Cooking the books on Iraqi deaths

Published by The Lancet, a venerable British medical journal, that study estimated the number of “excess” Iraqi deaths after the 2003 U.S. invasion at 654,965. Almost 92 percent of the dead, the study asserted, were killed by bullets, bombs or U.S. airstrikes. The stunning toll was more than 10 times the number of deaths that had been estimated by the Iraqi or U.S. governments, or by any human-rights group.

Those predisposed to oppose U.S. policy in Iraq seized on the numbers and trumpeted them giddily.

CBS News called the report a “new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq.” CNN said, “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports.”

The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times generated large stories that gave the study results credence. Democrats who had opposed Mr. Bush’s Iraq campaign embraced the report. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., issued a statement saying that the “new study is a chilling and somber reminder of the unacceptably high human cost of this war. … We must not stay on the same failed course any longer.”

Such remarks, amplified by myriad articles and broadcasts, helped cement Americans’ increasingly negative perceptions of the war. “For those who wanted to believe it, it gave them a new number to circulate, [and] it was a defining moment” in attitudes toward the war, said pollster John Zogby in a CNN interview.

But it now turns out the report was financed by wealthy leftists including George Soros, and that its authors (Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts) are anti-war activists who requested their studies be published shortly before the U.S. elections — which the editor of The Lancet agreed to do “with an expedited peer review process and without seeing the surveyors’ original data,” Neil Munro and Carl Cannon report in the National Review.

Furthermore, after an exhaustive investigation, Messrs. Munro and Cannon conclude the studies’ authors may have performed their field research “improperly — or not at all.”

The 2006 study relies on a system of multiplication, in which each death supposedly recorded by the survey teams in the small number of “sampled” neighborhoods is multiplied by the number 2,000 to reach an estimate for the number of deaths nationwide.

A car bomb attack in Sadr City that killed at least 60 people appears to have been counted by the researchers, even though it happened a day after the survey was supposed to end, critics say. Multiply that one incident by 2,000, and it adds 12,000 statistical “car bomb deaths” nationwide — as though car bombs are as frequent and as deadly in rural areas as they are in heavily contested Baghdad (and as though internecine car bombings are the same thing as innocent civilians strafed and killed by chortling monsters in U.S. uniforms.)

Both the 2006 and a prior 2004 Lancet study of Iraqi war deaths by the same authors rely entirely on data provided by Lafta, who operated with little American supervision and has rarely appeared in public or been interviewed about his role, the National Review reports.

Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein’s ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Until last fall, Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite religious leader whose Mahdi Army militia crippled Sunni insurgent groups in Baghdad during 2006, controlled the health ministry, which employed some of Lafta’s researchers.

“The authors refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data,” says David Kane, a statistician and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Statistics at Harvard University.

In plain English, the Lancet study on civilian deaths was absurd — making up fairy tale graveyards containing hundreds of thousands of bodies that no one can locate — and when asked to see their data, the authors have responded either by making stuff up, or claiming, “The dog ate my homework.”

Yes, wars cause unintended “collateral” death and destruction among civilian populations. But the fantastic and fanciful Lancet numbers were promoted without skepticism by branches of the news media that welcomed them precisely because they told a story those media wanted to tell. A story designed to hurt an administration they despised, promoted despite the fact it also strengthened our enemies, and may have contributed to the loss of U.S. lives.

Political opinions were formed based on those credulous reports. A little, “Whoops, have we got egg on our face” follow-up on page 34, at this late date, is hardly sufficient to right that wrong.