Perhaps WaPo Was NOT Wrong

Jeez! I wrote a post back on February 28th, reproduced here.

Perhaps WaPo Was Wrong

It seems some of the death counts are "slightly" inflated.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the Iraqi police said 1,020 people had been killed in the sectarian violence that followed the bombing of the Shia shrine at Sammara on 22 February, but officials at Baghdad's morgue told the newspaper they had logged 1,300 deaths.

The head of the Baghdad central morgue, Dr Qais Hassan, told BBC Arabic.com that the Washington Post's figures could not be correct. He told the BBC that the morgue's records for the 23 to 26 February showed that 249 people had died in the violence.


The fact is 249 is still bad enough.

(read more)

Now it seems WaPo may have been right after all.

ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES has a post titled The War That The Media Lost which includes this excerpt from WaPo.

The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared for his safety, said a representative of the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings.

A statement this week by the U.N. human rights department in Baghdad appeared to support the account of the Health Ministry official. The agency said it had received information about Baghdad's main morgue -- where victims of fatal shootings are taken -- that indicated "the current acting director is under pressure by the Interior Ministry in order not to reveal such information and to minimize the number of casualties."

...

On Sunday, as a Washington Post reporter briefly visited the morgue office, five bodies were brought in from a town just outside Baghdad. All were neatly dressed men, all had their hands bound, and all had been shot in the back of the head. Morgue officials took the bodies to one of the refrigerated trailers. No mention of the five appeared in news reports.

There is more and The Goddess has a link to the longer WaPo article.

In wars it is always difficult to accurately determine death tolls and it becomes more so when the "official" death numbers are manipulated for political reasons.