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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TideGlider who wrote (642197)	10/10/2004 6:55:24 PM
From: Doug R	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

um...tidybowl...I've posted 2 sources so far...you're obviously blind.

To: TideGlider who wrote (642197)	10/10/2004 6:56:39 PM
From: Doug R	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Here's another for just a SINGLE month in Iraq...back in 2003: the Associated Press, which counted Iraqi deaths for one month between the start of the war, on March 20, and April 20. Their assessment: At least 3,240 Iraqi civilians were killed. MARGARET WARNER: For more on the issue of civilian casualties in this and other wars, we get three perspectives. Niko Price is correspondent at large for the associated press. He headed the AP reporting team that conducted the assessment of civilian deaths in Iraq. Alex Roland is a professor of military history and of the history of technology at Duke University. He served with the marine medical battalion in the Vietnam War. And retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, military operations and planning, and is a long-time consultant to the Defense Department. Welcome to you all. Niko Price, tell us how the Associated Press arrived at this count of 3,240 civilian deaths in this one-month period. NIKO PRICE: Well, it's based largely on hospital records. But it... that number accounts for only the cases in which hospitals that we visited had good documentation on those deaths. The real number is certainly much higher than that, because some hospitals didn't have good documentation, and some of the dead weren't taken to hospitals. MARGARET WARNER: Tell us a little more about the documentation we required. I gather you did eliminate whole categories of people, what, if the hospital didn't know whether they were truly civilians? NIKO PRICE: Correct. For example, in Basra, Iraq's second largest city, the three main hospitals had a count of 431 dead. They said that 85 percent of those were civilians, but they couldn't prove on a case-by-case basis that they were. So we didn't include any numbers from Basra in our count. In general, hospitals would have ledgers recording names of people to which they issued death certificates, and we would go off of those ledgers. MARGARET WARNER: Now, you also only, I think, included about half the hospitals in Iraq. What kind of coverage did you get from those hospitals? In other words, how many did you think... well, just speculate, but just tell us about the coverage you got from that. NIKO PRICE: Sure. The hospitals that we covered included almost all of the large ones. The ones that we didn't visit were mostly in remote areas that were either dangerous or just too far to get to. MARGARET WARNER: Now, you also said that a lot of dead weren't taken to hospitals. Explain that. NIKO PRICE: Well, correct. Some families would bury their dead without going to the hospitals to get death certificates. In some cases, bodies were destroyed by the bombs that killed them. And in those cases, they wouldn't be brought to hospitals either. MARGARET WARNER: Now, there are, as we noted in the setup piece, other independent groups that have been doing their own assessment. There's one called Iraqbodycount.net out of Britain. And they, for instance, went and got eyewitness accounts. Why did the AP choose to just stick with hospital records, what was behind the methodology? NIKO PRICE: The difficulty in trying to combine hospital records, grave sites, witness accounts, is that it's almost impossible to determine that you're not counting the same person twice. You know, a witness could tell you about a certain death; that same person could be registered at a hospital and at a graveyard. So really, for the sake of consistency, we needed to just concentrate on one of those, and we felt that hospital records were the most accurate. pbs.org