UK: Blair’s own ‘Defence’ Department confirms 655,000 deaths in Iraq

From Blairwatch in Britain:

Blair And Bush Hit By Friendly Fire

Posted March 26th, 2007 by Tom

Poor old Tony (and poor old Dubya).

Having bravely come out back in October 2006 pooh-poohing the estimate of 655,000 excess deaths since the Iraq invasion claimed in the Lancet report [PDF] (a pooh-poohing echoed wildly by the insanosphere over in the US) it must come as something of a shock to be on the receiving end of some friendly fire from the MOD today:

“[T]he Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser said the survey’s methods were “close to best practice” and the study design was “robust”.”

Well, so far what we know – only a few people ever disagreed with that and they were discredited, insane or (usually) both.

Talking of which, here’s the Prime Minister’s Official Smokescreen from just after publication (12/10/2006):

“more important was the view of the Iraqi government, which, as recently as October, had said that the Lancet report numbers method was far from the correct. The Iraqi health ministry was the place to get the relevant figures. The problem with this was that they were using an extrapolation technique, from a relatively small sample, from an area of Iraq which was not representative of the country as a whole. We had questioned that technique from the beginning and we continued to do so. The Lancet figure was a greater order of magnitude than of any other figure. It was not one we believed to be anywhere near accurate.”

In short, a strong case of cognitive dissonance, given that the BBC’s FoIA request now reveals that they were being told internally that the method was sound *at the time* (well, the day after, on the 13th).

We know Blair and the other inmates of the Fuhrerbunker are unscientific – the faith schools/evolution argument and the technical/engineering illiteracy over ID cards and NHS IT give it away – but this is cast-iron proof – one of the tests of good scientists is not discarding eye-opening results merely because to do so risks having your eyes opened.

See also here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

And here.

Iraq and Rwanda: here.

Independent authority in Britain: it is not illegal to compare Blair to Hitler because of his ID cards plans.