Word: lancet
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...even as the killing of a single Iraqi, purported to be an insurgent, in a Fallujah mosque dominated almost a week of U.S. media coverage, the claim in the report in the respected British medical journal Lancet that the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the U.S. invasion may number as many as 98,000 rated hardly a mention even in news outlets that had been relatively critical of the war. The Lancet study, of course, was a scientific guesstimate based on incomplete data - the U.S. and its coalition partners have never kept a record of Iraqi civilian deaths...
...civilian death toll can be routinely dismissed as an unfortunate by-product of war, an even more uncomfortable aspect for the U.S. of the Lancet study is the conclusion that the majority of the violent deaths had been caused not by terror attacks, but by U.S. air strikes. The use of air power in urban areas has become a routine part of the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, and such attacks are typically reported as "air strikes against rebel positions." But civilian casualties are pretty much inevitable when air power is used in cities, despite the best intentions and technological capabilities...
...Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs points out, the U.S. media has for the most part ignored or downplayed not only the Lancet study, but the issue of civilian casualties more generally. The New York Times has been involved in a running debate with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, not published except on the activist group's web site, on the paper's reporting of the question of civilian deaths in Fallujah. And in a perceptive commentary in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing suggests that part of the reason much of the media has avoided some...
British medical journal the Lancet made a dramatic late entry into the U.S. election fray, fast-tracking publication on its website of a study saying that about 100,000 "excess" Iraqi deaths have occurred since the war began in March 2003. In the first scientific study of the human cost of the war and occupation, the deaths were attributed to "invasion violence," mostly U.S.-coalition air strikes. Although the figure is well above previously published estimates (which have ranged up to 30,000) the researchers, led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health...
...last Iraqi interviews took place on Sept. 20, and the completed study went to the Lancet on Oct. 1 and on to peer review - a fast turnaround for scientific work. Roberts concedes that he wanted the study released before the U.S. election and had hoped to prompt candidate commitments to protect civilian lives: "That is what we'd most like, and that was our goal in getting this out." In Iraq, meanwhile, it was business at usual: at least seven people died in a Baghdad car-bomb blast on Saturday, and the hostage ranks continued to swell...