15 seconds 2

The Rocky Mountain News printed my letter on the civilian death toll in Iraq.

A letter in Saturday's paper by Henri E. Stetter repeated the false claim that there have 100,000 civilian deaths since the Iraq war began two years ago.

That number is the midpoint of an estimate that ranges from 8,000 to 194,000, which is the 95 percent confidence interval. The wide range should tell you that the number is meaningless, and any statistician will confirm that.

Iraqbodycount.net, a Web site that counts "individual or cumulative deaths as directly reported by the media or tallied by official bodies (hospitals, morgues, etc.)" puts the number at between 17,061 and 19,432.