Counting Iraqi Casualties -- and a Media Controversy
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003711142
The author commissioned the "Lancet" study recently attacked in a National
Journal report and by the Wall Street Journal. He calls the criticism a
"hatchet job," fraudulent or based on innuendo.
By John Tirman
(February 14, 2008) -- (Commentary) One puzzling aspect of the news medias
coverage of the Iraq war is their squeamish treatment of Iraqi casualties. The
scale of fatalities and wounded is a difficult number to calculate, but its
importance should be obvious. Yet, apart from some rare and sporadic attention
to mortality figures, the topic is virtually absent from the airwaves and news
pages of America. This absence leaves the field to gross misunderstandings,
ideological agendas, and political vendettas.
The upshot is that the American publicand U.S. policy makers, for that
matterare badly informed on a vital dimension of the war effort.
As an academic interested in the wars violence, I commissioned a household
survey in October 2005 to gauge mortality, and I naturally turned to the best
professionals availablethe Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists who had
conducted such surveys before in Iraq, Congo, and elsewhere. Their survey of
1,850 households resulted in a shocking number: 600,000 dead by violence in the
first 40 months of the war. The survey was extensively peer reviewed and
published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, in October 2006.
CM8ShowAd("Middle");
The findings caused a ripple of interest (in part because President Bush,
during a press conference, called the results not credible) and stirred a
very lively debate among the few people interested in the methods. By and
large, however, the survey passed from public view fairly quickly, and the news
media continued to cite the very low numbers produced by the Iraq Body Count, a
U.K.-based NGO that counts civilian deaths through English-language newspaper
reports.
Another survey, this one undertaken by a private U.K. firm, Opinion Business
Research (ORB), found more than one million dead through August 2007. Yet
another, a much larger house-to-house survey was conducted by the Iraq Ministry
of Health (MoH). This also found a sizable mortality figure400,000 excess
deaths (the number above the pre-war death rate), but estimated 151,000 killed
by violence. The period covered was the same as the survey published in The
Lancet, but was not released until January 2008.
The ORB results were almost totally ignored in the American press, and the MoH
numbers, which did get one-day play, were covered incompletely. Virtually no
newspaper report dug into the data tables of the Iraqi MoH report, published in
the New England Journal of Medicine, for that total excess mortality figure, or
to ask why the MoH report showed a flat rate for killing throughout the war
when every other account shows sharp increases through 2005 and 2006. The
logical explanation for this discrepancy is that people responding to
interviewers from the government, and a ministry controlled by Moktada al Sadr,
would not want to admit that their loved one died by violence. There were,
instead, very large numbers of dead by road accidents and unintentional
injuries. The American press completely missed this.
What some in the news media did not miss, however, was a full-scale assault on
the legitimacy of the Lancet article by the National Journal, the insider
Capitol Hill weekly.
The attack, by reporters Carl Cannon and Neil Munro, which was largely built on
persistent complaints of two critics and heaps of innuendo, was largely
ignoredits circulation is only about 10,000until the Wall Street Journal
picked up on one bit of their litany: that George Soros funded the survey.
The Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar
activists posing as objective researchers, said the January 9, 2008, editorial
(titled The Lancets Political Hit) and concluded: the Lancet study could
hardly be more unreliable. The editorial created sensation in the right-wing
blogosphere and in several allied news outlets.
Let me convey what I thought was a simple and unremarkable fact I told Munro in
an interview in November and one of the Lancet authors emailed Cannon the
details of how the survey was funded. My center at MIT used internal funds to
underwrite the survey. More than six months after the survey was commissioned,
the Open Society Institute, the charitable foundation begun by Soros, provided
a grant to support public education efforts of the issue. We used that to pay
for some travel for lectures, a web site, and so on.
OSI, much less Soros himself (who likely was not even aware of this small
grant), had nothing to do with the origination, conduct, or results of the
survey. The researchers and authors did not know OSI, among other donors, had
contributed. And we had hoped the surveys findings would appear earlier in the
year but were impeded by the violence in Iraq. All of this was told repeatedly
to Munro and Cannon, but they choose to falsify the story. Charges of political
timing were especially ludicrous, because we started more than a year before
the 2006 election and tried to do the survey as quickly as possible. It was
published when the data were ready.
The New York Post and the Sunday Times of London, both owned by Rupert Murdoch,
followed the WSJ editorial and trumpeted the Soros connection and the supposed
fraud which Munro and Cannon hinted. $OROS IRAQ DEATH STORY WAS A SHAM was
a headline in the Post, which was followed by a story in which scarcely
anything stated was true.
The charges of fraud that were also central to the National Journal piece
were based on distortions or ignorance of statistical method, such as random
sampling and sample size, or speculations about Iraqi field researchers
fabricating data. Nothing close to proof of misdeeds was ever offered.
The two principal authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, parried the fraud
charges effectively on their web site and in letters to the editors, but of
course these are rarely noticed as much as the original charges. Those charges
were wholly speculative and at times based on small irregularities in the
collection of data, hardly a crime in the midst of the bloodiest period of the
war. For example, some death certificates were not collected from respondents;
about 80 percent of the time they were. (In the Iraqi MoH survey, death
certificates were never collected, making their claims about violence v.
nonviolent causes unconfirmable.)
In any case, the many peer reviews of The Lancet article, including one by a
special committee of the World Health Organization, gave the survey methods and
operations passing grades.
Munro then went on the Glenn Beck program and suggested the Iraqi researchers
were unreliable (without U.S. supervision) and that the Lancet authors made
it clear they wanted this study published before the election. Both of those
assertions are untrue. Beck then repeated these allegations on his radio
program, and added that there was no peer review of the fatality figures,
another falsehood, and were getting it jammed down our throat by people who
are undercover who are pulling purse strings, who are manipulating the news.
The charge, repeated in all these media, that the Iraqi research leader, Riyadh
Lafta, M.D., operated without U.S. supervision and was therefore suspect is
particularly interesting. Munro, in a note to National Review Online, asserted
that Lafta said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins
death-survey, which he also had noted in the National Journal piece. When he
interviewed me he pestered me about two anonymous donors, demanding to know if
either were Arab or Muslim. A pattern here is visible, one which reeks of
religious prejudice.
Munro had also ignored the corroborating evidence I sent him, the 4.5 million
displaced (suggesting hundreds of thousands of fatalities, drawing on the ratio
of all other wars); estimates of new widows (500,000 from the war); and the
other surveys done in Iraq suggesting enormous numbers of casualties (ABC/USA
Today poll of March 2007, showing roughly 53% physically harmed by war). When I
mentioned these things to him on the telephone, he literally screamed that such
data didnt matter, that the Lancet probe was a hoax. Lancet article authors
also cite several cases where they were misquoted. The National Journals
editors have been informed of their reporters misconduct and errors, and have
not responded.
So the smear is completea political hit by the anti-Bush billionaire,
complicity by anti-war academics, fraud by Muslims devoted to Allahand
repeated over and over in the right-wing media. Little has of this has appeared
in the legitimate news media, apart from right-wing columnists like Jeff Jacoby
in the Boston Globe.
One might expect that such nonsense is obvious to neutral observers, but it
constitutes a kind of harassment that scholars must fend off, diverting from
more important work. Gilbert Burnham, the lead author on the Lancet article,
runs health clinics in Afghanistan and East Africa, and is spending inordinate
amounts of time responding to the attacks. Les Roberts, a coauthor, and I have
both had colleagues at our universities called by Munro to ask if they would
punish us for fraud. The OSI people have also been writing letters to set the
record straight. Most important, Riyadh Lafta, who has been threatened before,
may be in more danger due to these attacks.
As to the issue of the human cost of the war, even the legitimate press that
has avoided this kerfuffle might be intimidated from taking on the issue in
depth. The fact that the National Journal hatchet job and the MoH survey
appeared within days of each other sent a message to editors around the United
Statesone survey is discredited and one is legitimate. The treatment of the
MoH survey that week often noted its death-by-violence number was one-fourth of
the Lancet figure -- forgetting, again, that total war-related mortality were
much closer in both, and congruent with other surveys. The New York Times did
run an editorial in early February about the dead in Iraq the 124 journalists
killed in the war.
The topic of the wars exceptional human costs, now inflamed by these
calumnies, appears to be too hot to handle. Even with all this fuss in January,
no explorations of the Iraqi mortality from the war have appeared in the major
dailies. No editorials, no examination of the methods (or the danger and
difficulty of collecting data), no sense that the scale of killing might affect
the American position, or might shed some light on U.S. war strategy, or might
point to honorable exits and reconstruction obligations. Remarkably, no
curiosity at all about the dead of Iraq, and what they can tell us.
That, in the end, may be the biggest injustice of all.
---------------------------------
Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
