The secret campaign to undercount the ‘war on terror’ death toll in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America
In the name of ‘counting every casualty,’ the Pentagon is systematically undercounting deaths from the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on drugs,’ in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America. Complicit in this great deception are some of the world’s most respected anti-war activists.
In this exclusive investigation, Insurge Intelligence reveals that a leading anti-war monitoring group, Iraq Body Count (IBC), is deeply embedded in the Western foreign policy establishment. IBC’s key advisers and researchers have received direct and indirect funding from US government propaganda agencies and Pentagon contractors. It is no surprise, then, that IBC-affiliated scholars promote narratives of conflict that serve violent US client-regimes and promote NATO counter-insurgency doctrines.
IBC has not only systematically underrepresented the Iraqi death toll, it has done so on the basis of demonstrably fraudulent attacks on standard scientific procedures. IBC affiliated scholars are actively applying sophisticated techniques of statistical manipulation to whitewash US complicity in violence in Afghanistan and Colombia.
Through dubious ideological alliances with US and British defense agencies, they are making misleading pseudoscience academically acceptable. Even leading medical journals are now proudly publishing their dubious statistical analyses that lend legitimacy to US militarism abroad.
This subordination of academic conflict research to the interests of the Pentagon sets a dangerous precedent: it permits the US government to control who counts the dead across conflicts involving US interests — all in the name of science and peace.
“Publishing in a peer reviewed journal is no guarantee that something is right… Peer review is an ongoing thing. It is not something that ends with publication. Everything in science is potentially up for grabs, and people are always free to question. Anyone might come up with valid criticisms… Science is a ruthless process. We have to seek the truth.” Professor Michael Spagat
1 — The Pentagon’s ‘peace’ network
In 2006, the leading British medical journal, The Lancet, published a comprehensive scientific study by a team of public health experts at John Hopkins University, which concluded that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the 2003 Iraq War, mostly through violence. By extrapolation, the study implies that the total death toll to date now approximates 1.5 million Iraqis.
The Lancet estimate was rejected by the US and British governments, who favoured the lower estimates.
Researchers affiliated to Iraq Body Count (IBC), a leading British NGO tracking casualties through collation of open source reports, published several damning peer-reviewed scientific papers concluding that The Lancet’s 2006 findings were fundamentally flawed due to serious methodological errors, and even deliberate fraud.
Since then, The Lancet figure has been largely ignored as an erroneous outlier, with most scholars and journalists deferring to the IBC, whose database of casualty reports puts the civilian death toll since the 2003 invasion at 154,875 violent deaths. It is now widely assumed by journalists that IBC’s figures offer the most reliable insight into the scale of deaths in Iraq due to the war.
According to IBC, its figures “are not estimates” but rather constitute “a verifiable documentary record of deaths.”
But the debate over the death toll is not over. In March 2015, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), a Nobel Peace Prize-winning doctors group, released a 97-page report concluding that approximately one million Iraqis had died since the dawn of the ‘war on terror’ due to its direct and indirect impacts.
So who is right?
IBC, Oxford Research Group, and the US government
The most widely-cited peer-reviewed critique of The Lancet’s 2006 Iraq death toll study, published in the Routledge journal Defense and Peace Economics, is authored by Prof. Michael Spagat, Head of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Spagat’s startling conclusion was that “this survey cannot be considered a reliable or valid contribution towards knowledge about the extent of mortality in Iraq since 2003.” Many apparent anomalies identified by Spagat in the 2006 Lancet study are derived from his comparisons of Lancet data with the IBC dataset, which is put forward as a reliable litmus test of violent deaths.
When IBC was first founded by John Sloboda, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Keele University, and Hamit Dardagan, its work was done largely in partnership with the Oxford Research Group (ORG), where Sloboda was executive director from 2005 to 2009. Prof. Sloboda then became co-director, along with Dardagan, of ORG’s Every Casualty program. (continue reading here)
