Documents obtained
by the BBC under a Freedom Of Information Act request
have proven that despite public dismissal of last year's
Iraq Death Toll study, published in The Lancet Medical Journal,
British Government officials actually backed the methods
used by scientists who concluded that more than 600,000
Iraqis have been killed since the invasion.
The study was jointly conducted by the John
Hopkins School of Public Health and and Al Mustansiriya
University in Baghdad and compared mortality rates before
and after the invasion by surveying 47 randomly chosen
areas across 16 provinces in Iraq.
It concluded that as many as 654,965 more
Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in
March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war
conditions. The deaths from all causes—violent and
non-violent—are over and above the estimated 143,000
deaths per year that occurred from all causes prior to
the March 2003 invasion.
Researchers estimated with 95 per
cent certainty that the war and its aftermath
have resulted in the deaths of between 426,000 and 794,000
Iraqis.
The researchers spoke to nearly 1,850 families,
comprising more than 12,800 people. In nearly 92% of cases
family members produced death certificates to support
their answers.
At the time of its publication in the Lancet,
in October 2006, the media dubbed the study "controversial"
purely because it set the death toll a much greater figure
than Iraqi Body Count organisation, which says it has
recorded about 44,000 to 49,000 civilian Iraqi deaths.
The UN and the coalition governements concur with these
lower figures.
The John Hopkins estimate was much higher
because it the study was derived from a house-to-house
survey rather than the other approaches that depend on
body counts or media reports, which it says probably overlook
"many if not most civilian casualties."
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Dr David Rush, a professor and epidemiologist at Tufts
University in Boston, said: "Over the last 25 years,
this sort of methodology has been used more and more often,
especially by relief agencies in times of emergency."
Critics, including President George Bush, have said the
results are not credible, but Rush said traditional methods
for determining death rates, such as counting bodies,
are highly inaccurate for civilian populations in times
of war.
In addition, the biases inherent in cluster sampling,
such as wording of questionnaires, would tend to undercount,
rather than inflate, the number of deaths, Rush said.
Michael Intriligator, professor of economics at the University
of California at Los Angeles, also backed the finding.
"I think this is an extremely credible study,"
he said.
Now it has been revealed that government
advisers warned against publicly criticizing the report
concluding that the study had used "sound methods".
The chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence,
Roy Anderson, described the methods used in the study
as "robust" and "close to best practice".
Another official from the foreign office wrote "the
survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is
a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict
zones."
Despite having the backing of experts and
government advisors, the government roundly rejected the
study. The timing of the survey's release, just a few
weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, even led
some to call it "politics."
Establishment media hacks such as Bill O'Reilly now routinely
refer to the study as if it has been proven to be inaccurate
when in actual fact the exact opposite is true. O'Reilly,
in an interview with Sunsara Taylor of anti-war organisation
"The World Can't Wait" last week, called the
study the work of the "far left," his answer
to anything that proves him wrong.
In reality the study was peer reviewed and The Lancet
Medical Journal, the journal of the British Medical Society,
is considered to be one of the core general medical journals
on the planet.
In 1996 the Lancet claimed sanctions were responsible
for the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children. UNICEF later
accepted the study and rounded the number off to 500,000,
prompting Clinton’s Secretary of State, at the time
UN ambassador, Madeleine Albright, to declare on CBS’
60 Minutes that the medieval siege of Iraq and the murder
of hundreds of thousands of children was a price worth
paying.
Denis Halliday, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator
in Baghdad, resigned after a 34 year career with the UN,
declaring, “I don’t want to administer a program
that satisfies the definition of genocide.” Halliday’s
successor, Hans von Sponeck, also resigned in disgust,
as did Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program
in Iraq. All told, 1.5 million Iraqis died as a direct
result of the sanctions.
This all goes to show once more that a parallel world
of truth and lies, morality and immorality dominates how
the crime in Iraq is presented to us.
The co-author of the study, Les Roberts, an Associate Professor
at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health
has
stated:
