Lancet Study Hoax Financed by Soros-cidal Maniacs

Lancet famously came out with a preposterous "study" in October, 2006, stating that deaths in Iraq resulting from the military overthrow of the Saddam regime resulted in about <665,000 Iraqi deaths, over ten times as much as the estimates of ALL other international and US investigations. Immediately, moronic turnip-truck refugees like Rosie O'Dodo and the usual leftist anvil chorus chimed in jumping up and down, holding their breath, and making smoke come out of their ears. Here is the Spectator asking the inevitable question at the end:

A story in the Wall Street Journal highlights a remarkable article in theNational 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. They also discovered that the person responsible for collecting the data for the study, Riyadh Lafta, was hardly an objective or reliable source.

Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease, or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In 2000, Lafta authored at least two brief articles contending that U.N. sanctions had caused many deaths by starvation among Iraqi children. In one article, he identified malnutrition as the main contributor to 53 percent of deaths among hospitalized children younger than 2, during a 1997 survey carried out at Saddam Central Teaching Hospital. The article cited no health data from before the sanctions, yet it asserted, ‘We can conclude from results that the most important and widespread underlying cause of the deterioration of child-health standards in Iraq is the long-term impact of the non-humanized economic sanction imposed through United Nations resolutions.’

In other words, the Lancet relied for its data upon assertions made by one of Saddam’s apologists, who had previously manipulated information in order to evade UN sanctions, about the alleged effects of the toppling of Saddam. This in a medical journal which hitherto was regarded as utterly authoritative — and which, because it played to the anti-war narrative, was swallowed uncritically by the ‘Bush lied people died’ crowd and was treated as holy writ.

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

The traitors on the ultra left will stop at no amount of garbage and lies to effect an American defeat, replaying the Democrat Party's treason on Vietnam thirty-four years ago. The Democrat Left is a Fifth Column trying to suborn the US Constitution and submit the US to the authority of the UN and other international bodies.
UPDATE: The Times On-Line has more information on how a respected British medical journal allowed itself to be duped by a spurious "survey," and adds the following interesting coda, mysteriously never reported widely by the US media which had trumpeted the fake Lancet "study" for days on end:

The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.

New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.

“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.

MIT and Columbia U. were also implicated in the hoax perpetrated by Lancet.