Of course we've been over this and of course the death rate in Iraq was probably higher in 2002 and official numbers estimated. But the Lancet is using perfectly good numbers.
Hitchens cites the Iraq Body Count (IBC) complaints about the Lancet study, but IBC does not even pretend to do a scientific survey. IBC does bring up the death certificates issue, but not in a way persuasive to their case. Death certificates seem not to have been counted well by the government even in the Saddam days, so there could be hundreds of thousands unaccounted for.
Oh, yeah, but Hitchens - he reaches down into the muck and comes up with the claim even American movement conservatives won't use in a direct way:
"And it's been noticed that Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of the magazine, is a full-throated speaker at rallies of the Islamist-Leftist alliance that makes up the British Stop the War Coalition"
We on the Left are apparently making overt common cause with Islamists. This claim is implied many times by right-wing commentators, but they rarely have the nerve to say it outright.
Does anyone on this list even know any Islamists and could you imagine how badly atheist leftists and Islamists would get along? I think Mormons would be a better match.
Boddi