Editing Iraq Body Count project (section)

== Criticisms and counter-criticisms ==
The IBC has received criticism from multiple sides. Some critics have focused on potential bias of sources. Others have raised concerns about the difficulty of distinguishing civilians from combatants. Others have criticized it for over or undercounting.

Some critics, often on the political right, claimed that the IBC numbers were an overcount, and that the numbers were suspect due to the antiwar bias of the IBC members. For example; 26 July 2005 ''[[National Review]]'' article, "Bad Counts. An unquestioning media."<ref>[http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/spruiell200507260924.asp "Bad Counts. An unquestioning media"], ''[[National Review]],'' 26 July 2005</ref>

Others, often on the political left, criticized media and government willingness to quote IBC figures more approvingly than the much higher estimate coming from the [[Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties|Lancet study]]<ref name="lancet2004"/> that came out in October 2004.

Journalists included Lila Guterman,<ref name=guterman>[http://chronicle.com/free/2005/01/2005012701n.htm "Researchers Who Rushed Into Print a Study of Iraqi Civilian Deaths Now Wonder Why It Was Ignored"]. By Lila Guterman. ''[[The Chronicle of Higher Education]].'' 27 January 2005.</ref><ref name=guterman2>[https://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/2/voices-guterman.asp "Dead Iraqis. Why an Estimate was Ignored"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051201051851/https://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/2/voices-guterman.asp |date=1 December 2005 }}. By Lila Guterman, ''[[Columbia Journalism Review]],'' March/April 2005.</ref> [[John Pilger]], and [[George Monbiot]]<ref>[http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/11/08/bringing-out-the-dead "Bringing Out the Dead"]. By George Monbiot. ''[[The Guardian]].'' 8 November 2005</ref>

In a 27 January 2005 article in ''[[The Chronicle of Higher Education]]'' Lila Guterman wrote:

<blockquote>The Lancet released the paper on 29 October, the Friday before the election, when many reporters were busy with political coverage. That day, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune each dedicated only about 400 words to the study and placed the articles inside their front sections, on Pages A4 and A11, respectively. (The news media in Europe gave the study much more play; many newspapers put articles about it on their front pages.) In a short article about the study on Page A8, The New York Times noted that the Iraq Body Count, a project to tally civilian deaths reported in the news media, had put the maximum death toll at around 17,000. The new study, the article said, 'is certain to generate intense controversy.' But the Times has not published any further news articles about the paper.</blockquote>

This view of IBC was based on the belief that IBC figures are extremely low due to pro-US [[media bias]] and inadequate reporting due to its heavy (though not exclusive) reliance on Western media sources, which has led some of these critics to claim IBC should be called the "Iraq Western Media Body Count". These biases and inadequacies, they claim, mean IBC's count is low by up to a factor of 10, and that it specifically minimizes the proportion of deaths caused by US forces.

Stephen Soldz wrote a 5 February 2006 article titled "When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths".<ref name="soldz"/> It stated: "Of course, in conditions of active rebellion, the safer areas accessible to Western reporters are likely to be those under US/Coalition control, where deaths are, in turn, likely to be due to insurgent attacks. Areas of insurgent control, which are likely to be subject to US and Iraqi government attack, for example most of Anbar province, are simply off-limits to these reporters. Thus, the realities of reporting imply that reporters will be witness to a larger fraction of deaths due to insurgents and a lesser proportion of deaths due to US and Iraqi government forces."

A further claim has been that IBC does little or nothing to correct misuse of their figures by public officials or media organizations. It is claimed that the media often misuse IBC's estimate of the total number dead. It is also claimed that the media use the IBC's estimate in order to ignore or downplay the October 2004 excess mortality study published in the Lancet Medical Journal, which estimated a far higher figure. Critics of IBC argue that the Lancet study is the most accurate estimate so far and is more reliable than IBC's estimate.

Other criticism of various kinds came from journalists Stephen Soldz,<ref name="soldz" /> Dahr Jamail,<ref name=dahrjamail>Dahr Jamail and Jeff Pflueger. 13 April 2006. [http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041306J.shtml "Learning to Count: the Dead in Iraq"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060517043312/http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041306J.shtml |date=17 May 2006 }}</ref> and Jeff Pflueger<ref name=dahrjamail/>

In April 2006, IBC published a lengthy response to their critics entitled "Speculation is no substitute: a defence of Iraq Body Count".<ref name=ibcdefended>Iraq Body Count. April 2006. [http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/defended/index.php "Speculation is no substitute: a defence of Iraq Body Count"]. By Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda & Josh Dougherty. A rebuttal to the critiques by Stephen Soldz, Dahr Jamail, and others.</ref> In their reply, IBC argues that their critics have several key facts wrong. IBC argues that while their estimate is likely to be below the full toll, their critics' errors have led the critics to exaggerate the likely extent of such an undercount. Finally, IBC argues, the available evidence does not support their critics' claims of a pro-US bias infecting the IBC database.

===English-language versus Arabic-language media sources===
The IBC report for March 2003 to March 2005<ref name="2003-5">Iraq Body Count. {{cite web|url= http://reports.iraqbodycount.org/a_dossier_of_civilian_casualties_2003-2005.pdf |title=A dossier of civilian casualties 2003-2005 }}&nbsp;{{small|(650&nbsp;[[Kibibyte|KiB]])}}. Report covers from 20 March 2003 to 19 March 2005, based on data available by 14 June 2005.</ref> states: "We have not made use of Arabic or other non-English language sources, except where these have been published in English. The reasons are pragmatic. We consider fluency in the language of the published report to be a key requirement for accurate analysis, and English is the only language in which all team members are fluent. It is possible that our count has excluded some victims as a result."

[[Stephen Soldz]], who runs the website "Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report", writes in a 5 February 2006 ''ZNet'' article<ref name="soldz">Stephen Soldz. [http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9660 "When Promoting Truth Obscures the Truth: More on Iraqi Body Count and Iraqi Deaths"] {{webarchive|url=http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20060504092259/http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9660 |date=4 May 2006 }}. ''[[ZNet]],'' 5 February 2006.</ref> (in reference to the 2003-2005 IBC report<ref name="2003-5" />): "Given, as indicated in that report, that ten media outlets provided over half the IBC reports and three agencies [Associated Press, Agence France Presse, and Reuters] provided over a third of the reports, there is simply no reason to believe that even a large fraction of Iraqi civilian combat-related deaths are ever reported in the Western media, much less, have the two independent reports necessary to be recorded in the IBC database. Do these few agencies really have enough Iraqi reporters on retainer to cover the country? Are these reporters really able comprehensively to cover deaths in insurgent-held parts of Iraq? How likely is it that two reporters from distinct media outlets are going to be present at a given site where deaths occur? How many of the thousands of US bombings have been investigated by any reporter, Western or Iraqi? Simply to state these questions is to emphasize the fragmentary nature of the reporting that occurs and thus the limitations of the IBC database."

In a 28 April 2006 BBC ''Newsnight'' interview<ref>[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4950254.stm "Interview transcript – John Sloboda"]. BBC ''[[Newsnight]].'' 28 April 2006.</ref> the IBC project's co-founder John Sloboda, in response to these and similar arguments, has said: "we have never had over the entire three years, anyone show us an Arabic source that reports deaths that we haven't already got. In three years. In thousands of incidents. There are organisations that translate Arabic reports into English, and we see their data."

IBC monitors multiple Arabic sources that either publish in English as well as Arabic, or are translated by other sources. Some of these include:

Al Arabiya TV, Al-Furat, Al-Ittihad, Al Jazeera (Web), Al Jazeera TV, Al Sharqiyah TV, Al-Taakhi, Al-Bawaba, Arab News, Arabic News, Asharq Al Awsat, As-Sabah, Arab Times, Bahrain News Agency, Bahrain Times.<ref>http://www.iraqbodycount.org/sources.php "IBC sources"</ref>

===Undercounting===

The IBC acknowledges on its website that its count is bound to be low due to limitations in reporting stating; "many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war." IBC's critics claim, though, that the IBC does not do enough to indicate what they believe is the full extent of the undercounting.<ref name="soldz"/><ref name=dahrjamail/> IBC has directly disputed these claims in a lengthy document on its website.<ref name=ibcdefended/>

One criticism of IBC's method, from MIT's [[John Tirman]], a principal research scientist, is that the "surveillance instrument" – the news media – is changing all the time: media organizations add or (more likely) subtract reporters from the field, which was happening in Iraq; reporters were largely confined to Baghdad during the worst violence; and reporters tended to write about spectacular events, like car bombs, when much of the violence was in the form of revenge killings throughout Iraq. "As a result, this technique of totaling up the dead is incapable of accounting for the deaths that were not being recorded, whether by the English-language news media or the chaotic health care system."  IBC itself radically changed its method in the middle of the war, switching from two references to one reference in the news media.<ref>Tirman, op. cit.: 333.</ref>

The [[Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties|October 2006 ''Lancet'' study]] states: "Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods."<ref name=lancet2006>[[Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties|2006 Lancet study]]. {{cite web|url=http://brusselstribunal.org/pdf/lancet111006.pdf |title=Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150907130701/http://brusselstribunal.org/pdf/lancet111006.pdf |archive-date= 7 September 2015 }}&nbsp;{{small|(242&nbsp;KB)}}. By Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts. ''[[The Lancet]],'' 11 October 2006</ref><ref name="supplement">{{cite web |title=The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-2006 |url=http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf}}&nbsp;{{small|(603&nbsp;KB)}}. By Gilbert Burnham, Shannon Doocy, Elizabeth Dzeng, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts. A supplement to the October 2006 Lancet study. It is also found here: {{cite web |title=Archived copy |url=http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/research/iraq/Human_Cost_of_WarFORMATTED.pdf |url-status=dead |archive-url=http://arquivo.pt/wayback/20160515142928/http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/research/iraq/Human_Cost_of_WarFORMATTED.pdf |archive-date=15 May 2016 |access-date=9 May 2012}} [http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf]</ref>

In an April 2006 article the IBC had described an example comparing itself to the 2004 United Nations Development Programme Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS).<ref>Iraq Body Count. April 2006. [http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/defended/3.6.php "Legitimate comparisons between studies and the strength of ILCS"].</ref><ref>Iraq Body Count, April 2006 [http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/defended/3.6.1.php "IBC Compared to ILCS"]</ref> ''The Lancet'' report uses the population estimates drawn from the ILCS study, while not mentioning its estimate of war-related deaths. IBC contends that ILCS is a more reliable indicator of violent deaths than the ''Lancet'' study, and suggests a much lower number than the ''Lancet'' study.

However, a supplement to the ''Lancet'' study published separately by its authors, as well as subsequent interviews with one of Lancet's authors have disputed the methodology and results of the ILCS study. On the other hand, Jon Pedersen, author of the ILCS study, has disputed the methodology and results of the Lancet study. For more info on this controversy see the sections titled "Criticisms" and "UNDP ILCS study compared to Lancet study" in [[Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties]].

The 2006 Lancet study<ref name=lancet2006/> also states: "In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates. Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5% in years of highest violence."

''The Lancet'' reference used is to Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer and their 1999 book, ''State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection''.<ref>[http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/qrtitle.html ''State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996: A Quantitative Reflection''.]. 1999 book by Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer.</ref> From the introduction: "The CIIDH database consists of cases culled from direct testimonies and documentary and press sources."

Chapter 10<ref name=chapter10>[http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/chap10.html "Chapter 10: Naming the Victims"] 1999 book by Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer.</ref> elaborates, saying that "In the CIIDH project, participating popular organizations collected many of the testimonies long after the time of the killings, when people were less clear about details, especially the identities of all the victims." And says, "Typically, during the collection of testimonies, a surviving witness might provide the names of one or two victims, perhaps close relatives, while estimating the number of other neighbors in the community without giving their names."

They report in chapter 7:<ref>[http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/chap7.html "Chapter 7: Reporting the Violence"]. 1999 book by Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer.</ref>

<blockquote>Figure 7.1 shows that in the CIIDH database, most of the information for human rights violations prior to 1977 comes from press sources. ... Approximately 10,890 cases were coded from the newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the press cases were taken from Prensa Libre, 10 percent from El Gráfico, 8 percent from La Hora and El Impacto respectively, and 6 percent from El Imparcial. The remaining 5 percent is made up by eight other newspapers.</blockquote>

But also in chapter 7 they reported that in later, more violent years:

<blockquote>When the level of violence increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s, numbers of reported violations in the press stayed very low. In 1981, one of the worst years of state violence, the numbers fall towards zero. The press reported almost none of the rural violence.</blockquote>

There is a list<ref>[http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ciidh/qr/english/figures.html "List of figures"]. From 1999 book. By Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert F. Spirer.</ref> of figures, tables, and charts in the book that can be used to calculate what percentage of their cases of killings by state forces were reported by 13 Guatemalan newspapers for each year when compared to the testimonies of witnesses (as previously described from chapter 10<ref name=chapter10/>).

In a 7 November 2004 press release<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/archive.php|title=Reference section :: Iraq Body Count|work=IraqBodyCount.net|access-date=3 February 2017}}</ref> concerning the October 2004 ''Lancet'' study<ref name="lancet2004">{{cite web |url= http://www.zmag.org/lancet.pdf |title= Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey |url-status= dead |archive-url= http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20051201092157/http://www.zmag.org/lancet.pdf |archive-date= 1 December 2005 }}&nbsp;{{small|(263&nbsp;[[Kibibyte|KiB]])}}. By Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, and Gilbert Burnham. ''[[The Lancet]]'', 29 October 2004. (hosted by zmag.org).</ref> the IBC states: "We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording".

One of the sources used by the media is morgues. Only the central Baghdad area morgue has released figures consistently. While that is the largest morgue in Iraq and in what is often claimed to be the most consistently violent area, the absence of comprehensive morgue figures elsewhere leads to undercounting. IBC makes it clear that, due to these issues, its count will almost certainly be below the full toll in its 'Quick FAQ' on its homepage.

Quote from an IBC note:<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.iraqbodycount.net/details/x350_note.php|title=Iraq Body Count|work=IraqBodyCount.net|access-date=3 February 2017}}</ref> "The Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimate for x350, like that for x334, was made possible by examination of the detailed data supplied to the Associated Press (AP) by the morgues surveyed in AP's 23 May 2004 survey of Iraqi morgues."

That 23 May 2004 [[Associated Press]] article<ref name = "5,500 Iraqis">[http://www.unitedjerusalem.org/index2.asp?id=443126&Date=5/24/2004 "5,500 Iraqis Killed, Morgue Records Show"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110716233611/http://www.unitedjerusalem.org/index2.asp?id=443126&Date=5%2F24%2F2004 |date=16 July 2011 }}. By Daniel Cooney. [[Associated Press]]. 23 May 2004. Article is [http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-05/24/content_333168.htm here] also.</ref> points out the lack of morgue data from multiple areas of Iraq. Also, it states: "The [Baghdad] figure does not include most people killed in big terrorist bombings, Hassan said. The cause of death in such cases is obvious so bodies are usually not taken to the morgue, but given directly to victims' families. Also, the bodies of killed fighters from groups like the al-Mahdi Army are rarely taken to morgues."