All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our first guest on the show today is Professor Leslie Roberts.
He is Associate Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health at Columbia University.
Professor Roberts was Director of Health Policy at the International Rescue Committee from December 2000 until April of 2003.
He's led over 50 surveys in 17 countries, mostly measuring mortality in times of war.
In recent years, he has taken part in studies to measure mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Zimbabwe, and Central African Republic.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Boy, do I have a lot of questions for you.
Let's start out by telling the people that they can read at brusselstribunal.org an article called WikiLeaks Analysis Suggests Hundreds of Thousands of Unrecorded Iraqi Deaths.
And then there's a link to a PDF file there of a full study that this article is basically the press release for, I guess.
But you're wrong, because I remember that TV and the New York Times and everyone agreed that when the Iraq war cables came out at WikiLeaks that they showed approximately 15,000 more deaths than the government had previously reported, bringing us to a grand total of maybe 100,000 or so dead Iraqis.
Well, that statement was exactly what inspired us to look at these a little more carefully.
So that statement would imply that maybe 80 percent of those Iraq war logs released by WikiLeaks were already reported by the press and known in the West.
And so what we did was we took a sample of about 2,000, actually 2,400 of those WikiLeaks war logs, and we tried to go find if they had been recorded in this group in England that records newspaper reports called the Rock Body Counts dataset.
So if there was a killing in Balad on June 4, 2005, we would go see was there a single killing in a Rock Body Count on the 4th in 2005.
And in the town of Balad, did it match, yes or no?
And we found that probably 80 percent of those reports were not in the 100,000 tally that a Rock Body Count has from their newspaper monitoring activities.
So in other words, as you explain in this article, is basically as you go through these Iraq war logs and these unreported casualties, these are really unreported casualties, not just unreported by the military, but these are ones where when you go back and compare and contrast with the media and with, as you say, a Rock Body Count, which tries their very best to keep track of each individual reported death in combat there, you find, wow, nobody ever reported these before.
This is an entirely new count.
Eighty percent of them, that's right.
Eighty percent, wow.
Okay, now you say in this article here that you were involved in, was it one or both of the Johns Hopkins Lancet studies that came out in the fall of 2004 and then 2006?
I was involved in both of them.
In both of them.
In the first one, in 2004, I actually went to Iraq and trained the interviewers and led the teams.
In 2006, I played a much smaller role.
Okay, now, there's so many directions to go with this.
I guess, first of all, just so that people remember, hopefully, the one that came out in 2004 had approximately 100,000 excess deaths, and then the one that came out in 2006, the number was up to 655,000 excess deaths or more.
And then I guess I'd like to throw in that opinion business research in, I believe it was the end of 07, and then again in early 2008, did two surveys in a row, and they came up with the number approximately a million excess deaths of Iraqi civilians.
I was wondering if you could please explain what excess deaths are, and then maybe we can dig a little deeper into that.
So, I think all of your listeners are used to the idea of an opinion poll, where you pick random telephone digits, or you take somehow a sample of people across the country, and you interview 1,000 people and ask, who are you going to vote for, this guy or this guy?
We're used to those sorts of polls.
Well, in the case of mortality, you can't interview the dead people.
So instead, what you tend to do is you ask people about their households, and you call them up, and you define a household really crisply.
In our case, we wanted to know who slept under your roof at the start of 2002, who was sleeping in the same building as you under the same roof.
And we asked people about any deaths since the start of 2002.
Well, the invasion didn't happen until March of 2003.
So we had the ability to figure out, well, in those houses that we interviewed, and it was about 1,000 households in 2004, and about 2,000 in 2006.
We got the ability to figure out the death rate in those houses for a year and a quarter before the invasion.
And then we could look at the death rate after the invasion.
And we called the rise in the death rate excess deaths.
It turns out that most people who die from wars don't die from bullets and bombs, usually.
And in fact, in the American Civil War, more soldiers died of disease than died of bullets and explosives.
In World War I, in World War II, more civilians died of the disruption and malnutrition and adverse effects of the war than actually died of bullets and bombs.
And so excess deaths are a way of saying how much rise in mortality has occurred because of the hardship induced by this war.
It happens in these two studies that most of the extra deaths were from violence.
And in the seven or eight wars I've worked in, that has only happened in Bosnia and Iraq, in my experience.
In most of the other wars, it's really disease that does most of the killing.
In Iraq, people were so healthy.
There's such a strong social fabric that people aren't dying of starvation.
They're not dying for lack of medicines.
They're dying mostly because of violence.
So of that 655,000, the estimate was 600,000 is from violence.
Okay, now a couple of things there.
First of all, when you talk about the increase of the death rate from after the invasion compared to before, before was still blockade and no-fly zone bombing and reports of a million people, I don't know, excess deaths compared to the short era of peace between the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the beginning of Operation Yellow Ribbon in 1991.
So actually, the blockade had essentially ended with an oil-for-food program that was organized by the UN a couple of years before.
So the evidence actually suggests that while indeed there was very high mortality, especially for children in the 1990s, that that actually had subsided a couple of years before the 2003 invasion.
Oh, well, I guess I'm surprised to hear that because the problem really was trucks and the ability to distribute the food even when they were allowed to sell their oil for food, right?
Well, actually, the last couple of years before the invasion, there were general rations distributed through the population, in part as a result of this oil-for-food program.
Okay.
So in other words, you would basically compare the excess deaths from after the invasion to more or less all things being equal in Iraq rather than...
That's right.
A blockade time, let's say, earlier in the 90s.
And our estimate was that in that 2004 study, that in 2002, the year before the invasion, the death rate in Iraq was only a little bit higher than Syria and Jordan and Iran next door.
Okay.
So now, when you say the majority of those killed, according to the survey, had died in violent episodes, I think I can hear 100 million American right-wingers washing their hands and saying, yeah, but that was their civil war.
That wasn't our fault.
Did you have any numbers of how many of these were killed or died violently at the hands of American soldiers or perhaps at the hands of the Bata Brigade?
Yeah.
We actually recorded in both surveys who the family members attributed these deaths to and realized family members don't always know when an explosive comes through their roof and blows up which side it came from.
So we need to take this with a grain of salt.
But we think most of the deaths in 2004 were actually caused by air power from the U.S. side.
And by 2006, that had subsided to a tiny fraction and most of the deaths were Iraqis killing Iraqis with guns.
All right.
Well, we'll be right back to pick up at that point.
It's Les Roberts, brusselstribunal.org, Columbia University.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Professor Leslie Roberts from Columbia University.
He's an associate professor there.
You can look at the website brusselstribunal.org.
And now he was involved in both Lancet, Johns Hopkins studies of 2004 and 2006 on the Iraq body count, the Iraq death toll.
And now he's got a new piece about the WikiLeaks.
And I want to reiterate again from the top of the program here, the top of this interview, that when the WikiLeaks Iraq war logs were released, thank you, Bradley Manning, the mainstream media said, wow, there are 15,000 deaths in here, civilian Iraqi deaths that were not previously reported by the military.
Well, still 15,000.
That's not that many or something.
And then the issue went away.
And now Professor Roberts is talking about this study that was done by I'm sorry, it was grad students at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
They went through and they judged the overlap.
They went through and counted how many of these deaths in the WikiLeaks were actually reported somewhere else.
And they found out that there was a vast discrepancy.
We're talking basically about an entire what, 80 percent.
How do you define the numbers here again?
Sure.
Eighty percent of the WikiLeaks reports had not been reported before in the press.
Right.
And then so were you able to somehow then extrapolate further that that meant that the Johns Hopkins Lancet study from 04 and then maybe again from 06 were pretty much right on or still there's space between those kinds of conclusions?
Yeah, there's a lot of space between those kind of conclusions.
Certainly, we don't think that what the military knew about and recorded and what appeared in the press are independent.
In both cases, a lot of the reports actually come from the Iraqi government.
All those WikiLeaks reports are not necessarily what American soldiers saw.
Many of them are police reported in Basra that do, do, do, do, do.
Well, there's often newspaper reports saying the same day police reported in Basra that do, do, do, do, do.
So we think there's a lot of sort of artificial overlap built into these two lists.
And it's not really possible to estimate how many are dead.
But I think certainly these two lists together imply it can't be only 300,000.
It has to be quite a bit more than that, certainly.
Well, now, OK, so before we went to the break, we're talking about how in the 04 study, the American military, particularly air power, he said, was to blame for most of the deaths.
And that certainly is not hard to believe, thinking back on that time.
We actually dropped 50,000 bombs supposedly by the end of 2004.
And this is a pretty urbanized country.
So, yeah, that's not so hard to believe.
But by 2006, as you were about to say, only maybe a quarter of all deaths involved U.S. forces and three quarters involved Iraqis killing Iraqis.
Although, you know, I think it's worth pointing out, and I'm not sure, you know, how much of this kind of topic, how far you've delved into it.
But, you know, it's pretty clear even, you know, at the time, they pretty much admitted that they had this plan called the El Salvador Option, where they were going to hire the most ruthless Shiite death squads, namely the Bata Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council.
And they would use them to hunt down the leadership and do decapitation strikes and nip this insurgency in the bud.
And what they ended up doing was creating a civil war.
And they, by the, especially the two massive attacks on Fallujah in 2004 and the displacement of all the people from Fallujah and the chain of dominoes that fell down as these populations were trying to find a place to go and others were being displaced.
And the Bata Brigade was acting as an arm of the U.S. military there.
So if Sauter's guys or al-Hakim's guys put a drill in your head, that was the U.S. Army putting a drill in your head.
We were fighting on their side in the civil war.
Well, actually, I can't speak to that.
I think it gets really complex.
I think from my friends who experienced kidnappings that by 2006 or 2007, the interweaving of criminal activities and political activities was so considerable that it's really hard for us on the outside, I think, to exactly understand the primary motives involved.
Let me give you just two trivial examples.
When I was there in 2004, there were two Italian aid workers, two women, who I believe both their names were Simone, who were taken hostage out of their offices.
And within just a few hours, the word was out on the street that you could buy one of these Italian aid workers for a quarter million dollars.
So clearly, the folks who kidnapped them were only interested in criminal activity.
They were interested in money, but they knew there were political groups who would pay for Italian prisoners, hostages.
Another example is I have a very good friend who is a Sunni, and he married a Kurdish woman.
And back there in the middle of the war, twice she was taken hostage, and money was demanded from this guy's house family.
And it was in part because they were a mixed couple.
And as a mixed couple, they were essentially vulnerable, and no one on their street was all that vested in protecting them.
And I just think the interweaving of political forces and criminal forces and the breakdown of law and order that comes in a time of prolonged war has sort of a vicious interplay, and it's hard to understand and digest it in simple terms.
Sure.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
But then again, you know, there was organized warfare going on as well between the major factions.
And so you did have entire neighborhoods cleansed.
You did have, as the WikiLeaks showed, orders that, yeah, if you capture these guys, turn them over to the Wolf Brigade.
And that's part of the Supreme Islamic Council, all Hakeem's guys, George Bush's buddies.
Well, back to our opening thought, what I find the most disturbing about this WikiLeaks reporting is the fact that hundreds of papers across the country ran articles, mostly AP wire articles and articles that were written by others.
But clearly, virtually no one bothered to go in and just look at 10 of these reports and see if they had existed in the Iraq buddy count database, as was so widely reported.
How is it possible that something this important just came without anyone actually delving into it and spending just 30 minutes trying to decide, are these really things we'd already heard about before?
And the Washington Post ran an editorial on the 26th of October saying, essentially, the headline was something like, WikiLeaks leaks reveal nothing new or reveal information already known about Iraq.
And gosh, to have run an editorial without looking at the information at all is quite a sad commentary, I think, on journalism.
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that because it was the former news editor, I believe, of the Washington Post who wrote a paper at the Daily Beast saying, hey, they were lying to us all along.
Oh, my gosh.
And that, to me, was the biggest story of the whole thing.
Because, of course, I'd looked at the Lancet studies from before.
I'd talked to Alan Hyde at Opinion Business Research and looked at JustForeignPolicy.com and all these at AntiWar.com.
We've been talking about the real extent of the casualties for a long time.
But the big deal, what should have been the big deal, at least to the TV people, to the hairdos and the Washington press corps types, was, well, wait a minute.
Throughout that whole time, you guys were lying right to our faces about how many people were dying and what exactly was going on in Iraq.
And that's not that long ago.
I would still hold a grudge for something like that, people lying right to my face.
I think I do, actually.
And it is stunning that the U.S. repeatedly, with government, repeatedly said, we actually don't do body counts in Afghanistan or Iraq and we don't keep track of this information.
And the WikiLeaks release, in essence, proved that that wasn't true, that we had been keeping track of such information.
And I think if you look in the political system, the only serious political response that I saw coming as a result of these October 22nd Iraqi war log releases was Denis Kucinich writing a letter to the president saying, A, how disturbing the contents of these were in terms of us condoning torture.
And secondly, I thought you said you didn't have this information.
And otherwise, other than Denis Kucinich, I can't find any evidence of outrage in the U.S. government other than outrage that someone leaked our information.
Right.
Well, let me give you a chance.
I know it's ridiculous.
I hate to waste your time.
But they all said back then that the only reason you all did the Lancet studies, the Johns Hopkins studies in 04 and 06 was because you're a bunch of Democrats and you were trying to help the Democrats.
Well, first of all, I wasn't even associated with any party when that 2004 study ever.
So I think that's a pretty weak analysis.
And secondly, I was surprised after that accusation came to find out that most of my co-authors actually supported the invasion of Iraq.
So that's a pile of bunk, I'm afraid.
There you go.
All right, everybody, that's Leslie Roberts from Columbia and Brussels Tribunal dot org.
WikiLeaks analysis suggests hundreds of thousands of unrecorded Iraqi deaths.
Thanks very much for your time.
My pleasure.
