Monday, January 06, 2003

Go check out Thinking it Through who says "advantage: blogosphere!" for pushing this story:

This time, Beth Osborne Daponte will be leaving her calculator off.

A senior researcher at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, Daponte was the Census Bureau demographer who postulated in 1991 that 158,000 Iraqi men, women and children died during and shortly after the Persian Gulf war. In return, she was reprimanded by her government, and saw her report rewritten and her career sidetracked.

Today, with another war in Iraq a possibility, Daponte says she has no intention of trying to estimate Iraqi deaths again. Revealing finely tuned cynicism, she wonders whether it would be worth the stress.



Clearly she should have been reprimanded for drawing a moral equivalence between dead Iraqis and the innocent premature babies that were ripped from the incubators by Iraqi soldiers.