BBC Bodycounting.

It's unusual to find that an opinion piece has been updated, so I was surprised by this Caroline Hawley piece on Fallujah. I slated the original, but in one way the update is worse:

Hawley says
'In parts of Falluja you could still smell death in the air. Many hundreds of Iraqis civilians are believed to have died during the course of the fighting. '

Many hundreds, eh? Civilians, eh?

Well then how come this from the LA Times via BlogIrish? :

'the Iraqi Health Ministry said at least 219 Iraqis had died in fighting in the area of Fallouja and nearby Ramadi between April 5 and April 22 [the point at which a ceasefire took hold]. The dead included 24 women and 28 children, it said. Nearly 700 people were injured, it said' (highlighting and brackets added. Further source here)

So, who 'believed' that 'many' hundreds of Iraqi 'civilians' had died in Fallujah? As in the first piece Hawley is as vague as she could be about the sources she has and the evidence she has been given. Everything is about her impressions, and these are presented in terms similar to matters of fact.

Meanwhile, on the web recently there's been a lot talked about the difficulties in estimating civilian deaths in Iraq. Josh Chavez says 'Unfortunately, in an ever faster media cycle, the press often takes numbers wherever it can get them, without bothering to inquire into the counters' agenda or even methodology. Fools and knaves come up with figures--be they advance predictions or ongoing "counts"--where responsible observers fear to tread, and the media, for lack of good numbers, cite the foolish or downright dishonest ones.'

This post at Iberian Notes is also interesting, discussing the ins and outs of bodycounting.