Co-Author of Medical Study Estimating 650,000 Iraqi Deaths Defends Research in the Face of White House Dismissal

Thursday, October 12th, 2006

The White House is dismissing the findings of a medical study that says 650,000 people have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion. The study was conducted by American and Iraqi researchers and published in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet. We’re joined by the report’s co-author, epidemiologist Les Roberts. [includes rush transcript]

More than 650,000 people have died in Iraq since the U.S. led invasion of the country began in March of 2003. This is according to a new study published in the scientific journal, The Lancet. The study was conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Researchers based their findings on interviews with a random sampling of households taken in clusters across Iraq. The study is an update to a prior one compiled by many of the same researchers. That study estimated that around 100,000 Iraqis died in the first 18 months after the invasion.

...I’m even more struck that here a year after our study came out, the first time the President has been asked about this was not by a reporter, but by someone from the public when he took a question.
-Les Roberts

On the 1,000th day of the U.S. war on Iraq, we look at a subject that usually receives little attention -- the Iraqi civilian death toll since the war began. We speak with Dr. Les Roberts, the lead researcher of a study released last year on the number of deaths in Iraq, which put the toll at more than 100,000. [includes rush transcript] President Bush was asked about the Iraqi civilian death toll on Monday following his speech at the Philadelphia World Affairs Council.

Q: Since the inception of the Iraqi war, I'd like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed. And by Iraqis I include civilians, military, police, insurgents, translators.

THE PRESIDENT: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We've lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq.

In an exclusive for IraqMortality.org Milan Rai, Author of War Plan Iraq, Regime Unchanged, and Chomsky's Politics gives indepth analysis of the three major mortality studies conducted in Iraq; Iraq Body Count, The Lancet, and The UNDP Report. This document is presented to help activists more fully understand the differences and similarities between these studies.

For five days, begining on October 24th, almost 100 grassroots groups and individual activists in the US, UK, and Switzerland will toll a bell in their communities for Iraqis who have lost their lives in this war and for the families and loved ones they have left behind. This tolling of bells will also usher in the one year anniversary of the publishing of The Lancet Study on October 29th which estimates 100,000 Iraqi deaths due to the war and occupation.

INTRODUCTION

As the death toll in Iraq continues to grow, one question haunting the debate over the occupation is the scale of this loss. Supporters of the continuing war seek to confuse and obscure the issue by presenting existing estimates as in conflict with each other. However, when we examine the best-known Iraq mortality estimates, we find that they tend to support rather than contradict each other.

All known estimates agree that the death rate in Iraq, especially the rate of violent death, has increased dramatically since the US/UK invasion in March 2003. They all indicate that number of ‘excess deaths’ (deaths that would not have occurred if not for the war) is staggeringly high.

IRAQ BODY COUNT

The first authoritative, and still constantly-updated, estimate of war-related deaths in Iraq was compiled by Iraq Body Count (IBC). In July 2005, IBC issued a dense, readable analysis of recorded civilian deaths due to the invasion and occupation of Iraq from March 2003 to March 2005. Careful and conservative work by IBC principal researchers Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda, Kay Williams and Peter Bagnall, showed that there had been 24,865 civilian war-related deaths, almost all of them as a direct result of violence, reported between 20 March 2003 and 19 March 2005.

In order to provide irrefutable, minimum figures for the death toll, IBC only records civilian deaths which have been reported by two reputable English-language sources.

IBC observed in its June 2005 report: ‘The population of Iraq is approximately 25,000,000, meaning that one in every thousand Iraqis has been violently killed since March 2003.’

Source Justice Not Vengeance
By Milan Rai
December 18 2004

OVER 100,000 DEAD?

The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, has published an estimate that 98,000 Iraqis have died because of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This estimate (usually approximated to 100,000 deaths) includes Iraqi civilians and insurgents, and includes all causes of death, both violent and nonviolent.

The 100,000 figure is likely to be an under-estimate.

Source: Crooked Timber
by Daniel Davies
November 11, 2004

Read full post at Crooked Timber

Source: Iraq Analysis Group
November, 2004

Responses to the 'Lancet Report' on Post-Invasion Mortality in Iraq -PDF (Nov 2004)

On 29 October, the Lancet, an eminent British medical journal, published a study by a team of researchers from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health entitled "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq" The authors concluded that

"making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100 000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths."

The full report is available for download (pdf file).

• Iraq Analysis Group Briefing: the Lancet Iraq mortality survey -- the UK government's response is unjustified and disingenuous (20 Nov 2004)
  
  On 17 November 2004, the UK Foreign Secretary produced a written ministerial statement response to the article Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey published in the Lancet on 29 October 2004. The ministerial statement dismissed mortality estimates produced by the Lancet survey. This briefing argues that this dismissal largely unjustified, and parts disingenuous.

• Iraq Analysis Group Briefing: the Lancet Iraq mortality survey -- the Prime Minister's response is inaccurate and misleading (01 Nov 2004)
  
  This is our previous response to the statement by the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman about the Lancet study

• Information sources page about the report

Source: AlterNet
by Marla Ruzicka
April 18, 2005

Just before her death, Marla Ruzicka wrote about the importance of recording and publicly releasing Iraqi civilian casualty numbers.

BAGHDAD --The writer, a 28-year-old humanitarian aid worker from California, was killed Saturday in Baghdad when a suicide bomber aiming for a convoy of contractors pulled alongside her vehicle and detonated his explosives. Her longtime driver and translator, Faiz Ali Salim, also died. She filed this piece from Baghdad a week before her death.

In my two years in Iraq, the one question I am asked the most is: "How many Iraqi civilians have been killed by American forces?" The American public has a right to know how many Iraqis have lost their lives since the start of the war and as hostilities continue.

Source: The Columbia Journalism Review
by Lila Guterman
March/April 2005

Last fall, a major public-health study appeared in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, only to be missed or dismissed by the American press. To the extent it was covered at all, the reports were short and usually buried far from the front pages of major newspapers. The results of the study could have played an important role in future policy decisions, but the press’s near total silence allowed the issue to pass without debate.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
by Lila Guterman
January 27, 2005

When more than 200,000 people died in a tsunami caused by an Asian earthquake in December, the immediate reaction in the United States was an outpouring of grief and philanthropy, prompted by extensive coverage in the news media.

Two months earlier, the reaction in the United States to news of another large-scale human tragedy was much quieter. In late October, a study was published in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, concluding that about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded by a United States-led coalition in March 2003. On the eve of a contentious presidential election -- fought in part over U.S. policy on Iraq -- many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines.

Source: Left Hook
by M. Junaid Alam and Noam Chomsky
December 23, 2004

On December 17th, Left Hook co-editor M. Junaid Alam met with Professor Noam Chomsky at his MIT office to get his thoughts on the ideological justifications and historical realities behind America's "war on terror." Professor Chomsky spent a half-hour taking apart the framework of "civilization" versus "barbarism," pointing to Western and particularly US state-sponsored atrocities, laying out the grave nature of war crimes committed in Iraq, attacking the intellectual culture which sanctions massive suffering, and explaining the elite's knowledge of the roots of terrorism.

-Transcribed by M. Junaid Alam and slightly edited for clarification by Professor Chomsky