Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber have a chapter in The Best War Ever [3] titled "Not Counting the Dead [4]," reporting on how the US government has chosen to hide the horrific impact of the US invasion and occupation. Now the authors of a major study examined in the book have a new study out. The New York Times reports, "A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 650,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here. ... It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. ... The study comes at a sensitive time for the Iraqi government, which is under pressure from American officials to take action against militias driving the sectarian killings. In the last week of September, the government barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the Health Ministry — the two main sources of information for civilian deaths — from releasing figures to the news media. Now, only the government is allowed to release figures."