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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. 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 consulted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union and Covington & Burling. Eventually, the Census Bureau backed down, and Daponte continued her work until she left for Pittsburgh in 1992. 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. BusinessWeek Washington Correspondent 199 Paul Magnusson recently reached Daponte at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she's a senior research scientist. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation: Q: How, exactly, are war casualties estimated if you can't count all the bodies? A: Demographers break a problem down into its components. One is civilian deaths from direct war effects, such as missed bombs and misdirected bombs. Indirect war effects come from the destruction of infrastructure. For Iraq, there was another category of casualties -- people killed after the war during the uprisings by Shiites and Kurds . The contribution I made was in looking at civilian casualties from indirect war effects. It was hard to separate some of these from the economic sanctions. But there was damage to the electrical grid, health-care facilities, roadways and the distribution system, and, most importantly, the sewage system. When you contaminate the water, you cause all kinds of health problems. I went to different human-rights sources and created a database of death in each incidence of a missed bomb. We calculated indirect deaths in part from age distributions. A: If it's a bombing war, being a refugee is the most dangerous aspect. Refugees are exposed to the elements, bad sewage, cholera, outbreaks of diarrhea. The youngest and oldest are most vulnerable and generally don't have the strength to begin with. Q: After you were fired, you appealed and won reinstatement. A: I took a leave of absence because I wasn't being given any worthwhile work to do. I went to Greenpeace, and they funded a follow-up study. I spent a whole summer redoing the estimates and submitted it to a professional publication for peer review and then went to Carnegie Mellon. What I had done at Census was the best that could have been done in a short time period. By the time I went to Greenpeace, more data was available. Q: Was your estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths confirmed by later demographers? Q: Any idea whether the civilian casualties in a current war would be lesser or greater? If the allies target infrastructure like they did last time, civilians will suffer. The last time, we targeted the electrical grid and bridges. Even military targets can have an effect on civilians -- say a plant producing truck tires for the military is attacked. A: The lawyers were incredible, but so was the social-science community. Many professional academic people got involved and stood up for me. A lot of Census colleagues stood up for me and went in and protested, even though they were risking their jobs. Edited by Douglas Harbrecht Click to buy an 200 e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. Add news from BusinessWeek Online to your Web site with our 201 headline feed. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please 202 click here. 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