The Left INFLATES Iraqi Casualty Numbers

A Study In Lies
By Kathleen McKinley

Remember in 2006 when many leftwingers shouted with horror regarding a study that had found over 600,000 Iraqi civilians dead since the war began? I heard this number ad nauseum from my leftwing friends.

The WashingtonPost included the number in this piece. Fox News quoted it with some skepticism. But CNN headlined it.
Turns out, Fox was right to be skeptical because it was a bunch of bull:
It's probably no coincidence that one of the authors — Roberts — just happened to oppose the removal of Saddam Hussein from his dictator's throne and has confessed he tried to influence the 2004 U.S. elections by timing the release of a previous study that made the war look much worse than it was.

Roberts also ran — unsuccessfully — as a Democrat for New York's 24th congressional district in 2006. He told the National Journal that "a combination of Iraq and (Hurricane) Katrina just put me over the top."Meanwhile, "Burnham admitted that he set the same condition" on the second report.

IBDeditorials.com didn't believe the numbers from the start because they didn't jive with our government's numbers or the Iraqi government's numbers or even another anti-war group with causality numbers, which were 44,000 to 49,000. Higher than the government's, but a BIT less than over 600,000, If you want to call 550,000 a bit less.

Naturally anti-Bush and anti-war forces have thrown the higher numbers around as if they were indisputable fact, not fraud. At least one media outlet, though, used its journalistic instincts to take a critical look at the study. The National Journal let Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon use that publication's Jan. 4 cover story to detail what they discovered after months of scrutiny. Headlined "Data Bomb," the story identifies three problems:

more...

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kathleen-mckinley/2008/01/09/study-lies