UK:The British government was advised that the methodology behind a controversial survey of deaths in Iraq could not be lightly dismissed at a time when both the British prime minister and US president publicly questioned the survey results.
The survey, carried out by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and published last October in the British medical journal, the Lancet, estimated that some 655,000 Iraqis had died since the start of the war in 2003.
At the time, Tony Blair's spokesperson said the figure was not anywhere near accurate. George Bush said: "I don't consider it a credible report."
But while this was being said publicly, there appeared to be a different attitude behind the scenes, according to the BBC.
The British ministry of defence's chief scientific adviser said the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study design was "robust". Another statistician agreed the method was "tried and tested".
The information comes from British foreign office documents obtained by the BBC under Britain's freedom of information act. One of the documents is an e-mail in which an official asks: "Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies."
The reply from another official is: "We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate." But in the same e-mail, the official later writes: "However, the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones."
The survey compared mortality rates before and after the invasion by surveying 47 randomly chosen areas. Researchers spoke to more than 12,800 people. In almost 92 per cent of cases family members produced death certificates. It estimated that 601,000 deaths were the result of violence, mostly gunfire.
Asked by the BBC how the government could accept the method but reject the findings, the government said: "The Lancet figures are much higher than statistics from other sources, which only goes to show how estimates can vary enormously according to the method of collection."