COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

The Iraq Body Count project has been cited in dozens of media outlets as an authority on the death toll imposed on Iraqi civilians by the US led military intervention in Iraq.

Citing news outlets include PBS News Hour, Newsweek, Newsday, the Guardian, the Toronto Star, the Village Voice, Cox News Service, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Boston Globe.

Here's an example, from the Globe, of how the cite typically shows up in print:

Bush went to Fort Campbell, Ky., to tell soldiers that they had liberated a nation "in which millions of people lived in fear, and many thousands disappeared into mass graves. That was the life in Iraq for more than a generation until the Americans arrived."

The soldiers applauded. There was no mention of the civilian carnage caused by the arrival of the Americans.

At both Fort Campbell and in another speech in Orlando, where the crowd chanted "USA! USA! USA!" Bush said America will do whatever it takes to defeat and destroy the terrorists "so that we do not have to face them in our own country."

In his three speeches, Bush made no mention of the Iraqis who were permanently defaced.

Bush cannot mention them because the invasion had no grounds. Neither weapons of mass destruction nor proof of an imminent threat was found. Bush cannot mention them because he knows a needless invasion was not worth up to 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed by US and British forces. [emphasis added.]

And this unquestioning citation from the UK outlet, The Independent:

On its website, the organisation says: "So far, in the 'war on terror' initiated since 9/11, the USA and its allies have been responsible for over 13,000 civilian deaths, not only the 10,000 in Iraq, but also 3,000-plus civilian deaths in Afghanistan, another death toll that continues to rise long after the world's attention has moved on. "Elsewhere in the world over the same period, paramilitary forces hostile to the USA have killed 408 civilians in 18 attacks worldwide. Adding the official 9/11 death toll (2,976 on 29 October 2003) brings the total to just under 3,500." (Again, emphasis added.)

Here's the problem:

Iraq Body Count lies about its own methodology.

Here's a passage from the methodology page of IBCs own website:

Our methodology requires that specific deaths attributed to US-led military actions are carried in at least two reports from our approved sources. This includes deaths resulting from the destruction of water treatment plants or any other lethal effects on the civilian population. The test for us remains whether the bullet (or equivalent) is attributed to a piece of weaponry where the trigger was pulled by a US or allied finger, or is due to "collateral damage" by either side (with the burden of responsibility falling squarely on the shoulders of those who initiate war without UN Security Council authorization).

Here are some examples of instances where "the trigger was pulled by a US or allied finger," or are just "collateral damage,"
according to IBC:

Zarqawi's murder of 182 Shiite pilgrims in a series of bombings on 2 March 03.

The terrorist bombings of the PUK and KDP offices in Irbil, which killed 107.

The 21 April car bombings in Basra and Zubair, which killed 74.

The truck bomb at Iskandiyah police station which killed 75.

The 11 February car bomb at Muthara Airport, killing 47 Iraqi recruits.


No coalition action caused these deaths--nor were their deaths 'collateral damage' on the part of either side. Their deaths were entirely the result of a calculated campaign of terror and murder by the insurgents. Yet neither the IBC, nor the useful idiots in the press corps who believe anything they say, draw a distinction between collateral damage and outright murder.

Rather, the IBC uses the murders to inflate their counts to play politics with the dead.

Going through the IBC database, and using only minimum numbers of reported dead, I counted 2,146 civilian deaths which can be attributable entirely to the actions of the enemy.

The deaths were the result of 202 separate incidents. Which means that of the 500-odd incidents recorded by IBC, nearly 40% cannot be laid at the feet of the coalition--contrary to IBC's stated intention.

Some of the more egregious abuses of IBC's discretion are particularly difficult to swallow:

--IBC counts 10 killed when terrorists blew up the Red Cross Headquarters in Baghdad on 27 Oct.
--IBC counts 12 killed when insurgents detonated a car bomb at the Italian MP headquarters, Nov.12.
--IBC counts 14 killed when terrorists detonated a truck bomb at al-Baya'a police station in April 2004.
--IBC counts the abduction and subsequent murder, by terrorists, of a prominent Shiite judge on 3 November.

I ask the Boston Globe--how in the world can you explain having charactarized these deaths as having been "killed by US and British forces?

In addition to the 2,146 Iraqis clearly murdered by insurgents and terrorists, there are an additional 4,442 deaths of questionable provenance, since they record only 'violent deaths' reported by Iraqi hospitals and morgues.

There is no way to reliably discern how many of these people were victims of coalition gunfire, nor how many were Fedayeen operatives in civilian clothes, nor how many may have been simply the victims of street crime or vengeance killings on the part of other Iraqis.

Perhaps that distinction is impossible to draw. The situation in Iraq during the spring of 2003 was simply too chaotic. And yes, the true total number of dead is almost certainly undercounted.

But it does no good to fail to draw a distinction between those who are doing the best they can to mimimize civilian casualties, and those who are going out of their way to wreak wonton murder, destruction, and mayhem.

And news outlets who let this kind of crap analysis slip by--numbly allowing the body count figures to be manipulated for partisan purposes without taking a good look at the methodology and data are failing at their jobs.

Other outlets simply report the total number of dead, oblivious to their underlying causes, or simply buying blindly into the implicit assumption that the Coalition must somehow bear culpability for every civilian death in Iraq.

Oh, did I mention that the IBC's definition of "Iraqi civilian" also extends to include Qusay's 14 year old son who was killed bearing arms against US troops?

The Boston Globe has been had again--publishing verifiably false information.

Every civilian death is awful. But we are still capable of drawing meaningful distinctions between tragedy and murder.

Even if reporters can't.

Splash, out

Jason