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.

October 11, 2006
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
New York Times

BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

Morgue's Revised Toll for August Undermines Claims by Leaders of Steep Drop in Violence

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, September 8, 2006; A12

BAGHDAD, Sept. 7 -- Baghdad's morgue almost tripled its count for violent deaths in Iraq's capital during August from 550 to 1,536, authorities said Thursday, appearing to erase most of what U.S. generals and Iraqi leaders had touted as evidence of progress in a major security operation to restore order in the capital.

July 9th, 2006
The New York Times

View Photo Essay by Farah Nosh

November 25, 2006

100,000 Rings: In Remembrance of the Iraqi Civilian and Military Dead

Two women were arrested on Friday 25th November while holding a bell-ringing ceremony outside Parliament as part of an international peace event to mark the anniversary of the release of the Lancet study on 29th October 2004 which estimated 100,000 people had died since the beginning of the war in Iraq.

One of the women, Giulia, stated:
"I am here today to remember the terrible loss of life that has occurred throughout the illegal war and occupation of Iraq, to commemorate the slaughter that took place in Fallujah a year ago and in solidarity with all the courageous people who have been arrested since the introduction of the new laws preventing demonstrations in the vicinity of the Houses of Parliament."

Anna-Linnéa, the other bell-ringer, said:"The fact that two women, unarmed and totally open, accountable and nonviolent, get arrested for ringing a bell in a remembrance ceremony outside Parliament proves how much the authorities fear the truth. What we have to say is clearly important since the government clamps down on us in this way."

This comes from Elisa in San Francisco...

Today's SF Chronicle had a short piece that talked about the high numbers of Iraqi civilians that have been "war casualties." They get their high estimate of 30,000 from Iraq Body Count, and didn't even mention the study by the journal Lancet that calculated Iraqi deaths as around 100,000. They didn't even mention it, though I guess that should not come as a surprise.

Last May, I wrote about an anti-war vigil held by Scott Blackburn of Voices in the Wilderness (now Voices of Creative Nonviolence), to recognize the deaths of the then 1.594 American troops. In his vigil, Scott rang a bell once a minute to mark each death. He was ringing the bell from 8 am on a Friday morning until 10:34 Saturday. I commented that you would need more than 70 days of bell ringing to reach the numbers in the Lancet study, plus those American deaths.

This week, in a way, both have happened.

Continue Reading on Elisa's Website

October 26, 2005 by Kathy Kelly

Today, in cities and towns throughout the U.S. and beyond, activists will gather to grieve and protest the carnage wrought by the unlawful and immoral war in Iraq. Thousands will gather to commemorate the 2,000 lives of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and call upon U.S. people to stop funding the war. Others will focus chiefly upon the well over 100,000 Iraqi lives lost, and, in a campaign launched some months ago, will ring bells 100,000 times –1,000 chimes each in 100 different locations - as names of Iraqi civilians killed since the start of Shock and Awe are read aloud.

October 25th marked the 2,000th American service-member death in the Iraq war: October 29th will mark one year since The British Lancet, perhaps the world’s foremost medical journal, estimated from careful research that tens of thousands of Iraqi people had died due to this same horrific war. The demonstrations will overlap, but for once we can claim that separate demonstrations, held, simultaneously, can actually raise awareness and hopefully affect change. These protests are after all the same: One life, two thousand lives, one hundred thousand lives, or many, many more - are all too much to pay for the imperial ambitions of the few.

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.’