The Death Toll Question Revisited. Again.

More than a week after its original report that 1,300 Iraqis had been killed as a result of violence following the bombing of a Shiite shrine – a number disputed by the U.S. military and several Iraqi officials and one that has not yet been corroborated by any other news outlet – the Washington Post today offers another defense of the paper's statistics.

The day after the number was cited, The Post offered a further explanation of its report "but it took a strange, strained and stilted form," wrote CJR Daily's Gal Beckerman, who continued: "…it doesn't serve to explain the bizarre gap between its numbers and everyone else's." In that story, The Post spoke with the U.N.'s former human rights chief for Iraq (who was located in Australia), who cited "pressure" on Baghdad morgue officials not to investigate the "the soaring number of apparent cases of execution and torture in the country." The story also noted that "Gen. Ali Shamarri of the Interior Ministry's statistics department put the toll at 1,077."

Today's story anonymously quotes an Iraqi Health Ministry official, who said that the Shiite party had "ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings." In addition to the Post's original source for the 1,300 number (an anonymous Baghdad morgue worker) the Post cites the Health Ministry official and two more sources --"an official with the Interior Ministry and an international official in Baghdad," -- who "have put the toll at 1,000 or more, though none gave a toll as high as 1,300." In his summary of the piece, Slate's Eric Umansky makes an interesting catch:

Last week, the Post actually cited a named source, a Gen. Ali Shamarri. Other papers haven't been able to find him; Iraqi officials say they have no record of such a general. And curiously, he's not mentioned in today's Post.

It's worth reading the entire Post story, which makes it clear that there are certainly questions that remain about the actual death toll among Iraqis following the shrine attack. But it's still not clear why The Post went ahead originally with a headline that screamed "Toll in Iraq's Deadly Surge: 1,300," when a week later, it's still not entirely clear if that's an accurate number. Of course, information like this is not easy to come by. The Post notes that "An e-mail sent to U.S. military officials this week seeking updated casualty figures went unanswered," and access to the morgue continues to be restricted. Nonetheless, it looks like the Post won't be letting go of this story anytime soon.

[bob___k]

Oh yeah. Having two links in the same sentence to the same web page is poor form. The word 'say' is a duplicate to the link just prior to it.

[bob___k]

Let's see what we have here. Former Iraq Chief of that travesty of an oraganisation, the UN Human Rights Commission. Located half a world away from Iraq. Relied on by the WPost for the latest scoop concerning deaths in Iraq. Rather than someone actually in the country. Also sourced by some general that appears not to exist. Boy! That certainly clinches it. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.

[peterbaldwin-2009]

That Guardian article is interesting - 7000 reprisal killings in recent months.