I fear Bruce (and perhaps Damian too) may have slipped and bumped his head; how else to explain this posting on the Lancet article:
The actual statement of claim is pretty simple when you reduce it to the nub. The Iraqi survey team claims to have randomly interviewed households totalling 12,801 individuals, and found that exactly 300 of them had died violently between the U.S invasion and July, 2006. Survivors produced approximately 240 death certificates that confirmed this.
That math (even if you use only the certified deaths) works out to 5.5 violent deaths per thousand people per annum in Iraq. Extrapolate that to the entire population of Iraq and you get a number in the 450,000 range. Assume the other 60 undocumented violent deaths were truthful reports, as well, and you're up to 600K.
The methodology as defined in the study is as sound as any other scientific study (more on this later). The simplest statistical sample size calculations tell us that if the real number of violent deaths so far in Iraq had been, say, 60,000, then there should have been around 30 certifiable violent deaths in a sample of this size, not 240 (or 300).
Now, there's nothing I particular disagree with in what Bruce is saying here. However, there's one other fact you can deduce from this data: to switch the projected number of deaths from 60,000 to 600,000, all you need to do is deliberately mis-sample between 210 and 270 households in the survey of 12,801 household; to spell it out, to go to households where you know someone died instead of a "random" sample about 2% of the time. I could come with similar numbers for Toronto if you gave me a budget and a handful of undergrads with a sense of humour.
Who would do such a dastardly thing? Lying lays near the top of the toolbox of the political extremist and it's hard to argue, given the timing etc. that the purpose of the Lancet articles are anything but political in nature.
You of course can judge for yourself whether anti-war activist Horton (who's not afraid, or ashamed, to appear on the same stage as the odious certifiable nut George Galloway) is such an extremist.