You Better Be Counting
Press Action
Saturday, November 01, 2003
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/dempsey11012003/
By Michael Dempsey
“It’s almost as if some people want Iraqi civilians to die.” So reads the first sentence of an article published in the Weekly Standard last spring claiming that antiwar activists deliberately inflated the number of innocent civilians killed by the U.S. bombardment of Iraq. The author continues, “So eager are they to score political points that you can almost see them licking their chops as they desperately seek out any reports — however sketchy — of Iraqi casualties. For their political agenda, the only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi.”
The author of this particular polemic, Josh Chafetz, aims his ire at an organization known as the Iraqi Body Count Project. This group was founded in part by Professor Marc Herold, an academic widely known for his previous work in compiling the most authoritative account of Afghan civilians killed by the U.S. military’s Operation Enduring Freedom campaign two years ago. Herold acts mainly as a consultant for the IBC as it attempts to maintain an updated and accurate count of the number of Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. and British forces in Iraq during their occupation of the country.
Chafetz’s main objection to the study is the methodology employed by IBC to determine the minimum and maximum number of innocents who have been killed by U.S. and British firepower. He writes that the problem is that the minimum is anything but. As the project’s methodology page explains, “The minimum can be zero if there is a report of ‘zero deaths’ from two of our sources. ‘Unable to confirm any deaths’ or similar wording (as in an official statement) does NOT amount to a report of zero, and will NOT lead to an entry of ‘0’ in the minimum column.”
Chafetz concludes: “In other words, suppose the Iraqi Information Minister said, ‘Today the imperialist aggressors slaughtered 300 innocent Iraqi children.’ Reputable news outlets will report what the minister said, while simultaneously reporting that they were unable to confirm it and that the Pentagon was unable to confirm it. But the Pentagon will only rarely be able to say with certainty that the incident did not happen, or that no innocent civilians died. … So, instead, it will say that it was ‘unable to confirm’ the reports. And the result? The Iraq Body Count Project will add 300 to both its minimum and its maximum counts.”
Wrong. That is not how the methodology of the report is explained at all. The methodology of the Iraq Body Count project is coherently explained on the website. It reads:
For a source to be considered acceptable for this project it must comply with the following standards: 1) site updated daily 2) all stories separately archived on the site, with a unique url 3) source widely cited or referenced by other sources 4) English language site 5) fully public (preferably free) web-access … By requiring that two independent agencies publish a report before we are willing to add it to the count, we are premising our own count on the self-correcting nature of the increasingly inter-connected international media network.
This explanation, excusing its overly technical and jumbled style, refutes Chafetz’s charge that if the Iraqi Information Minister had announced last spring prior to the fall of Saddam that 300 Iraqis had been mutilated by American bombs that it would then have been posted on the Body Count website post haste. IBC makes it clear that Body Count only posts numbers that can be corroborated by two separate independent news agencies.
And when Chafetz writes that “the Pentagon, unlike the Iraqi Information Minister, does not want to make false statements,” are we supposed to believe then that the Pentagon Papers were nothing but a press kit that somehow landed on the editorial desk of the New York Times?
In a recent phone interview, Professor Herold recalled a conservation he had with an Associated Press reporter after his study on Afghan civilians killed during Operation Enduring Freedom had been released. The reporter called him not once, not twice, but three times asking him the same questions each time. “She wasn’t getting the answers she wanted,” Herold said. “Finally she broke down and said, ‘Why do you put all this up on the Internet anyway?’”
The one time an AP reporter asks “why” it is when she is sneering at somebody else for doing the job she should have been doing.
So, what is the lesson to be learned here, if any? That the fog of war is as thick as Mr. Chafetz alleges? Or is it that some people are not interested in making the effort to brush through it?
While the lesson may be hard to grasp, the message is clear: large numbers of civilians died in Iraq during the invasion and are continuing to die under the U.S. occupation. Nobody aside from the Iraq Body Count project seems to care enough to count. Have you, I dare ask, been counting lately?
Michael Dempsey is a freelance journalist in Boston. He can be reached at mikedem80@hotmail.com.