National Journal has an in-depth report on why the much-vaunted study by The Lancet claiming 600,000 civilian casualties in Iraq was a work of scientific fraud and not a legitimate study. Almost immediately after it was public statisticians and other examiners found that the study was statistically invalid. Now there’s evidence that it was an attempt by none other than George Soros to manipulate public opinion with faked statistics on the war:

Over the past several months, National Journal has examined the 2006 Lancet article, and another [PDF] that some of the same authors published in 2004; probed the problems of estimating wartime mortality rates; and interviewed the authors and their critics. NJ has identified potential problems with the research that fall under three broad headings: 1) possible flaws in the design and execution of the study; 2) a lack of transparency in the data, which has raised suspicions of fraud; and 3) political preferences held by the authors and the funders, which include George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

The Lancet studies were so obviously politically timed and so obviously distorted that they should never have been published—yet what can only be described as a cabal of left-wing activists managed to get a reputable scientific journal to be party to outright academic fraud. Now, once even more careful analysis has been compiled, there is little left with which to defend the Lancet studies. The data was either collected inaccurately or not even collected at all. The methodology was designed to create a specific result, not accurately report the data. The funding came exclusively from groups with a partisan axe to grind. Everything was done in such a way as to generate a hit piece rather than a real study.

The Lancet studies were frauds, pure and simple. Their data is worthless, their conclusions the result of conscious bias and they were designed for political effect. This is another example of how a certain group of radical ideologues have hijacked institutions to serve as propaganda organs, and an example of why people simply cannot trust the mainstream media to give them the straight story anymore.