Glenn writes, describing WaPo on the new NEJM study on Iraqi mortality:

In some circles, it's a cause for celebration and vindication that the completely optional war we started "only" resulted in the violent deaths of 150,000 Iraqi innocent civilians (through mid-2006), with the overall number of "excess deaths" at 400,000, and the displacement of 4 million human beings.

But elsewhere (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/18/AR2007091802203.html) on WaPo's website (see the widget at the bottom of the page) they tell us that the "Maximum Count" of Iraqi civilians killed is estimated at 87,792 through (or at least updated as of) January 9, 2008.

So to review: according to WaPo until very recently the maximum estimate of violent Iraqi mortality from the invasion through the present is under 90,000. And now they're vindicated by an estimate of almost double that over a much shorter time frame?

The knew of course about the Lancet and ORB numbers which both project to roughly a million for excess violent deaths through the present (or 600,000 through mid-2006). But that wasn't worth mentioning to their readers -- indeed they were so marginal WaPo felt they could be ignored in presenting "maximum" numbers for casualties -- until now there is a peer-reviewed study contradicting them.

For detailed discussion of Iraqi mortality, I recommend Tim Lambert's Deltoid (http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/lancetiraq/). In particular, note there are reasons to think the new study may be an underestimate. In particular, they used questioners from the Iraqi government. Especially in Sunni areas, one can imagine that respondents might feel intimidated to report violent deaths of family members under the Shiite government to representatives of that government.

Let me try again. Here is the URL for the page on WaPo where you can see that supposedly the "Maximum Count" for an estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths since the invasion is less than 90,000:

http://tinyurl.com/2rohuq

In case anyone's wondering what WaPo's defense would be, I suspect it would hinge strongly on the word "Count" (and ignoring the fact they also use the word "estimates"). These are IBC numbers which are based on specific press citations. But clearly the effect (and one suspects the intent) is that the vast majority of readers will see this as an upper bound on the number of civilian casualties. (This despite the fact that even the IBC folks themselves readily concede their numbers are underestimates by as much as a factor of 2 and have on occasion conceded it could be as much as a factor of 4.)

One thing I should note in fairness if you click on the (tiny) "About these figures" link on the widget, you'll be taken to a page that does mention the Lancet study. But what percentage of readers will do that?

Also, I note that WaPo shows just 193 contractors killed which strikes me as a very low number.

But Glenn, CNN's John King assured me that unlike our diligent press corps you never do research.

This was the title from a blog post by him at The Hill on Saturday:

"Can’t Let FISA Expire, But We Need to Take a Good Look (Sen. Ben Nelson)"

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:jbNvxY9WAlMJ:blog.thehill.com/2008/01/26/cant-let-fisa-expire-but-we-need-to-take-a-good-look-sen-ben-nelson/+FISA+expire&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

That's not good if some Democratic Senators are as confused as WaPo and the Politico on what this debate is about.

In fairness, it's conceivable Nelson doesn't write the titles for his own blog posts. Also, I see The Hill took down the blog post so maybe someone realized the mistake (the link above is to the Google cache). Still, not an encouraging sign.

The accompanying claim that companies should never "second-guess" the "judgment of the President regarding what's legal" -- which I just heard from John Cornyn and Saxby Chambliss -- is equally creepy, and is the crux of the authoritarian case for telecom immunity.

Hear, hear. In some circumstances, we even expect soldiers to second-guess their commanders when their orders are illegal. That after all is the precedent of Nuremberg. So why can we not expect civilians to sometimes second-guess the requests of the government? Reasonable deference to the expressed legal judgments of the administration is appropriate. But we should not let private actors off the hook no matter what they did just because as the government paid them it also said, wink wink, this is all legal.

But if the Brezhnev-era Soviet Communist government were attempting to convince Russian citizens that they needed more domestic spying powers or greater benefits for government-allied corporations, and they wanted to use Pravda to achieve that end, what would be different?

They would ask the questions in Russian.

E.g. he says 2 year sunset provision not 4 years. (The confusion may come about because 6=2+4. I.e. is the sunset being changed to 2 years or being shortened by 2 years?)

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/house_dems_circulate_draft_of.php

As I understand it, ACLU vs. NSA (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACLU_v._NSA ) was unsuccessful with the appellate court because of a Catch-22 situation that no-one could prove standing because of the secrecy of the program. Why not introduce a provision that creates standing? This would allow courts to evaluate the legality of programs where it is known that someone was affected but secrecy prevents us from knowing who specifically was affected. This could be tailored to just surveillance or more generally.