Dahr Jamail has astonishing absence of common sense and timing

UPDATE: Note how Dahr’s story of all the gravediggers gibes with a story that Matty O’Blackfive just sent a link to from last year:

NAJAF, Iraq — At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn’t good. A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

I signed up for this moron’s alerts because it generally takes the better part of a nano-second to find something ridiculous about the article. Today’s is more funny than most the others. It’s about the amazing prosperity of Gravediggers in Iraq, who are flush with jobs from burying so many corpses.

BAGHDAD — Amidst the soaring unemployment in Iraq, the gravediggers have been busy. So busy that officials have no record of the number of graves dug; of the real death toll, that is.

“I’ve been working here four years,” a gravedigger who gave his name as Ali told IPS at the largest cemetery in Baghdad, a sprawling expanse in the Abu Ghraib section of the capital city. “In 2006 and some of 2007, we buried 40- 50 people daily. This went on for one-and-a-half years.

“Twenty-five percent of these were from violence, and another 70 percent were killed by the Mehdi Army (the militia of Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr).” Only a few appeared to have died from natural causes.

This seems to defy every other news source from Iraq, where killings seem down, no? So, our intrepid moron-on-the-scene goes back to using the rock solid numbers he always has:

Such graveyards, and there are many, raise questions about the real death toll in Iraq.

The last serious study, by a group of doctors in the U.S. and Iraq, was published in the British peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet on Oct. 11, 2006.

The study said about 655,000 Iraqis (2.5 percent of the population) had been killed as a direct result of the invasion and occupation. The research was carried out on the ground by doctors moving from house to house, questioning families, and examining death certificates.

Wow, impeccable timing there [fecal matter]-[richard]. It seems like just yesterday that that study was thoroughly discredited. Possibly because it was just yesterday.

In a highly unusual rebuke, the American Association for Public Opinion Research today said the author of a widely debated survey on “excess deaths” in Iraq had violated its code of professional ethics by refusing to disclose details of his work. The author’s institution later disclosed to ABC News that it, too, is investigating the study.

[…]

Both AAPOR and the school said they had focused on Burnham’s study, published in the October 2006 issue of the British medical journal the Lancet, reporting an estimated 654,965 “excess deaths” in Iraq as a result of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. An earlier, 2004 report, in which Burnham also participated, estimated approximately 98,000 excess deaths to that point.

[…]

AAPOR’s standards committee chair, Mary E. Losch, said the association, acting on a member’s complaint, had formally requested from Burnham “basic information about his survey, including, for example, the wording of questions he used, instructions and explanations that were provided to respondents, and a summary of the outcomes for all households selected as potential participants in the survey.”

Losch said Burnham gave some partial answers but “explicitly refused to provide complete information about the basic elements of his research.”

This Ain’t Hell has just completed our own peer-reviewed study wherein we discovered that 106% of all anti-war activists war stories are made up entirely of expelled body fluids, and that such material is generally even fruitier than shit from a Mexican Fruit Bat. You can believe us on that, because it was PEER REVIEWED. By Jimbo.

Category: Politics