Soros: Philanthropist or Propagandist? Soros-Funded Study Inflates Numbers of War Dead

Brendan Montague, of UK’s Times Online:

A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.

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 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.

There have obvioulsy been skeptics of the Lancet’s body count since it first appeared, such as this, from the Iraq Body Count:

1. On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;
2. Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;
3. Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq…(more)

The New York Post:

Soros, who gave more than $20 million to prevent President Bush’s re-election, contributed $45,000 of the $145,000 that was spent on the study, the National Journal disclosed.

TigerHawk summed this debacle up brilliantly, in George Soros and the subversion of academic reputation:

• First, it was a brilliant bit of propaganda on the part of Soros and his co-conspirators on the academic left…
• Second, this is an academic scandal, insofar as these institutions have lent their brand equity to what is essentially a fraud on the public…
• Third…it is now fairly clear that George W. Bush and Tony Blair (and a host of wingnut bloggers) were correct in their characterization of the study’s methodology, and The Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and The Lancet were wrong.
• Finally, it is a lead-pipe cinch that the destruction of this study will elicit no apologies or even quiet investigations…The silence will be deafening.

(Hat-Tip, Orion, S&L)