Iraq Body Count

Iraq Body Count
Founder	•  John Sloboda •  Hamit Dardagan
Type	NGO

Iraq Body Count (IBC) is a nominally independent NGO with heavy ties to the US/NATO military-intelligence community. Its purpose is systematically undercount casualiteis in the Iraq War and the War on Drugs, getting these low numbers accepted both by both the mainstream and even amongst war opponents, and framing these death in a way that is (more) positive to the US image as a benevolent power. This is achieved by taking charge of the counting process, similar to the NGO Airwars, especially with use of "open source reports".

 The analyst Nafeez Ahmed writes: 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.

Oxford Research Group and Military funding

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. Sloboda then became co-director, along with Dardagan, of ORG’s Every Casualty program.

The ORG Every Casualty program, however, was not an ideologically independent research project. The two-year initiative that ran from 2012 to 2014, ‘Documenting Existing Casualty Recording Practice Worldwide,’ was funded by the US government-backed agency Institute for Policy Studies(USIP) which played a key role in the 2003 Iraq War. USIP was established via an appendix to the 1985 military budget, which states that USIP’s Board of Directors would consist of fifteen voting members, namely the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, the president of the Pentagon’s National Defense University in Washington DC, and twelve other Presidential appointees.

According to former University of California (Berkeley) sociologist Dr. Sara Diamond, an expert in US right wing politics, USIP was essentially set up to function as a “funding conduit and clearinghouse for research on problems inherent to US strategies of ‘low intensity conflict.”... The USIP is an arm of the US intelligence apparatus,and intersects heavily with the intelligence establishment.” It is therefore little more than “a stomping ground for professional war-makers.”

Undercounting

IBC states its "documentary evidence is drawn from crosschecked media reports of violence leading to deaths, or of bodies being found, and is supplemented by the careful review and integration of hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures or records." By relying mostly on the Western mainstream press, the statistics can be maniulated in the wanted direction.

The IBC is not "a group that monitors Iraqi deaths”; it is a group that monitors media reports of Iraqi deaths. And IBC does not monitor “Iraqi deaths”; it monitors media reports of Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of violence. IBC does not monitor reports of war-related deaths due to disease, lack of food, water and medicine, and so on. IBC also does not collect reports of Iraqi military deaths.

The undercounting was even acknowledged by a 2008 RAND analysis sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which concluded that IBC’s dataset is “problematic,” because “its reliance on media reports may ‘favor’ particular types of attack, such as ones with higher fatalities, and regions where media outlets are concentrated, such as Baghdad. Therefore, undercounting is likely.”

Countering the Lancet study

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 Lancet study implies that the total death toll to date now approximates 1.5 million Iraqis.

Researchers affiliated to Iraq Body Count at once 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 conveniently ignored by the media 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. The media standard assumption is that IBC’s figures offer the most reliable insight into the scale of deaths in Iraq due to the war.

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.

Funding

The funding for Iraq Body Count is unclear, although Western governments are amongst the sponsors. "Throughout our existence, our steadiest source of income has been from concerned individuals", including the Network for Social Change of anonymous donors, "some of us have inherited our wealth, while others have created it. Some are new to philanthropy, looking for a good way to use surplus capital, income or a windfall to support exciting social change projects. Others are more experienced philanthropists with significant charitable trusts, who value Network as an efficient way to fund cutting-edge projects."

Other sponsors include smaller NATO-countries, like The German Federal Foreign Office and (indirectly) the the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, and The Swiss Foreign Office (Switzerland is not as neutral as it used to be);the US Institute for Policy Studies and trusts like the The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and The Sigrid Rausing Trust.

 

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