ALL SMOKE, NO FIRE - THE NATIONAL JOURNAL SMEARS THE LANCET

Media ALERT –"...an appalling humanitarian catastrophe has taken place in
Iraq under US-UK occupation. This, in the end, is the point that matters."
– www.medialens.org –Last year, we described how mainstream climate sceptics had queued up to
praise film-maker Martin Durkin's now infamous documentary, The Great
Global Warming Swindle. The Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, and their
counterparts in the United States, used the film to heap scorn on the
scientific consensus that climate change is a grave and rapidly evolving
threat. In the event, the film itself turned out to be a swindle, one
denounced by climate scientists far and wide - its media supporters
quietly moved on.



A similar propaganda wave has been generated by a January 4 article in the
US-based National Journal smearing the 2004 and 2006 Lancet studies on
mortality in Iraq, which estimated 98,000 and 655,000 war-related deaths,
respectively. Once again, distortions have been boosted through
high-profile media, and through the blogosphere, to create the impression
of a rational consensus. Once again, the targets are leading scientists
working for some of the world's most respected research organisations.



The National Journal's 6,900-word report, 'Data Bomb,' by Neil Munro and
Carl Cannon used speculation, innuendo and numerous references to mostly
unnamed "critics", to smear the Lancet studies, focusing particularly on
the 2006 study known as Lancet II.



The most serious charge involved Professor John Tirman, Executive Director
and Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Center for International Studies (MIT). Munro and Cannon wrote:



"Tirman commissioned the Lancet II survey with $46,000 from George Soros's
Open Society Institute and additional support from other funders." (Munro
and Cannon, 'Data Bomb,' National Journal, January 4, 2008;
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/index.htm)



The significance?



"That means that nearly half of the study's funding came from an outspoken
billionaire who has repeatedly criticized the Iraq campaign and who spent
$30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004." (ibid)



Munro and Cannon asked "whether a latent desire to feed the American
public's opposition to the war might have shaped these studies". (ibid)



The Wall Street Journal picked up the story and ran with it. A January 9
editorial commented on Lancet II:



"We know that number was wildly exaggerated. The news is that now we know
why.



"It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and
conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also
turns out the timing was no accident." ('The Lancet's Political Hit,' Wall
Street Journal, January 8, 2008;
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119984087808076475.html)



The Boston Globe weighed in with an article titled, 'A war report
discredited':



"Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of
leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who,
as Munro and Cannon point out, 'spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in
2004.'" (Jeff Jacoby, 'A war report discredited,' Boston Globe, January
13, 2008)



The Globe described the National Journal article as a devastating
"debunking" of the Lancet's work: "the truth, it turns out, is that the
report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should
have inspired anything but confidence".



Across the Atlantic, the Sunday Times followed up with an article titled,
'Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study.' (Brendan Montague, Sunday Times,
January 13, 2008)



Melanie Phillips wrote in the Spectator on January 10:



"A story in the Wall Street Journal highlights a remarkable article in the
National Journal, which reveals startling information about the infamous
2006 Lancet 'study' which purported to show that Iraqi casualties had
totalled more than 650,000 in the three years since the fall of Saddam in
2003. The figure was clearly absurd. The NJ authors say they have now
learned that this 'research' was funded by George Soros, the financier who
has spent millions of dollars trying to destroy George W Bush." (Phillips,
'That study,' The Spectator, January 10, 2008;
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/441491/that-lancet-study.thtml)



Phillips asked:



"Whatever happened to peer review? Who can take the Lancet seriously ever
again?"



Phillips has form. Last year, she wrote:



"Channel Four's devastating documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle
has blown an enormous hole in every fundamental claim made to support the
climate change obsession..." (Phillips, 'The emperor's green new clothes,'
March 9, 2007; http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1467)



A large number of right-wing blogs have also used the National Journal
article to discredit the Lancet studies. If there is no smoke without
fire, the right-wing media have done their level best to generate plenty
of smoke. The story is now 'in the air' and will doubtless be referenced
in future media coverage.



"A Disgraceful Lie"



But now consider these allegations in light of comments sent to us by John
Tirman:



"Open Society Institute funded a public education effort to promote
discussion of the mortality issue. The grant was approved more than six
months after I commissioned the survey, and the researchers never knew the
sources of funds. As a result, OSI, much less George Soros himself, had
absolutely no influence over the conduct or outcome of the survey. This
was told to the authors of the National Journal article at least twice.
One must conclude that their misrepresentation of this---among many other
issues---was intended to sensationalize their version of the story and
color the readers' opinion about 'political bias.' This is contemptible
malpractice on their part. It is also a grotesque injustice to Mr. Soros,
whose philanthropy has braced and enlivened whole regions of the world."
(Email to Media Lens, January 15, 2008)



In other words, the fact that the study was "funded by antiBush partisans"
was completely irrelevant. There was literally no story, no fire, here -
the smoke was an illusion.



Lancet II co-author Gilbert Burnham responded to the Wall Street Journal
editorial:



"The fact that some of MIT's financial support in 2006 came from the Open
Society Institute had no effect on these reports; the researchers knew
nothing of funding origins. MIT played no role in the study design,
implementation, analysis or writing of the Lancet report." (Burnham,
'Researchers Respond to National Journal Article,' letter submitted to the
editors of the National Journal, January 7, 2008;
http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/research/iraq/national_journal.html)



Even more disturbing is the fact that these issues were carefully
explained to the National Journal authors several times as they were
preparing their article. Tirman forwarded to us the following email sent
by Lancet II co-author Les Roberts to Carl Cannon on November 20, 2007:



"After our interview on Friday afternoon I e-mailed the main people at
Hopkins and MIT associated with sorting out the funding for the 2006 study
to ask about the various funding sources (of which there were several)...
Some of the MIT funding did come from the Open Society Institute, but this
funding was a minority portion and found after the project was underway."
(Email forwarded to Media Lens, January 14, 2008)



John Tirman told us (January 14, 2008):



"I spoke to Munro on the phone and emailed him some other data, which he
essentially ignored... Upshot: the authors were told twice that OSI [Open
Society] money came well after the study was commissioned."



Lancet II was commissioned in Oct 2005, with internal funds from the
Center for International Studies at MIT. Tirman points out:



"I have checked my correspondence with OSI to make sure. I first
approached them with an email on January 25, 2006. They made a grant to us
of $46,000 on May 4, 2006." (ibid)



He has added elsewhere:



"The funds for public education (not the survey itself) came from the Open
Society Institute in the following spring, long after things had started.
Burnham did not know this (Roberts was not much involved at this point.)
MIT was providing funds, that's all he knew or needed to know. There were
other small donors involved too. I told this to Munro on the telephone and
in an email. He nonetheless implied that Soros money had funded the survey
from the start, possibly at Soros' behest. That is a disgraceful lie, and
Munro knows it." ('John Tirman on Munro and Soros,' January 11, 2008;
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/01/john_tirman_on_munro_and_soros.php)



Munro and Cannon also suggested that Soros had knowledge of the report and
was keen for it to appear before the 2006 US mid-term elections. Under the
sub-heading "Partisan considerations," they wrote:



"Soros is not the only person associated with the Lancet studies who had
one eye on the data and the other on the U.S. political calendar." (op.
cit)



Did Soros in fact have an "eye on the data"? Tirman again:



"It is extremely doubtful that Soros ever knew anything about this survey.
The grant was approved by his large foundation staff. For OSI, it's a
small grant." (Tirman, 'Bombs Away - The Anatomy Of A Hatchet Job,' note
t48;
http://www.johntirman.com/Bombs%20Away%20-%20a%20dull%20hatchet%20job.pdf)



Did Munro and Cannon check with Soros? Certainly they provided no evidence
at all that he knew of the report or was in some way following its
progress.



The point links to the claim that the Lancet II authors were seeking to
influence the US 2004 presidential and 2006 mid-term elections, the
implication being that they were anti-Bush and so were "partisan" in their
science. Munro and Cannon commented:



"Roberts was hardly the only American to lose confidence in Bush. The
question is whether he and his team lost their objectivity as scientists
as well." (op. cit)



They also wrote that, in a "much more troubling admission", Roberts "said
that he had e-mailed the first study to The Lancet on September 30, 2004,
'under the condition that it come out before the election.' Burnham
admitted that he set the same condition for Lancet II. 'We wanted to get
the survey out before the election, if at all possible,' he said." (op.
cit)



The reference to a "much more troubling admission" suggested there was
something new here. But in fact the same criticism was made in 2005. A
June 23, 2005 editorial in the Washington Times derided the 2004 Lancet
study as an "egregious politicization of what is supposed to be an
objective and scientific journal". The editors explained:



"We're referring to the Lancet's role in trying to influence the U.S.
presidential election with a cynical 'study' of deaths in the Iraq war in
October." (Leader, 'The Lancet's Politics,' Washington Times, June 23,
2005)



We cited Les Roberts' response in our September 12, 2005, media alert:



"We finished the survey on the 20 Sept [2004]. If this had not come out
until mid-Nov. or later, in the politicized lens of Baghdad (where the
chief of police does not allow his name to be made public and where all
the newly trained Iraqi soldiers I saw had bandanas to hide their faces to
avoid their families being murdered...) this would have been seen as the
researchers covering up for the Bush White House until after the election
and I am convinced my Iraqi co-investigators would have been killed. Given
that Kerry and Bush had the same attitude about invading and similar plans
for how to proceed, I never thought it would influence the election and
the investigators never discussed it with each other or briefed any
political player."
(http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050906_burying_the_lancet_update.php)



The point is a simple one - the Lancet authors +were+ keen for their
studies to appear before US elections, but for ethical rather than
political reasons. This is a million miles from aspiring to publish in
order to unseat Bush. And it is further still from the possibility that
such an aspiration generated biased science that went undetected by the
Lancet's rigorous peer-review system. As Gilbert Burnham told us:



"I doubt any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent
years as this one has!" (Burnham, email to Media Lens, October 30, 2004)



Again, the National Journal claim was based on nothing - a nothingness
that has been eagerly embraced and boosted by media in both the US and
Britain.



Refutations of the rest of the National Journal's criticisms can be viewed
here:
http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/research/iraq/lancet_mortality_response.html



John Tirman has provided a user-friendly demolition here:

http://www.johntirman.com/Bombs%20Away%20-%20a%20dull%20hatchet%20job.pdf





Grim Reading - The National Journal's Track Record



The US media activist, David Peterson, has kindly provided us with details
of the National Journal's past performance in covering the Lancet studies.
The January 4 Lancet smear aside, Peterson's search for National Journal
articles containing the words 'Iraq' and 'Lancet' delivered three results:



1. Alexis Simendinger, 'Grim Science of Body Counts,' October 14, 2006
(198 words)

2. Neil Munro, 'Counting Corpses,' January 5, 2008 (782 words. A
remarkable piece. See here:
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/databomb/sidebar.htm)

3. 'Vital Statistics,' January 12, 2008 (47 words)



It appears that the National Journal had nothing all to say about the 2004
Lancet report in the year it was published and almost nothing to say about
the 2006 study until this month. Peterson comments:



"Until the January 5, 2008 cover stories... these topics had never really
entered the NJ's purview." (Email to Media Lens, January 16, 2008)



In a bizarre article last December that did not even mention the Lancet
studies, Munro produced a similar smear of the September 2007 ORB poll
which estimated 1.2 million deaths in Iraq. Munro wrote:



"The poll isn't credible, said critic Michael Spagat, an economics
professor at the Royal Holloway University of London, who specializes in
civil conflicts, because its numbers are too high and because it doesn't
offer any evidence that the survey was conducted properly." (Munro,
'Iraq's Slippery Polls,' National Journal, December 1, 2007)



If this sounds just plain childish, consider the comment that follows:



"For example, the poll says that 264,126 Iraqis have been killed by car
bombs, but the Iraq Body Count website says the Iraqi media has reported
only 11,700 car-bomb deaths."



This is intended as serious analysis. In fact there is no longer any
excuse for this innocent reliance on Iraq Body Count (IBC). A review of
Iraq deaths reported by four major US newspapers found that IBC missed
more than one of every ten deaths reported by the news media. A separate
study soon to be published by Columbia University found that the majority
of violent deaths in a phone sample from Baghdad were not recorded by IBC.
('Answers to Questions About Iraq Mortality Surveys,'
http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/research/iraq/lancet_mortality_response.html)



One of the ironies of the January 4 National Journal piece was its concern
that anti-war bias might have distorted the Lancet reports. Munro and
Cannon wrote:



"Virtually everyone connected with the study has been an outspoken
opponent of U.S. actions in Iraq."



Tirman, on the other hand, describes Munro as "a militant right-winger...
whose professional misconduct is demonstrable".



In November 2001, Munro advocated "the destruction of Iraq" in a National
Journal piece titled, 'The Iraqi Opportunity - Berlin '45. Tokyo '45.
Baghdad '02.'



So how was Iraq an "opportunity"?



"He [Saddam Hussein] has little popular support, his country is a
flat-desert ideal for U.S. Army's mechanized warfare and the U.S. Air
Force's bombers, and his army is weakened by years of sanctions and
defeat. The response suggests itself; destroy Saddam first, and the rest
of the anti-American structure will collapse, regardless of bin Laden's
whereabouts or Saudi politics." (Munro, National Review, November 6, 2001;
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-munro110601.shtml)



Munro added:



"Even the Palestinians might learn something from the destruction of Iraq.
They're still refusing to make peace - albeit a bitter peace of the
defeated - -because they're still hoping to push Israel into the sea. This
forlorn hope has survived repeated debacles, disasters, and defeats, so
there can only be a modest prospect that the destruction of their
terrorist and Iraqi allies will reconcile them to peace. Maybe all those
construction jobs in Iraq will serve as compensation."



Dealing with Osama bin Laden, "stuck in a rat-infested cave" as he was,
posed less of a problem, although "when we do kill him, and metaphorically
stick his head on a pike in downtown New York, he will still live on as a
martyr, albeit a failed martyr".



Only metaphorically? Beneath its veneer of disinterested rationality, this
is the malignant bias that underlies the January 4 National Journal
report.



Genuine questions do of course remain about how many people have died in
Iraq. On January 9, an Iraqi Ministry of Health study published in the New
England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) estimated the death toll from the time
of the invasion in March 2003 until June 2006. (Iraq Family Health Survey
Study Group, 'Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006,'
January 9, 2008;

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMsa0707782)



Journalists have focused on NEJM's estimate of 151,000 dead by violence,
noting that it is lower than that offered by the 2006 Lancet study, which
estimated 655,000 excess deaths from all causes. Les Roberts observes that
the two articles have more in common than appears at first glance.



"The NEJM article found a doubling of mortality after the invasion, we
found a tripling. The big difference is that we found almost all the
increase from violence; they found half the increase from violence."
(Stephen Fidler and Steve Negus, 'Post-invasion death toll in Iraq put at
over 150,000,' Financial Times, January 10, 2008)



The deaths-by-violence in the latest survey remained the same from
year-to-year, which is highly unlikely - all observers agree that violent
deaths rose sharply in 2005 and 2006. It is possible that respondents
attributed deaths to nonviolent causes in order to avoid attracting the
attention of the Iraqi government and security forces. The excess
mortality implied by the new study is close to 400,000. Given that the
survey period ended 19 months ago, a continuation of the same death rates
would give a toll, today, of more than 600,000.



The new study is identical to both Lancet studies in one key respect - it
suggests that an appalling humanitarian catastrophe has taken place in
Iraq under US-UK occupation. This, in the end, is the point that matters.





SUGGESTED ACTION



The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect
for others. If you decide to write to journalists, we strongly urge you to
maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.



Write to Neil Munro

Email: nmunro@nationaljournal.com



Write to Melanie Phillips

Email: m.phillips@dailymail.co.uk



Please send a copy of your emails to us

Email: editor@medialens.org



This media alert will shortly be archived here:

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080122_all_smoke_no.php



Please visit the Media Lens website: http://www.medialens.org