Case closedReport claiming 600,000 Iraqi civilians died in the second Gulf War based on fabrication and falsification

Whether one supported or opposed the second Gulf War, one question that would not go away concerned the number of people killed in the war and its aftermath. Critics of the war, and of the United States more generally, said a large number of Iraqi civilians die in the war and in the chaos that followed.

These claims were given support in what became to be known as the Lancet surveys, after the prestigious forum in which they were published, or the Burnham reports, after one of the authors, Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore, Maryland. The first survey was published on 29 October 2004. The second survey was published on 11 October 2006, and it was that second survey which caused most of the controversy.

The authors of the report estimated 654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population, through the end of June 2006.

The figure was so unexpectedly high, that researchers took a closer look at Burnham’s research and his methodology. This closer examination unleashed a withering criticism by scientific organizations of Burnham, his research methodology, and his conclusions. Just two examples:

• On 3 February 2009, the Executive Council of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) announced that an 8-month investigation found that Burnham had violated the Association’s Code of Professional Ethics & Practices for repeatedly refusing to disclose essential facts about his research.
• In February 2009 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published the results of an internal review of the study, concluding the Burnham and his researchers violated accepted scientific research protocols.

It now appears that the final nail in the coffin of the Lancet survey has been hammered in. Research by Professor Michael Spagat of the Department of Economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, examining the Iraq war death toll, is published in the latest issue of Defense and Peace Economics. Professor Spagat’s research analyzes the high-profile second Lancet survey (2006) that estimated 601,000 violent deaths in the Iraq war and says it is unreliable, invalid, and unethical and resulted in an exaggeration of the death toll.

“According to the study all credible evidence suggests that a large number of people have been killed in the Iraq war. However, injecting inflated and unsupportable numbers into this discussion undermines our understanding of the conflict and could incite further violence,” says Spagat.

Spagat’s paper divides the evidence of data fabrication and falsification into nine broad categories and includes evidence suggesting that the figure of 601,000 violent deaths was extrapolated from two earlier surveys and unlikely patterns in the confirmations of violent deaths through the viewing of death certificates and in the patterns on when deaths certificates were requested and when they were not.

Spagat says a few of these anomalies could occur by chance but it is extremely unlikely that all of them could have occurred randomly and simultaneously.

Spagat′s paper also presents evidence suggesting ethical violations to the survey’s respondents including endangerment, privacy breaches, and violations in obtaining informed consent. As noted above, serious violations of minimal disclosure standards have already been confirmed in an investigation by the standards committee of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) that resulted in a rare formal censure because Gilbert Burnham, the principal investigator of the survey, “repeatedly refused to make public essential facts about his research.”

At the time, Richard Kulka, AAPOR’s president, wrote: “When researchers draw important conclusions and make public statements and arguments based on survey research data, then subsequently refuse to answer even basic questions about how their research was conducted, this violates the fundamental standards of science, seriously undermines open public debate on critical issues, and undermines the credibility of all survey and public opinion research.” (AAPOR, 2009)

Serious ethical breaches have also been confirmed by an investigation of John Hopkins University that resulted in the suspension of Gilbert Burnham for five years from being a principal investigator on human subject research.

Note that Defense and Peace Economics invited a response from the authors of the Burnham et al. (2006) paper, but the authors did not provide one.

Spagat says that “In light of these findings, Burnham et al. (2006) cannot be considered a reliable contribution to knowledge about mortality during the Iraq war.”

—Read more in Michael Spagat et al., “Ethical and Data-integrity Problems in the Second Lancet Survey of Mortality in Iraq,” Defense and Peace Economics 21, no. 1 (February 2010): 1-41 (DOI: 10.1080/10242690802496898)