Not Counting the Dead

by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

During the initial invasion phase of the war in Iraq, the low number of U.S. and coalition casualties made it possible to imagine that the war would be a relatively blood-free affair. U.S. forces combined devastating aerial attacks with overwhelming technological superiority in ground operations to crush their Iraqi opponents. The march to Baghdad was so rapid that the main problem encountered by troops was the difficulty maintaining adequate deliveries of food and fuel at the front of the line. By the time President Bush declared an "end to major combat operations in Iraq" on May 1, 2003, only 173 coalition troops had died -- 140 Americans and 33 British.

Bush also used the occasion to praise the modern technology of war, which he claimed had helped protect Iraq's civilian population: "With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians," he said. "No device of man can remove the tragedy from war; yet it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent."

The government was not merely determined to minimize the number of dead. It also worked to minimize reporting on the deaths that did occur. On the eve of war in March 2003, the Pentagon sent a directive to U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops," it stated.

By the summer of 2003, however, the euphoria of victory began to fade as a steady trickle of new casualties in Iraq demonstrated that the invasion of Iraq was only a prelude to the real war of occupation. By July 17, the Pentagon reported another 33 combat deaths since the "end of major combat." U.S. publications began to periodically update the death toll for U.S. soldiers, and local newspapers reported on individual deaths as they occurred. In the spring of 2003, CNN and the Washington Post launched special sections on their websites that provided photographs and names of U.S. and coalition casualties. A similar memorial was begun in December 2003 by the Army Times, a civilian newspaper that is sold mainly on military bases. It used eight pages of its year-end review to run photos of the more than 500 soldiers who had died by then in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the paper's managing editor, Robert Hodierne, getting the photos was a struggle because "The military doesn't give out so many photos of the dead."

In April 2004, a month that saw the deaths of 140 soldiers, Americans finally saw their first images of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq. The photo was not taken by a journalist, however. It was taken by Tami Silicio of Seattle, Washington, who worked with her husband for Maytag Aircraft, a private company that handled cargo shipments for the U.S. military. On April 7, the cargo consisted of coffins being loaded for their journey back to the states. Using her digital camera, Silicio took photos of the scene and emailed them to a friend back home with a note that said, "Last night at work we sent home 22." Moved by the power of the image, her friend took the photo to the Seattle Times, which asked for permission to print the photo in their April 18 edition.

"I didn't have any aspirations of sending my picture to the paper, but I agreed to publish it because I felt that if families knew how well their loved ones were being treated on the way home, it would help comfort them in a time when nothing else can," Silicio said. Its publication, however, brought retaliation. Under pressure from the Pentagon, Silicio's employer fired her along with her husband, although her photo prompted an outpouring of supportive letters and phone calls from Seattle Times readers.

Silicio's photo also set off a chain of events that helped raise the profile of anti-war sentiments in the United States. Although some people criticized the decision to publish the photo, several parents of fallen soldiers told reporters that they wanted newspapers to publish photos documenting their pain and sacrifice. One of those was Bill Mitchell, whose son Michael had died in Sadr City on April 4.

"I am quite positive that he was inside one of those coffins in the picture," Mitchell wrote in a letter to to Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton. "I am happy that you ran the story and showed the picture. I would like everyone to know the devastation that this event has brought upon Mike's family and friends."

The death of his son also helped introduce Bill Mitchell to another grieving parent -- Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Sadr City on the same day as Mike Mitchell and whose body was on the same flight. The two soldiers had not known each other in life, but their deaths brought their parents together. A year later, Sheehan would lead a growing protest vigil outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, and Bill Mitchell flew in from California to stand by her side.

The Memory Hole

As it turns out, the same government that objected to Tami Silicio's photograph was shooting hundreds of pictures of soldiers' caskets and quietly filing them away. The government photos were uncovered, not by the traditional news media but by a website run by a single individual -- Russ Kick's TheMemoryHole.org, which archives government files, corporate memos, court documents, and other "material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known." After Kick learned of the government ban on distributing photos of caskets, he filed a request under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act in November 2003, asking for "all photographs showing caskets (or other devices) containing the remains of US military personnel at Dover AFB." His request was rejected, but he appealed the ruling and won. On April 14, 2004, the Air Force sent him a CD containing 361 digital photographs, which he promptly added to his website. The incident, according to former Minneapolis newspaper reporter Steve Yelvington, demonstrated "that freedom of the press belongs to the people, not just to corporations, and that sunshine laws are for all of us, not just for the press."

On April 30, 2004, the controversy over mentioning the dead spilled onto television, when Ted Koppel's 'Nightline' program on ABC News ran a program titled "The Fallen," which consisted of Koppel simply reading the names of the 721 U.S. soldiers who had died by then in Iraq, as their faces flashed briefly on the screen.

Supporters of the war denounced these references to the dead, saying that were insensitive, disrespectful and intended to undermine support for the war. Actually, though, the images of flag-draped coffins and still photos of the faces of the dead that have appeared in U.S. news media have been exercises in minimalism compared to the photos that have been published from previous wars. During the U.S. Civil War, for example, Matthew Brady took photographs of bodies sprawled across the battlefield at Antietam that more graphic and shocking to the viewers who saw them. "Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations," commented Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (the father of the future U.S. Supreme Court justice) after viewing Brady's photos. "It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us. . . . [It] gives us . . . some conception of what a repulsive, brutal, sickening, hideous thing it is, this dashing together of two frantic mobs to which we give the name of armies."

The Tomb of the Unknown Civilian

At least the American dead were counted. The same cannot be said for Iraqis. There is a difference between the importance that Americans accorded to their own casualties and the way they thought about others, and that difference was reflected in media coverage. Although U.S. government officials made an effort to minimize publicity about American casualties, the deaths nevertheless were tallied. On any given day, it was possible to find an exact number. Websites such as the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (www.icasualties.org) provided monthly charts. As the death toll crept upward, U.S. news media recorded the grim benchmarks: 1,000 soldiers dead by September 2004; 2,000 in October 2005.

These benchmarks would have come sooner if they had used statistics based on all soldier deaths, but the deaths of non-Americans were considered less newsworthy. On October 25, the date that marked 2,000 U.S. deaths, few reporters bothered to mention, even in passing, that 199 soldiers from other countries had also been killed (half of them British) -- not to mention 3,500 deaths of U.S.-trained Iraqi police and military. The Washington Post reported on the 2,000 milestone with poignant reporting on Americans who were coping with the loss of loved ones, but made no mention at all of the deaths of foreign soldiers. Its only mention of Iraqi deaths came in a single paragraph near the bottom of the story. "Based on fragmented reports," it stated, "the number of enemy Iraqi fighters killed appears to be several times greater than the U.S. fatalities, while independent estimates of the number of dead Iraqi civilians range from 20,000 to 30,000." These numbers, however, almost certainly understated Iraqi losses.

During "Operation Iraqi Freedom," the U.S. military has avoided giving Iraqi body counts. No specific numbers have been offered in briefings or public reports, although officials have used vague adjectives to characterize the numbers. "The loss of innocent life is a tragedy for anyone involved in it, but the numbers are really very low," said Paul Bremer, the head of the Provisional Coalition Authority in August 2003.

Just a few days earlier, however, Col. Guy Shields, another U.S. military spokeman, had said that the U.S. didn't have any numbers. It was not trying to count civilian deaths, he said, because doing so was just too difficult: "Well, we do not keep records for the simple reason that there is no really accurate way," Shields said at a press briefing on August 4. "In terms of statistics we have no definite estimates of civilian casualties for the whole campaign. It would be irresponsible to give firm estimates given the wide range of variables. For example we've had cases where during a conflict, we believed civilians had been wounded and perhaps killed, but by the time our forces have a chance to fully assess the outcomes of a contact, the wounded or the dead civilians have been removed from the scene. Factors such as this make it impossible for us to maintain an accurate account."

It ought to be obvious upon even a moment's reflection that this argument is nonsense. Even if it is impossible to obtain a perfect casualty count, it is still possible to make meaningful estimates. Casualty statistics exist for the Christian Crusades, the Hundred Years War in Europe, the English Civil War, the First and Second World Wars, the Russian Civil War of 1917-22, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the Russian war in Afghanistan -- to name just a few. Compared to the war in Iraq, those wars all occurred under conditions that were less conducive to recordkeeping, and with weaker technological capabilities for battlefield monitoring. If statistics do not exist for Iraq, it is not for lack of ability to compile them; it is because of unwillingness to do so.

In the post-9/11 political environment in the United States, it was not just the government that chose this course. For journalists and many members of the general public as well, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were acts of retaliation, and they simply did not want to be bothered by hearing how many innocent people might suffer as a result. During the war in Afghanistan, the News Herald in Panama City, Florida sent a memo to its editorial staff. "DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan," it warned. "Our sister paper in Fort Walton Beach has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening e-mails and the like. . . . DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. They should be mentioned further down in the story. If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, DO IT. The only exception is if the U.S. hits an orphanage, school or similar facility and kills scores or hundreds of children. . . . Failure to follow any of these or other standing rules could put your job in jeopardy."

In Afghanistan and Iraq alike, the closest thing to systematic efforts at counting the dead came, not from journalists or the government, but from motivated private individuals. During the war in Afghanistan, University of New Hampshire economics professor Marc Herold, a critic of the war, attempted to compile a count of Afghani deaths by tallying the numbers in verified reports from aid agencies, eyewitnesses and the world's media. Herold's methodology ignored soldiers and only looked at civilian deaths, and since some deaths in wartime never get publicly reported, undoubtedly he missed some of the casualties that were actually occurring. He made no attempt to tally indirect deaths caused by land mines, lack of water, food or medicine. His initial report also included some errors, reflecting inaccuracies and inconsistencies in some of the underlying news reports, as well as double-counting due to confused site names in some of the reports that Herold cited. After adjusting as best he could for those factors, by the end of July 2002 Herold had arrived at a stable estimate of between 3,000 and 3,400 Afghan civilians killed since the start of war on October 7.

This effort to tally the dead came under instant attack from supporters of the war such as popular conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds, who called Herold a "polypseudomathicator." Other conservative bloggers called him an "anti-war propagandist," a "charlatan," "pseudo-scholar," "the professor who can't count straight," "full of shit," an "eternal liar."

Iraq Body Count

With the commencement of war in Iraq, Herold served as advisor to a British-based team of researchers and antiwar activists who established the Iraq Body Count project (IraqBodyCount.net), an internet-based dossier of Iraqi civilian casualties that was compiled using a methodology similar to Herold's, with additional care taken to cross-check and review results. They also required two independent agencies to publish a report before adding it to their count. Where different news stories reported a different civilian death toll from a single incident, they added the low number to their "minimum" estimate and the high number to their "maximum" estimate. Even so, their requirement that deaths had to be first reported in the news as a condition for being counted virtually guaranteed that even their "maximum" estimate was an undercount. "We are not a news organization ourselves and like everyone else can only base our information on what has been reported so far," they stated. "What we are attempting to provide is a credible compilation of civilian deaths that have been reported by recognized sources. ... It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war."

In July 2005, Iraq Body Count issued a news release on the number of civilian casualties in the first two years of war. It had tallied 24,865 civilian deaths during that period. Its conclusions were reported prominently in leading newspapers throughout Latin America and Europe. "Virtually all British dailies carried the story in full on July 20," noted Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer. "But in the U.S. press, the Iraq Body Count report got short shrift. From a search in in the Nexis-Lexis database, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were among the few to carry staff-written stories on the report. The Washington Post mentioned it in passing, in the last paragraph of a story on the Iraq war, accompanied by a chart on civilian casualties. Most other U.S. newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Herald didn't carry the story in their print editions." The conservative National Review, however, responded to the report by denouncing Iraq Body Count as a "hard-left antiwar group."

Another, less systematic effort at counting the dead was mounted by Marla Ruzicka, a peace activist from California who, like Herold, got her start counting casualties in Afghanistan. Unlike Herold, Ruzicka didn't rely on news reports. She did her research in person, going door to door with the assistance of interpreters. By herself, of course, she wasn't able to cover an entire country. Rather than compiling a complete count, her goal was to obtain financial compensation and assistance for some of the surviving family members of people who had been killed.

A young, attractive blonde, Ruzicka managed to charm U.S. soldiers and diplomats as well as the Iraqi families she was trying to help. In 2005, however, she herself became a casualty of the war when she was killed by a suicide bomber while traveling with a U.S. military convoy. Her death brought effusions of grief and praise for her work from people who knew her. Once again, however, pro-war pundits responded with vitriol. FrontPage Magazine, a popular conservative website, responded to her death with an orgy of vindictive slanders, calling her death "poetic justice" and describing her as an "activist bimbette" whose "sole purpose is to legitimize our enemies, cause problems for U.S. troops already in harm's way, and morally equate dead terrorists with victims of 9/11."

The methods used by the Iraq Body Count and Marla Ruzicka were not intended to provide a comprehensive estimate of the total number of Iraqi deaths. To date, the best available estimate remains a study that was conducted in 2004 for a team of medical researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and Baghdad's Al-Mustansiriya University and published in the Lancet, England's leading medical journal. The Lancet researchers, led by John Hopkins epidemiologist Les F. Roberts, were familiar with the techniques used to study disease and mortality. Roberts had studied mortality caused by war since 1992, leading surveys in locations including Bosnia, Congo, and Rwanda. His Congo research had been treated as front-page news by the New York Times and had been quoted in public testimony by public figures including Colin Powell and Tony Blair.

Roberts' team in Iraq used a method similar to those he had used elsewhere. It did not attempt to distinguish between civilian and military deaths, and it looked at all causes of death -- not just military violence but also crime, chaos, lack of sanitation and medical care. Rather than simply count deaths, its goal was to estimate the number of excess deaths and the causes of death.

If supporters of the war were genuinely concerned about the welfare of Iraqis, this is precisely the type of information that ought to interest them. And it was possible, in theory at least, that a complete mortality study would actually show that the invasion was saving or would save lives, by eliminating the malnutrition, poverty and government violence that existed under Saddam Hussein.

During the runup to war, some of its supporters had actually claimed that this would happen. "The only reason to fight this war is that doing so will save lives," said Marvin Olasky, a conservative thinker and occasional advisor of President Bush. (It was Olasky who coined the term, "compassionate conservatism.") Olasky recognized that war would inevitably kill some civilians: "Even though our intent is only to take out Saddam Hussein and his soldiers, it is certain that some innocent people will suffer alongside the guilty." Nevertheless, "my sense is that President Bush's policy is the one most likely to minimize the loss of innocent life."

If this were indeed the case, the Lancet study could have provided evidence of it. And a complete mortality study has other, more immediately practical benefits. Knowing the most common causes of death can help in directing assistance and compensation efforts for families of the victims, and it can also help planners design military and reconstruction strategy with an eye to reducing future deaths. Counting the dead is not just an exercise in morbid curiosity. It is important for humanitarian reasons.

The Lancet study's results were chilling. Before the invasion, the major causes of death for Iraqis were heart attacks, strokes, and other chronic disorders. Afterwards, the Lancet reported, "violence was the primary cause of death. Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters, and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher . . . than in the period before the war. . . . Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths."

The Lancet study was widely praised by public health researchers and received front-page play in newspapers throughout Europe but was virtually ignored in the U.S. news media. It was not mentioned at all on the Fox, ABC and CBS networks. NBC mentioned it in a report that lasted 21 seconds. On National Public Radio, "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" devoted 45 seconds to it. The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune gave it about 400 words of mention apiece in stories buried on their inside pages. The New York Times gave it 770 words, also on an inside page. It stated that the study "is certain to generate intense controversy," but the Times has published nothing further on it since. The Washington Post also buried the story on an inside page and quoted Marc E. Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, as saying, "These numbers seem to be inflated."
In fact, Garlasco had not read the Lancet paper at the time he was interviewed by the Post, and he now regrets his remark. When the reporter phoned, he says, his initial response was, "I haven't read it. I haven't seen it. I don't know anything about it, so I shouldn't comment on it. . . . Like any good journalist, he got me to." Garlasco has subsequently studied the Lancet report and is impressed by it.

In the pro-war media and the right-wing blogosphere, the Lancet study was treated with hostility that matched or exceeded the contempt heaped upon Iraq Body Count and Marla Ruzicka. Ironically, some conservatives began treating Iraq Body Count with newfound respect as a source of lower numbers that they could quote against the Lancet. Marc Gerlasco's dismissive comment from the Washington Post was frequently quoted, even though Gerlasco himself disavowed his comment within days of saying it.
"The Lancet has become Al-Jazeera on the Thames," declared Michael Fumento on the Tech Central Station website. Others called the study "shoddy research," "worthless," "rotten to the core," "obviously bogus on its face . . . a piece of polemical garbage."

The Lancet study did not deserve these epithets, but as its authors themselves have stated, its precision was limited. The proper scientific answer to those limitations would be to duplicate the Lancet study independently on a larger scale. Not one of the pro-war commentators whose views we have examined (and we have examined many) has ever called for such research. We have not seen a single comment from a supporter of the war suggesting that a better study should be done. For all their fiery attacks on the supposed flaws of the people who are counting the dead, supporters of the war are unable to offer rebuttals in the form of contrary research findings because they haven't attempted to study the question at all. In effect, they have rejected the very idea that the dead in Iraq should be counted at all.