It's Spelled A-n-t-i-w-a-r

Not enough U.S. troops are being charged with homicide--there's a problem you hadn't thought about. That's the gist of Homicide Charges Rare in Iraq War, by Josh White, Charles Lane and Julie Tate. Oh well, in the midst of scores of column inches about the havoc wreaked by Americans, they allow a professor to say that heroic soldiers and Marines should not be tarnished by the actions of a very few, and one or two soldiers note that the Iraq War is a war. So it's all good.

But what caught my eye was the Post's comical description of Iraq Body Count.. It's an antiwar group. How hard is that to say? Very:

Iraq Body Count, an independent group that advocates more extensive investigation of civilian deaths, estimates that 40,000 to 45,000 civilians have been killed by insurgents, terrorists and U.S. personnel.

What's the big mystery, folks? You getting paid by the word? The term you're looking for is anti-war. As Stephen Spruiell wrote last summer:

The group’s antiwar credentials are impeccable — they are affiliated with a who’s who of hard-left organizations, from Counterpunch to Peace UK to Operation Human Shields. A number of music professors from a group Musicians Opposing War round out the group’s roster, making it such an imminently credible source of scholarly research that the mainstream media, once it got the press release, trumpeted the group’s findings without much qualification.

And the media has been doing so ever since, to the point where the Post includes its questionable numbers--read the rest of the Spruiell piece--in a weekly roundup of casualties.

I mean come on. Iraq Body Count. Hello? But this is best described as an independent group that advocates more extensive investigation of civilian deaths. Just because, you know, they're curious.

Listed on Iraq Body Count's current Further Reading page are treasures including:

• The Iraqi Civil Conflict--Another Reason For Bringing The Troops Home (with another link, Permanent U.S. Bases In Iraq Are Immoral)
• U.S. Bombing Watch: Archives of U.S. Bombings, Invasions and Occupations of Iraq
• Scoop Media of New Zealand; "is like many other web sites maintaining a gallery of disturbing but human-centred images from the war. The little girl whose eye is bleeding no longer has a mother. Scoop declares elsewhere on its site:  If publishing these images causes those, who would otherwise send more to their deaths or support the killing of innocents, to consider the true consequence of their decisions, then publishing is justified. Photographs courtesy of Al-Jazeera.net...
• United For Peace and Justice
• Stop the War Coalition, a U.K. group that Iraq Body Count informs us has been phenomenally successful in mobilising UK and international action against the war.

Included as window-dressing among the thirty or so links are a couple of U.S. military sources, Centcom and DefenseLink. Hey, somebody's got to keep track of the bad guys.