Earlier today, I sent the following email to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian. He does not have a good record of responding to complaints (not to mine anyway), but let's hope he has a change of heart.

Dear Mr Rusbridger,

An article by Julian Borger and Jonathan Steele in today's Guardian ("Rumsfeld singled out as crisis deepens in Iraq", Monday March 20, 2006) has this to say on estimates of casualties in the Iraq war:

"Since the invasion of Iraq three years ago, the US military has lost more than 2,300 troops in combat, roadside explosions, insurgent attacks and friendly fire. But that figure is dwarfed by estimates for the number of Iraqis killed, which range from a conservative 30,000 to a more speculative 100,000."

The last sentence is, presumably, an allusion to the figure cited in the Lancet in November 2004. As you no doubt know, this figure was arrived at on the basis of research conducted by Les Roberts and his team, who also used the same methodology to arrive at a figure of 1.7 million for the death count in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As far as I am aware, this latter figure has never been referred to by the Guardian as "speculative"; and was certainly not referred to as such almost a year and a half on from its initial publication, as the Iraq figure has been here - truly remarkable considering the increasing level of violence in Iraq, which must surely make any such figure a severe underestimate. The epithet is doubly extraordinary considering that your own paper even published a piece a few months ago (George Monbiot, 8 November 2005) on the very question of the flagrant double standards applied by the mainstream media in covering the Lancet report, explicitly comparing it with the DRC study.

So what exactly is going on? Why does the Guardian persist in undermining the Lancet report's estimate, some 16 months after its initial publication, in the face of the worsening situation in Iraq, and abundant evidence of flagrant double standards, of which you cannot but be aware? I await your reply with interest.

Yours sincerely,

Tim Holmes