OxBlog

# Posted 2:33 AM by Ariel David Adesnik

FLOOD THE ZONE! FLOOD THE ZONE! Each day, the Washington Post performs an admirable service by updating the number of American soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq, while also providing the names of those fallen soldiers identified by the Pentagon.

This morning, however, the Washington Post committed a grave error by including estimates of Iraqi civlian casualties provided by iraqbodycount.net (IBC for short). The Post deceptively states that the figures are provided by Reuters and IBC. Yet Reuters itself states that the figures for civilian casualties come from IBC alone.

(NB: The Post provides the IBC figures on page A18 of Saturday morning's print edition. I have not been able to locate the figures online.)

In the past, OxBlog has demonstrated conclusively that IBC relies on fraudluent data and that its flagrant dishonesty reflects its lleft-wing extremist agenda.
Principal flaws of the IBC count include:

1) Counting the victims of suicide bombings as victims of American intervention.

2) Counting victims of common crime as victims of American intervention.

3) Claiming false knowledge of the names of such victims.

As my partner Josh Chafetz documented in the Weekly Standard in April 2003, IBC's has a long history of blatant deception. As both Josh and I have shown, mainstream publications have a disturbing habit of citing IBC as a reliable source.

However, the Post's decision to rely on IBC for its daily count brings unprecedented prestige and credibility to a malicious organization. Therefore I ask you that join me in contacting Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler to demand that the Post repudiate the IBC count, investigate why it use was approved in the first place, and issue an apology for this failure to maintain professional standards of reporting.

If you are a blogger, I ask that you encourage your readers to contact Mr. Getler. His e-mail address, provided by the Washington Post, is:ombudsman@washpost.com.

I ask you to join me in this effort first of all in the name of truth. But this particular truth matters because IBC's falsehoods unfairly blacken the reputation of the United States and its armed forces, which have made extraordinary efforts to minimize the number of civilian casualties inflicted during this war.

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