The Guardian and Iraq Body Count keep deceiving you

Dear Richard Norton-Taylor,
Guardian's security editor

In your latest piece on the Guardian, you write:

More than 89,300 civilians have been killed in Iraq since 2003, according to the latest tolls from the human rights group, Iraq Body Count (IBC). It is significantly less than the 650,000-plus deaths estimated in a study released in October 2006 by the Lancet medical journal. IBC says its data is drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures, to produce what it calls a "credible record of known deaths and incidents". The latest figures suggest the number of killings is falling, after reaching a high level for most of last year.

Please, may I ask you why you favored the amateurish IBC’s data over scientific studies published on peer reviewed journals? Also, why didn’t you report on the studies conducted by the serious British ORB?

1) The sudies conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and published on the British medical journal The Lancet

2) The studies conducted by British ORB

September 2007 – More than 1,000,000 Iraqis murdered

January 2008 - Update on Iraqi Casualty Data

Sincerely,
Gabriele Zamparini
London

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Please, also read:

What the Independent says... and what it omits

The "human cost" of the Iraq War and IBC's co-founder John Sloboda's "gut feeling"