Portland Scandal: Anti War Group ‘Jacks Iraq Body Count Name for PSU Exhibit

March 9, 2008

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The REAL group Iraq Body Count, based in the UK, says it knows NOTHING about this poseur group that purports to show the “real” numbers of deaths in Iraq through an exhibition of white flags (which ought to tell you where they’re coming from).
The group Iraq Body Count EXHIBIT says there are 655,000 civilian deaths in Iraq. This number has been debunked several times (by statisticians, people who are there, and IRAQ BODY COUNT).
I emailed the REAL Iraq Body Count group and received this response:

Victoria, The Portland, Oregon project has no connection to Iraq Body Count, which I co-founded with Hamit Dardagan, and whose entire project is described at www.iraqbodycount.org
The project you are trying to contact is a totally different organisation, of which we have no knowledge, and e have no contacts to its personnel.
They appear to have a website at http://www.iraqbodycountexhibit.org/contact.htm which gives an email address as info@iraqbodycountexhibit.org
I think you need to contact them directly.
Regards,
John Sloboda, Press and media spokesperson, Iraq Body Count.

I, of course, have emailed the group putting on the bogus exhibit here and it will come as no surprise that they haven’t bothered to get back to me.
The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore (who has himself done damage and death statistics in Iraq) and the National Journal have debunked and refuted these outrageous claims here and here.

Officials at Iraq Body Count strongly opposed the Iraq war yet issued a detailed critique of the Lancet II study. Researchers wading into a field that is this fraught with danger have a responsibility not to be reckless with statistics, the group said. The numbers claimed by the Lancet study would, under the normal ratios of warfare, result in more than a million Iraqis wounded seriously enough to require medical treatment, according to this critique. Yet official sources in Iraq have not reported any such phenomenon. An Iraq Body Count analysis showed that the Lancet II numbers would have meant that 1,000 Iraqis were dying every day during the first half of 2006, “with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms.” The February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque is widely credited with plunging Iraq into civil war, yet the Lancet II report posits the equivalent of five to 10 bombings of this magnitude in Iraq every day for three years.

“In the light of such extreme and improbable implications,” the Iraq Body Count report stated, “a rational alternative conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from unrepresentative data.”

Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com