Some people like their propaganda simple. Unfortunately, these people (*cough*Blubonnet*cough*) can't be convinced by reason that their theories are half-baked at best and thoroughly reprehensible at worst.
But other people need to sugar-coat the lies using statistics. As this thread illustrates, you can't use logic on these people. When I asked where the graves for all those bodies were, and then provided photos of what real graves in Iraq look like, the troll dashed in a cloud of dust.
Well, unfortunately for said troll, there's more statistical evidence debunking the Lancet figures.
Much of the math here is mind-numbingly complicated, but Kane’s bottom line is simple: the Lancet authors “cannot reject the null hypothesis that mortality in Iraq is unchanged.” Translation: according to Kane, the confidence interval for the Lancet authors’ main finding is wrong. Had the authors calculated the confidence interval correctly, Kane asserts that they would have failed to identify a statistically significant increase in risk of death in Iraq, let alone the widely-reported 98,000 excess civilian deaths.
An interesting side note: as Kane observes in his paper, the Lancet authors “refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data (or even a precise description of the actual methodology).” The researchers did release some high-level summary data in highly aggregated form (see here), but they released neither the detailed interviewee-level data nor the programming code that would be necessary to replicate their results.
One of the charges made by the above-mentioned troll was that no respected person had debunked the Lancet figures. But that's not really true. According to Kane, others had attempted to replicate the Lancet figures but could not because Lancet won't release its data. If the data is good, why not release it?
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