Thursday, December 07, 2006

Underreporting Iraq Violence

New Patriot (via Norwegianity):
It was easy to see this coming. Still, it stings.

WASHINGTON - U.S. military and intelligence officials have systematically underreported the violence in
Iraq in order to suit the Bush administration's policy goals, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group said...

...The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. "Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence," it said.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder what documentation the Study Group is consulting that gave them the number in the thousands and how those incidents break down.

helmut said...

Don't you kind of wonder about how the Bush administration uses numbers too? Or is that where the questioning stops?

Anonymous said...

People are going to USE numbers whether I question or not. I'd prefer to have access to the raw data, the incident reports etc., to give me a clearer picture of the situation and the players involved. The character and source of the violence is far more valuable than the statistics bacause it permits the development of strategies to limit or eliminate future violence.

The "numbers" only point to rough trends and while informative as a gauge to track changing insurgent strategies.

I will leave it to you, Helmut, to be concerned with how to use the numbers. Because we already no that your use of numbers is not to be questioned ;)