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An Interview with Les Roberts
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ePulse: Do you feel that your reports are more accepted now than when you released them?

LR: Yes.

ePulse: Do you think that that is a function of the increasing disapproval of the war?

LR: Let’s talk about the 2006 report. Is it more accepted today, five months on? Yes. I think the reason is in the week after it came out, most of the commentary and criticisms were by people with no expertise in this area. Over time, more and more people have seen public letters by scientists chiding Prime Minister John Howard for example for dismissing the study. People have had a chance to talk to someone who knows the science. I just think that once the original hoopla and spin had subsided, the strength of the work speaks for itself.

ePulse: How have the Iraqis reacted to your work?

LR: The minister of health tripled his estimate from 50,000 to 150,000 in the months after the study came out, but the Iraqi people for the most part know that this is true. Our study is saying that one in seven families has lost someone. The Iraqi government was up until then saying that one in eighty or one in a hundred families had lost someone. Most Iraqi families know that, while at first the number was probably shockingly high, when they started thinking about it, everyone has lost a cousin or someone and they realized that it is true.

ePulse: Has it been picked up al-Jazeera or other global news outlets?

LR: In the Middle East, in most of the world, our estimate is the estimate, because it is certainly a far more complete way of estimating than any of the other efforts.

ePulse: Did the Iraq Study Group consider your work?

LR: Our second report came out just before they were finished, but I can’t answer that, I’m not sure. But I can say that they pointed out that the U.S. military’s monitoring of attacks was very incomplete. In particular, they cited one day in July, where the U.S. government reported 100 something attacks and when they went out and started collecting information for themselves for that one day, they found about eleven hundred.

So the Hamilton-Baker report essentially confirmed our findings that surveillance is extremely incomplete, although that was attack data and we were talking about deaths. My guess is that the incomplete nature of the surveillance is similar between the two.