British Government Admits 600,000+ Iraqi Death Toll

Jill Lawless
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
London Independent

British government officials have backed the methods used by scientists who concluded that more than 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion, the BBC reported yesterday.

The Government publicly rejected the findings, published in The Lancet in October. But the BBC said documents obtained under freedom of information legislation showed advisers concluded that the much-criticised study had used sound methods.

The study, conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, estimated that 655,000 more Iraqis had died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war.

The study estimated that 601,027 of those deaths were from violence.

The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 per cent certain that the real number of deaths lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636.

The conclusion, based on interviews and not a body count, was disputed by some experts, and rejected by the US and British governments.

But 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 said it was "a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones".


Related Material:

1. A study Jointly conducted by the John Hopkins School of Public Health and and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, compared mortality rates before and after the invasion by surveying 47 randomly chosen areas across 16 provinces in Iraq.

2. "Advisers Told Ministers Not To Rubbish Iraq Deaths Study" ( BBC ,Monday, March 26, 2007)

Two Incidents Worthy Of Remembrance, Regarding Past Government Lies:

1. 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.

2. 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.

Notable Quote:

The co-author of the study, Les Roberts, an Associate Professor at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health has stated:

"The consequences of downplaying the number of deaths in Iraq are profound for both the UK and the US. How can the Americans have a surge of troops to secure the population and promise success when the coalition cannot measure the level of security to within a factor of 10?

How can the US and Britain pretend they understand the level of resentment in Iraq if they are not sure if, on average, one in 80 families have lost a household member, or one in seven, as our study suggests?"