"The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. 'Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence,' it said."If, on average, one Iraqi died in each such attack, the mortality rate would be greater than that in the Lancet study. Thus, the reported rates are not implausible, as many critics claim. Of course, the fact that the mortality rates are not implausible does not mean that they are therefore correct. While many epidemiologists and others have defended the study, some experts in this area, most notably the eminent Norwegian researcher Jon Pedersen have criticized the study. Like all studies on important matters, this one does deserve careful scrutiny. But it does not deserve to be dismissed by the press in a way that similar studies with results more comfortable to the United States government are not dismissed. The existence of "controversy" should not be an excuse to ignore that, as a consequence of U.S. government action, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have needlessly died. Les Roberts again made the point that their data implies that the majority of deaths in Iraq are from violence, whereas alternative accounts from Iraq Body Count, the Brookings Institution, or the Iraq Ministry of Health imply that only a small percentage, perhaps 10%, of deaths in Iraq are from violence. He again, as he has done since the study came out in early October, has called upon the press to visit graveyards and ask if the majority of deaths is from nonviolent or violent causes. Roberts again called, as these authors did after their 2004 study, for another research group to investigate the Iraqi mortality rate and confirm or invalidate the Lancet study. It is disturbing that, in the two years between theses researchers' 2004 and 2006 studies, no other group did attempt such a replication. Given the numbers of surveys conducted in Iraq on other controversial issues, such as attitudes toward attacks on Coalition troops, it should he relatively easy for this study to be replicated. Perhaps all of us, whatever our evaluation of this study, can echo these calls to the press and to other survey researchers. Movingly, Rep. Kucinich ended the briefing by emphasizing "the imperative of human unity" "that we recognize the imperative of human security,... that each of us has a right to survive." And: "It is an imperative to focus on the imperative of peace. War is not inevitable." Kucinich seems among the very few in the public arena who realize what is truly at stake for the human race in an era of modern technology. Given the nature of this technology of warfare, either Rep. Kunich's call will be heeded or one of the continual conflicts will spark an all out war that will destroy us all.