MSM sources like the AP and the Washington Post, among many others, highlighted the report lending it credence when it came out last month but few of those news outlets revealed the source of the study's funding. While most did reveal that the study was "controversial," few went into just how far off from the truth the details of this study are.
The real facts, however, are beginning to come out.
Michael Fumento has penned a great expose on how many lies fill the famed Lancet Study on Iraqi war deaths and the UK's Timesonline also revealed the connection with Soros.
The Times tells of the Soros involvement.
Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.
“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.
And Michael Fumento has a great run down on all the spurious mathematics promulgated by the study. When comparing the numbers offered by the Iraq Family Health Survey study to that of the study in the Lancet, some startling differences are seen.
So for that last period, while the IFHS daily figure was 2.3 times higher than that of Iraq Body Count, the Lancet 2006 daily figure was a stunning 7.3 times higher than that of the IFHS and 17 times higher than that of Iraq Body Count.
But, here is something that Fumento dug up that is even more startling. The man responsible for compiling some of the Lancet study is the very same propagandist employed by Sadam Hussein to claim that U.N. was killing innocent Iraqi children when sanctions were imposed after the 1990 liberation of Kuwait.
While it's widely known that the Lancet authors refused to release their data to be evaluated by outsiders, there has been little talk about Riyadh Lafta.
Lafta was the man in charge of the actual collection of numbers, while another Lancet author was in Iraq but holed up in a hotel. As National Journal notes, Lafta was also a high-ranking official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health and there authored some of the agit-prop papers about the vast number of small children dying from sanctions the U.N. imposed after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait... So Lafta doesn't exactly fit the definition of a trustworthy researcher except in the sense of trusting him to come to the "proper" conclusions.
Fumento also reveals the connections of the Lancet's editor to anti-war organizations as well as his past usage of the Lancet for activism as opposed to serious scientific studies.
But the editor of the Lancet, physician Richard Horton, has unapologetically used the journal for advocacy on other issues, including a notorious 1998 paper that created an international panic over the safety of the childhood vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella [the MMR] – linking it to autism and bowel disease.
And...
Horton spoke at a rally in 2006 sponsored by Stop the War Coalition, a British group set up on September 21, 2001, which is to say its purpose was to oppose punishing and defeating the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. At the rally, Horton shouted about the "mountain of violence and torture" in Iraq – and no, he wasn't talking about Saddam. "This axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease," he angrily added. Watch the histrionics on YouTube. This is not your father's medical journal editor.
Fumento’s piece is a must read on this issue.
So, not only is this study funded by George Soros in an attempt to undermine U.S. policies, the editor of the magazine is also an anti-war activist who is willing to ignore the obvious problems with the study -- such as the fact that a Sadam Hussein propagandist was relied on to research the stats for it.
Whole ballyhooed as proof of America's crimes, the truth of the matter is that this study is filled with lies, funded by anti-Americans, and written by propagandists.
No wonder the MSM loved it so.
