| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-Republicans |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
09 Sep 2006 12:02:36 PM |
| Object: |
Military officials lie to keep Iraq body count low. |
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/content2/2006/09/military_officials_lie_to_keep.html
September 9, 2006
Military officials lie to keep Iraq body count low
By Mark Brunswick and Zaineb Obeid
McClatchy Newspapers
U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program
aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of
dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the
country's sectarian violence.
In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt.
Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in
its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals
killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.
That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths
from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in
August over July.
But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths
are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite
Muslims.
Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly
coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in
eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Johnson declined to provide an actual number for the U.S. tally of
August deaths or for July, when the Baghdad city morgue counted a
record 1,855 violent deaths.
Violent deaths for August, a morgue official told McClatchy Newspapers
on Friday, totaled 1,526, a 17.7 percent decline from July and about
the same as died violently in June.
The dispute is an important one.
With Baghdad violence reaching record levels in July, U.S. commanders
warned that the country was tipping toward civil war.
They then ordered 8,000 U.S. troops and 3,000 Iraqis to conduct
house-by-house searches of Baghdad's neighborhoods in an effort to
root out insurgent gunmen and militia death squads in Operation
Together Forward.
The program, which began in earnest Aug. 7, included bringing in
thousands of American troops from other parts of Iraq in what was seen
by many as a last-ditch effort to head off a civil war that many
Iraqis say has already begun.
Within weeks of the kickoff of the Baghdad security plan, the U.S.
military's top spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, boasted that
the murder rate in Baghdad had fallen by 46 percent and attributed
most of the fall to the new security sweeps.
On Thursday, Caldwell revised the figures, posting a statement on the
website of the Multi-National Force-Iraq that the murder rate had
dropped even more - by 52 percent from July.
That claim was immediately contradicted by the morgue figures, which
trickled out in accounts by various news organizations citing unnamed
officials.
Johnson said he couldn't comment on morgue figures and declined to
release the raw numbers on which Caldwell's claim was based.
He said the numbers were classified and that releasing them might help
"our enemy" adjust their tactics.
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They lied? Really? So what's new?
Harry
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