One Hundred Thousand and Counting

Bad poll figures have now caused Bush to peek his head out of the protective bubble and give one of his ongoing Iraq occupation pep rallies in front of a crowd that was not pre-screened for supporters only. He even shocked the media by agreeing to take a few (five as it turned out) questions from the audience. The first question asked by the audience was also the question I asked in the first posting I made after introducing Sense last October, “How many Iraqis have died?”

The woman interrogator had more courage than all our mainstream media who have failed to ask that very basic question. Reporters with access don’t ask Bush why he does not take questions from the real public, maybe because, as this lady demonstrated, the public often asks better questions than the reporters, with resulting embarassment to both Bush and the reporters.

I admit I was surprised that Bush actually had an answer, “Thirty thousand, more or less”. I knew he did not really care, a point proven by his failure to offer even a passing token of dismay, but I thought his lack of concern would mean he did not even have a vague idea of the number. What about the number Bush gave, where did it come from? The US does not keep any official tally and the White House said Bush got the number from the media. The hardworking media then checked and verified - "yep, that is the number we have been reporting, though we don’t report it very earnestly, nor very often."

The most popular media source for the Iraqi civilian death toll seems to be the web site Iraq Body Count. Visiting the site, I note a prominent opportunity to make a secure donation via Pay Pal, but with no prominent mention of where the donations go. Further digging shows the donations go to support the work of the web site, but I did not notice any accounting report of the donations received and the costs of the site. So how does the web site get its data? They get it from media reports. The IBC site does seem sincere, but its methodology, compiling data from media reports, does not justify its prominence as a source, nor make a compelling case for financial donation.

The scientific study I wrote about last October still seems the most credible to me. Its methodology was later respectfully questioned by an American pathologist and his questions were credibly responded to by the study authors in this correspondence. Here in the Puget Sound area, an organization of Americans who share the concern of the first Bush questioner, “100,000 & Counting”, shows that just as most Americans believe the American death toll in Iraq is unacceptable and must stop, many Americans also believe the true Iraqi death toll is much more 30,000.