But the media played it up. "One in 40 Iraqis killed since invasion," blared a front-page headline in the Guardian. CNN.com's story began: "War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports." Few journalists questioned the integrity of the study or its authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Iraqi scientist Riyadh Lafta. National Public Radio's Richard Harris reported asking Burnham, "Right before the election you're making this announcement. Is this politically motivated? And he said, 'no, it's not politically motivated.' "
<snip>
The study's authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of "data-heaping" - that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud. "They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication," Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center, told the reporters.
Bad as the study's methodological defects were, its political taint was worse: Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of the leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who, as Munro and Cannon point out, "spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004."
Burnham and Roberts were avowed opponents of the war, and submitted their report to The Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election.
Roberts, a self-described "advocate" committed to "ending the war," even sought the Democratic nomination for New York's 24th Congressional District. "It was a combination of Iraq and Katrina that just put me over the top," he told National Journal.
Source
