that so?

A. Yes.

Q. So the criterion and the test which you applied in your slaughter was blood?

A. The criteria which I used were the orders which I got, and it has not been doubted during the entire trial, that in this
Fuehrer Order the Jews were designated as the ones who belonged to that circle in Russia and who were to be killed.

Q. Tell us how orders that you operated under in 1941 in Russia differed from the order which controlled killing of Jews in Poland in 1939 ?

A. In Poland individual actions had been ordered, while in Russia, during the entire time of the commitment, the killing of all Jews had been ordered. Special actions in Poland had been ordered, whose contents I do not know in detail.

COL. AMEN: Were all victims, including the men, women, and children executed in the same manner?

OHLENDORF: Until the spring of 1942, yes. Then an order came from Himmler that in the future women and children were to be killed only in gas vans.

COL. AMEN: How had women and children been killed previously?

OHLENDORF: In the same was as the men - by shooting.

COL. POKROVSKY: You said that mostly women and children were executed in these vans. For what reason?

OHLENDORF: That was a special order from Himmler to the effect that women and children were not to be exposed to the mental strain of the executions; and thus the men of the kommandos, mostly married men, should not be compelled to aim at women and children.

THE TRIBUNAL (Gen. Niktchenko): In your testimony you said that the Einsatz group had the object of annihilating the Jews and the commissars, is that correct?

OHLENDORF: Yes.

THE TRIBUNAL (Gen. Niktchenko): And in what category did you consider the children? For what reason were the children massacred?

OHLENDORF: The order was that the Jewish population should be totally exterminated.

THE TRIBUNAL (Gen. Niktchenko): Including the children?

OHLENDORF: Yes.

THE TRIBUNAL (Gen. Niktchenko): Were all the Jewish children murdered?

OHLENDORF: Yes.

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/Einsatz2c.htm
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/Ohlentestimony.html

You have been shown the report from SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to Fuhrer Adolf Hitler entitled "Report to the Führer on Combating Partisans", stating that 363,211 Jews had been killed by Einsatzgruppen in August–November 1942.



You have been shown the Höfle Telegrams sent by SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle on January 11, 1943 to SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in Berlin and SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim in Cracow detailing the number of deaths of Jews in the concentration camps.



You have been shown the Korherr Report written by chief inspector of the statistical bureau of the SS, Dr Richard Korherr outlining the population drop of European Jewry (4 million not including substantial portions of Eastern European Jewry and Jews within occupied Soviet Russia) from 1937 to December 1942.

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.o rg/holoprelude/korherr.html

 

http://www.chrisspivey.co.uk/you-can-fool-some-of-the-people-some-of-the-time/

http://www.truetorahjews.org/issues/adl4

http://www.truetorahjews.org/naziismzionism

I'll leave it to truth religious leaders to dispell the myth.


Have a nice day.

Highlander

 

This entire post is a combination of misleading information, misrepresentations of facts and outright lies. You have an inability to comprehend basic information.

 

Potty Mouth tattoo freak is now a source for you?

And they have;

"Unfortunately the Holocaust did happen: nearly 6 million Jews were indeed murdered by the Germans, most of them in gas chambers or in mass shootings. This is not a Zionist falsification."

 

Lancelet;

"Of these deaths, we estimate that 601,027 (426,369–793,663) were due to violence.""

Iraqi Family Health Survey;

"It estimated 151,000 deaths due to violence"

I don't write this stuff but rather merely report it. If you can't deal with facts then perhaps you might open a blog with the 'allow comments' option set to 'no' to allow for your distorted prose to be laid out and never challenged with cold hard reality.

 

There are alway two sides of a story, but I am very sceptical when to question the official fact results in a jail sentence.

Now that is criminal!

Highlander

 

"Nice try"...Nuance is clearly beyond you. So, for the benefit of other posters', let me spell it out to you. The (relevant) point which actually results in a greater commonality between the two surveys than is often assumed on face value, relates to excess death comparisons. Given that not all excess deaths are due to violence, the excess death figures that comprise both violent and non-violent deaths, are the crucial ones. The reality is that the IFHS survey actually estimated 400,000 excess Iraqi deaths as a result of the invasion:

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/PublicHealth/10230

"The non-violent mortality rate increased by about 60%, from 3.07 deaths per 1000 people per year before the invasion to 4.92 deaths per 1000 people per year in the post-invasion period. This was not further addressed in this analysis, which focused on mortality due to violent deaths. Further analysis would be needed to calculate an estimate of the number of such deaths and to assess how large the mortality increase due to non-violent causes is, after taking into account that reporting of deaths longer ago is less complete":

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2008/pr02/2008_iraq_mortality_study_qa.pdf

John Tirman, who commissioned and directed the funding for the 2nd Lancet study stated in a January 21, 2008 AlterNet article:

"A little digging would have revealed much more: The total deaths attributable to the war, nonviolent as well as violent, was about 400,000 for that period, now 19 months ago. If the same trends continued, that total today would be more than 600,000..

Interviewers identified themselves as employees of the Ministry of Health, then under the control of Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr. Those interviewed, therefore, would be wary of saying a brother or son or husband had been killed by violence, fearing retribution. And, indeed, there are nonviolent categories in the survey that suggest just such equivocation: 'Unintentional injuries' would equal about 40 percent of the death-by-violence toll, for example. Road accidents were ten times their pre-war totals-if someone is run off a highway by a U.S. convoy, is that a "nonviolent" death?

http://www.alternet.org/story/74263/right-wingers_can't_cover_up_iraq's_death_toll_catastrophe

Les Roberts said Friday, January 10, 2008:

The NEJM article found a doubling of mortality after the invasion, we found a 2.4-fold increase. Thus, we roughly agree on the number of excess deaths. The big difference is that we found almost all the increase from violence, they found one-third of the increase from violence....
They roughly found a steady rate of violence from 2003-2006. Baghdad morgue data, Najaf burial data, and our data all show a dramatic increase over 2005 and 2006....It is likely that people would be unwilling to admit violent deaths to the study workers who were government employees. ...
Finally, their data suggests one-sixth of deaths over the occupation through June 2006 were from violence. Our data suggests a majority of deaths were from violence. The morgue and graveyard data I have seen is more in keeping with our results:

http://www.accuracy.org/release/1627-lancet-study-author-assesses-new-report-on-iraqi-death-toll/

On February 14, 2008 John Tirman wrote:

Yet another, a much larger house-to-house survey was conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health (MoH). This also found a sizable mortality figure—400,000 “excess deaths” (the number above the pre-war death rate), but estimated 151,000 killed by violence. The period covered was the same as the survey published in The Lancet, but was not released until January 2008.

The ORB results were almost totally ignored in the American press, and the MoH numbers, which did get one-day play, were covered incompletely. Virtually no newspaper report dug into the data tables of the Iraqi MoH report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for that total excess mortality figure, or to ask why the MoH report showed a flat rate for killing throughout the war when every other account shows sharp increases through 2005 and 2006. The logical explanation for this discrepancy is that people responding to interviewers from the government, and a ministry controlled by Moktada al Sadr, would not want to admit that their loved one died by violence. There were, instead, very large numbers of dead by road accidents and “unintentional injuries.” The American press completely missed this:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003711142

Timothy R. Gulden, Ph.D., of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy in College Park, asserted that the Iraq Family Health Survey authors "acknowledge and attempt to correct for underreporting of deaths from nonviolent causes, but they make no allowance for the more serious underreporting of violence-related deaths to government-affiliated survey takers.":

http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/PublicHealth/10230

When the Iraq Family Health Survey was published in January 2008 the Iraqi health minister was Dr Salih al-Hasnawi whose own methodology contradicted the flawed methodology of the previous Iraqi health minister (al-Shemari) upon which the IFHS based their estimation. The previous minister's estimation of deaths was predicated on a figure of 100 bodies per day brought to mosques and hospitals, the conclusions of which were regurgitated in the The Washington Post:

"As al-Shemari issued the startling new estimate, the head of the Baghdad central morgue said Thursday he was receiving as many as 60 violent death victims each day at his facility alone."

However, to their credit, they did go on to report the truth:

"Dr. Abdul-Razzaq al-Obaidi said those deaths did not include victims of violence whose bodies were taken to the city's many hospital morgues or those who were removed from attack scenes by relatives and quickly buried according to Muslim custom."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/10/AR2006111000164.html

The truth (your hatchet jobs and smears of Dr Burnham and Mr Soros notwithstanding) is that the Lancet survey is one of only a few credible peer-reviewed surveys into mortality rates in Iraq that exists. The findings it reported on have utmost credibility and are highly respected and highly regarded by all those not swayed by propaganda as the various comments from professionals in the field that I posted attest. The exact same methodology has been used without criticism in other conflicts and the Lancet has been praised for their robustness. Only in Iraq has there been the contrived controversy of the kind perpetuated by right-wing idealogues like you.

 

In truth, the Lancet study has inherent credibility. The reasons were explained in a rare US press editorial on the matter in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) on October 15, 2006:

"Here is one of the world's most respected medical journals publishing a peer-reviewed study by epidemiologists backed by Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health, part of one of the world's most respected medical schools." ('Methodology in madness,' October 15, 2006)

Richard Brennan, head of health programmes at the New York-Based International Rescue Committee, told Associated Press:

"This is the most practical and appropriate methodology for sampling that we have in humanitarian conflict zones."

Brennan's group has conducted similar projects in Kosovo, Uganda and Congo. He added:

"While the results of this survey may startle people, it's hard to argue with the methodology at this point." (Malcolm Ritter, 'Bush Dismisses Iraq Death Toll Study,' Associated Press Online, October 12, 2006)

Professor Mike Toole of the Centre for International Health, Melbourne, said:

"The methodology used is consistent with survey methodology that has long been standard practice in estimating mortality in populations affected by war. For example, the Burnet Institute and International Rescue Committee (IRC) used the same methods to estimate mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The findings of this study received widespread media attention and were accepted without reservation by the US and British governments. The Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health's Centre for International Health endorses this study." (Toole, The Age (Melbourne), letters to the editor, October 14, 2006)

Richard Garfield, a public health professor at Columbia University who works closely with a number of the authors of the report, told the Christian Science Monitor:

"I loved when President Bush said 'their methodology has been pretty well discredited'. That's exactly wrong. There is no discrediting of this methodology. I don't think there's anyone who's been involved in mortality research who thinks there's a better way to do it in unsecured areas. I have never heard of any argument in this field that says there's a better way to do it." (Dan Murphy, 'Iraq casualty figures open up new battleground,' Christian Science Monitor, October 13, 2006)

John Zogby, whose New York-based polling agency, Zogby International, has done several surveys in Iraq since the war began, said:

"The sampling is solid. The methodology is as good as it gets. It is what people in the statistics business do." (Anna Badkhen, 'Critics say 600,000 Iraqi dead doesn't tally,' San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 2006)

Zogby said similar survey methods have been used to estimate casualty figures in other conflicts, such as Darfur and the Congo. Zogby also noted that US critics accept the method for opinion polls, which are based on interviews with around 1,000 Americans in a country of 300 million people.

Frank Harrell Jr., chair of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University, called the study design solid and said it included "rigorous, well-justified analysis of the data". (Ritter, op., cit)

Steve Heeringa, director of the statistical design group at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, said:

"Given the conditions (in Iraq), it's actually quite a remarkable effort. I can't imagine them doing much more in a much more rigorous fashion." (Ibid)

BBC Newsnight interviewed Sir Richard Peto, Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of Oxford, who described the study as "statistically reliable". (Newsnight, October 11, 2006)

Professor Sheila Bird of the Biostatistics Unit at the Medical Research Council said:

"They have enhanced the precision this time around and it is the only scientifically based estimate that we have got where proper sampling has been done and where we get a proper measure of certainty about these results." (Channel 4 News, October 11, 2006).

 

All nice and fine however, from your source;

"Gilbert M. Burnham, M.D., Ph.D.(Disgraced), who was an author of the two Lancet studies, said in his letter to the NEJM that the Iraq Family Health Survey "estimated a very low crude mortality rate before the invasion as compared with the rate we calculated (3.17 vs.5.5).""

Indeed, no mention of those Saddam killed that we now know of (Saddam killed 125 people per day in administering his nation gulag which, over the same period would account for 135,000) yet would certainly not be published by pre war Iraq health officials and is not mentioned in either study;


:":Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power"

To sum it up;

"Add it up, and in three decades, about 900,000 Iraqis have died from violence, or well over 3% of the Iraqi population--the equivalent of more than 9 million people in a nation with a population as large as that of the United States. That's what Iraq will have to recover from over the next decades--not just the death toll of the last six years, but that of the last 30."

So Trout, how many excess deaths?

"he [Saddam] murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas"

 

As usual, when your entire argument falls around you, you deflect by introducing irrelevances and moving goal posts. All you have presented in this debate is a combination of half-truths, misrepresentations, red-herrings, disingenuous arguments and, by smearing individuals and deliberately misspelling of The Lancet, cheap political and ideologically- driven point-scorers. With the exception of your smearing of Dr Burnham, I've debunked all of your unfounded criticisms. I will debunk the smear on Dr Burnham in due course. At the end of the day, both surveys garner credibility and both come to similar conclusions regarding excess death figures (an understanding of which eludes you).

 

He was the frontman for Floyd...Ever heard of 'Dark Side of the Moon' or 'The Wall'...And in this case he is completely right...And I'm Jewish...Go figure!...

 

Fact;

Iraqi Family Health Survey used more intensive research

Fact;

Soros funded the Lancelet

Fact;

The Lancelet states there were 601,000 violent deaths

Fact;

"Wednesday, February 3, 2009 -- The Executive Council of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) announced Tuesday that an 8-month investigation found that Dr. Gilbert Burnham violated the Association's Code of Professional Ethics & Practices.

AAPOR found that Burnham, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, repeatedly refused to make public essential facts about his research on civilian deaths in Iraq. In particular, the AAPOR inquiry focused on Burnham's publication of results from a survey reported in the October 2006 issue of the journal Lancet. When asked to provide several basic facts about this research, Burnham refused."

Fact;

The Lancelet refused to release raw data for review.

Fact;

The results of the Lancelet are way out of wack with all other surveys the Iraqi Family Health Survey included.

Fact;

Both surveys do not take into account deaths prior to the invasion which were never released by Saddam's government.

Fact;

The Lancelet states 650,000 excess deaths occurred with 601,000 of them being violent deaths leaving fifty thousand excess deaths to cover everything else which I find rather difficult to believe as that is below pre war levels sop once again, something is wrong with their methodology.

Oh goodie, I can hardly wait to watch you have another meltdown.

Even at face value without addressing the fact that the Lanclet has poor cluster representation and both have not taken the unreported but now know deaths due to Saddam's murdering of his people, 650,000 vs 400,000 is not in the same ballpark.

 

The basis for the attacks on Burnham stem from The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The AAPOR put out a press release alleging that Gilbert Burnham (who is not a member of the AAPOR) violated the AAPOR’s code of ethics. What did he do? Their press release states:

Mary E. Losch, chair of AAPOR’s Standards Committee, noted that AAPOR’s investigation of Burnham began in March 2008, after receiving a complaint from a member. According to Losch, “AAPOR formally requested on more than one occasion from Dr. Burnham some basic information about his survey including, for example, the wording of the questions he used, instructions and explanations that were provided to respondents, and a summary of the outcomes for all households selected as potential participants in the survey. Dr. Burnham provided only partial information and explicitly refused to provide complete information about the basic elements of his research.”

That seems to be more than a little misleading. Burnham has released the data from the study and can be viewed here:

http://www.jhsph.edu/research/cente...ons_tools/iraq/Human_Cost_of_WarFORMATTED.pdf

This report goes into a fair bit of detail on how the survey was conducted and can be viewed in the above link:

And here is the survey instrument which includes the “wording of the questions he used”:

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/pdfs/mortality_questionnaire_template.pdf

The AAPOR press release fails to specifically state what information was not provided. Nor does there seem to be any sort of report available from the AAPOR web site. Despite repeated requests from journalists asking for this information, none to my knowledge has so far been forthcoming.

Leaving aside the fact that Burnham is not a member of the AAPOR (so how can he be in violation of their code of ethics as he has been accused), it is a little more than ironic that AAPOR have censured Burnham for not fully disclosing the data behind his study, while themselves failing to fully disclose the basis for their serious charge.

In other words, in relation to this last point, the AAPOR have not disclosed, specifically, what is missing from the information that Burnham has provided. Their press release was therefore misleading. I checked their website and they’ve now put their press release up, but provided no supporting information. They’ve also linked to a paper by David Marker published in their journal which implicitly contradicts their press release. Marker clearly felt that Burnham had published enough information for him to evaluate their methodology, writing:

"Burnham et al. attempt to estimate the number of excess Iraqi war dead throughout the country using fairly standard survey methodology, for which they are to be commended. We have examined four specific methodological factors: coverage errors, correct probabilities of selection, migration, and training and control of interviewers. Coverage provided by the first stage of sample selection (the sample of administrative units) appears to have been complete (other than the exclusion of area considered as too violent to allow household interviews as well as the exclusion of the three sampled clusters for the reasons the authors indicated). The coverage at the second stage appears less than complete. In addition to the exclusion of some deaths mentioned earlier (short term household members), there may have been systematic exclusion of some types of households or housing units. The extraordinarily high response rates reported suggest this as a possibility. It should be noted that for the two governorates where data were not collected, they used an underestimate of no excess deaths, choosing to err on the side of understating mortality in these unknown cases. This level of coverage represents a major improvement over other reported estimates."

Commenting on behalf of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Tim Parsons said:

"The level of civilian mortality in Iraq is a controversial subject. Questions have been raised regarding the findings and methodology of the 2006 Iraq mortality study conducted by Dr. Gilbert Burnham and published in The Lancet. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health takes any allegation of scientific or professional misconduct very seriously. It believes that the correct forum for discussing the reported findings of the Lancet study and the general methodology that led to those findings is in the regular exchange of views in the scientific literature. The Bloomberg School of Public Health has undertaken a review of the study to determine if any violation of the School’s rules or guidelines for the conduct of research occurred in the conduct of the study. That review is nearing completion and the School is unable to discuss the results at this time.

The American Association for Public Opinion Researchers (AAPOR) chose to criticize Dr. Burnham for failure to fully cooperate with the organization’s review of his 2006 study. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is not a member of the organization and does not know what procedures or standards were followed in reaching the decision regarding this study and therefore is not in a position to comment on the decision."

I guess we’ll have to wait for the Johns Hopkins report.

Another right-wing idealogue, Megan McArdle, added yet more blunt unfounded errors with which to attack the Lancet study here:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/03/28/framing-iraqi-deaths/

She adds to the mountain of her errors on the Lancet studies with this:

I happened to be writing my story just as the World Health Organization study that was highly critical of Burnham, et. al. was released. Les Roberts, who had become the public face of the team, was making frankly lunatic claims on the radio that the two studies basically agreed, even though the introduction to the WHO study specifically said that their results made it very unlikely that Burnham et. al. had been correct. This claim was so unusual that when I asked neutral conflict epidemiologists, they patiently explained that I couldn’t possibly have heard Roberts correctly, because no one with half a brain would ever have said that."

http://www.theatlantic.com/business...ed-by-a-group-he-doesn-apos-t-belong-to/4667/

McArdle does not seem to have understood what Roberts was saying was in agreement: the excess deaths in the Lancet study (about 650,000) and in the IFHS study (about 400,000).

Now where have I heard a similar promotion of a similar red-herring? (sarcasm).

McArdle’s piece reminds of me of Neil Munro’s hatchet job in the National Journal that I posted previously — they both pretend to be objective observers, dispassionately recording the arguments between the pro-Lancet and anti-Lancet people, when in reality they are anti-Lancet partisans and the reason why they wrote their pieces was to try to knock down the Lancet studies.

 

Meltdown? Nope, just continuing on with sound reasoned refutations of your false politcally-motivated propaganda

Your "facts" amount to crap that I've debunked.

Your attacks on Burnham amount to a politicised hatchet job.

The Lancet was more robust and wider.

The fact that Soros funded the study is irrelevant in terms of adverse influence. There was none as I've demonstrated. So a strawman.

The violent death figure you cite is another of your red-herrings since it's the total of excess deaths, both violent and non-violent, that is the significant factor.

The Lancet wasn't obliged to release data to the AAPOR as I have shown. So that'll be yet another red-herring.

The Lancet study was peer-reviewed and their methodology widely praised by people who know.

etc etc

You are done.

 

Although Roger Waters referred in his comparisons to the nazis of the 1930s and not 40s when the holocaust was enacted, Israel is definitely out of line with its current attitude towards the Palestinians, pushing them off their land, bulldozing down their settlements and depriving them of utilities such as water. By an equal token, there were no Jews in the 1930s Germany who talked of destruction of Germany and occasionally sent out suicide bombers or shot rockets at civilians. By the same token, west bank is not Gaza. They are run by different political establishments, one considerably more violent than the other.