"Toting the Casualties of War", Business Week, FEBRUARY 6, 2003
Beth Osborne Daponte was a 29-year-old Commerce Dept. demographer in 1992, when she publicly contradicted then-Defense Secretary Richard Cheney on the highly sensitive issue of Iraqi civilian casualties during the Gulf War. In short order, Daponte was told she was losing her job. She says her official report disappeared from her desk, and a new estimate, prepared by supervisors, greatly reduced the number of estimated civilian casualties.
Although Cheney said shortly after the 1991 Gulf War that "we have no way of knowing precisely how many casualties occurred" during the fighting "and may never know," Daponte had estimated otherwise: 13,000 civilians were killed directly by American and allied forces, and about 70,000 civilians died subsequently from war-related damage to medical facilities and supplies, the electric power grid, and the water system, she calculated.
In all, 40,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in the conflict, she concluded, putting total Iraqi losses from the war and its aftermath at 158,000, including 86,194 men, 39,612 women, and 32,195 children.
"FALSE INFORMATION"? Daponte was finishing her doctorate in sociology at the University of Chicago at the time and had been assigned to update an annual world-population survey by Commerce's Census Bureau of Foreign Countries. That required her to estimate how many Iraqis had died from the war and its aftermath, including the rebellion of Shiites in the South and Kurds in the North (an additional 30,000 deaths, she estimated). Daponte used a 1987 Iraqi census and U.N. figures as her base of comparison. (The Defense Intelligence Agency eventually estimated 100,000 Iraqi military were killed in the war, plus or minus 50,000.)
After a reporter called Daponte and included her estimates in a story about war casualties, her boss informed Daponte in writing that she was being dismissed for releasing "false information." A Commerce spokeswoman denied that the cause of Daponte's firing was retribution, saying the information had been released prematurely.
Daponte consulted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union and Covington & Burling. The American Statistical Assn. weighed in on behalf of her methodology. Eventually, the Census Bureau backed down, and Daponte continued her work until she left for Pittsburgh in 1992.
INDIRECT DEATHS. She has since published two studies in scholarly journals about the effects of economic sanctions on Iraqi children, and casualties from the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath. Her final estimates were higher than her original ones: 205,500 Iraqis died in the war and postwar period, she believes today.
[An interview with Daponte follows...]
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb2003/nf2003026_0167_db052.htm