Iraq Body Count Controversy

Pressure is being applied by various parties in order to minimize the number of extra-legal deaths in Iraq, and the numbers game has been going on for some time prior to the Samarra mosque bombing of last week.

Officials overseeing Baghdad's morgue have come under pressure not to investigate the soaring number of apparent cases of execution and torture in the country, the former U.N. human rights chief for Iraq said Tuesday.

John Pace, who left his post this month, spoke as Iraqi and U.S. officials offered widely varying numbers for the toll so far in the explosion of sectarian violence that followed last Wednesday's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.

Pace said the pressure had come from "both sides," but declined to give further details. The statement seemed to refer to both the Shiite-led government and the Sunni insurgency fighting it.

I would reckon that a more forthcoming assessment by the U.N. official Pace would name the U.S. and the Shiites as "both sides", since the party most aggrieved by death squad activities over the last few months--the Sunnis--would have no motive to downplay the body count.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari said Tuesday that the death toll provided to The Washington Post by morgue workers -- more than 1,300 dead since last Wednesday -- was "inaccurate and exaggerated." Jafari said the toll was 379. Gen. Ali Shamarri of the Interior Ministry's statistics department put the toll at 1,077.

The Washington Post has been catching grief from the wingnuts for yesterday's count of 1300 post-mosque bombing deaths, and found it necessary to contact the former U.N. official in Iraq to set the record straight about the habitual undercounting at the Baghdad morgue.

Pace, speaking by phone from his home in Sydney, said some of the officials connected with the morgue had been put "under a lot of these pressures" and had been threatened in the past and told not to investigate the killings of those brought to the morgue "precisely because it was considered a way of attributing responsibility for such crimes."

The pressure would be to underreport the numbers "or to ignore them," Pace said. "I think the pressure would be not to take into account the totality of cases.

"The ultimate objective is not to count the bodies" in political killings, Pace said. "The objective is to use that data in order to take measures to prevent its recurrence, and to take measures to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice."

This is not the first instance of underreporting casualties in the Iraq war.

The U.S. has long followed a policy of "not counting civilian dead."

What that really means is that they are counted, one way or another, but the number is withheld from the public for public relations purposes.