Iraq Study Group finds “systematic” effort to cook the books.
Published: December 12, 2006
We first heard about Iraqi war-casualty figures from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2004, when its researchers reported finding that 100,000 civilians had perished in the U.S. invasion and its aftermath. The researchers were almost booed off the public stage, so much higher were their figures than others. Undaunted, they came back two months ago with a new report, based on a house-to-house survey, of 655,000 civilian deaths caused by the U.S.-initiated violence. This figure, too, was widely rejected as far too high.
But now comes the Iraq Study Group with an explanation for the discrepancies between the Johns Hopkins numbers and other estimates: The Pentagon’s reporting system on civilian deaths systematically underreports violence in Iraq. How? “The standard for recording attacks,” the bipartisan group said, “acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases.”
Suddenly, the Johns Hopkins numbers are getting another, closer look, which they deserve.
In December 2005, long after the first John Hopkins estimate of 100,000 deaths, President Bush offered his belief that “only” 30,000 Iraqi civilians had died. When the researchers came back with their 655,000 figure in October, he was scathing in his criticism: “Six hundred thousand — whatever they guessed at – is just not credible.” The researchers’ methodology, he said, had been “pretty well discredited.”
Actually, it had been pretty well substantiated. Before the Lancet, a British medical journal, published the latest report, the results were examined by four independent experts who found the effort scientifically sound and urged publication. The methodology that Bush said had been discredited is basically the same methodology used in the U.S. census survey and employed sampling techniques that undergird every credible public opinion poll.
Of the 655,000 deaths the Johns Hopkins researchers calculated in their extrapolation from the sample, about 601,000 resulted directly from violence and about 54,000 from a generally deteriorating health and environmental climate in Iraq. The researchers estimated that American forces were responsible for almost one-third of the deaths.
But most of those deaths did not show up in Pentagon tallies, and the Iraq Study Group explains why: “A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.”
The Iraq Study Group rather drolly concludes, “Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.” In other words, the Pentagon “systematically” cooked the books to make things look better in Iraq than they actually were.
Why are we not surprised? From the very beginning of the tragic Iraq adventure, the Bush administration has distorted the truth about pretty much everything, from weapons of mass destruction to Al-Qaida linkages to Iraq to the number of Iraqi civilians being killed. And in the process, the administration lied to itself, making sound policy choices almost impossible.
The Iraq Study Group recommends “immediate changes” in data collection on violence in Iraq “to provide a more accurate picture of events on the ground.” We have a neat solution for the White House: Hire the Johns Hopkins researchers.
Source: Editorial: Pentagon undercounts deaths of Iraq civilians - Minneapolis Star Tribune
