About The Iraq Casualties Count

It will be interesting to see whether the Post includes the latest "controversial" figure of 655,000 "extra" deaths in Iraq in its weekly rundown of casualties. The Post often runs a box with the hed Iraq Casualties, frequently during the week and always on Saturday. It currently includes the earlier study claiming 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths as a footnote to the box.

The box that appears with today's story isn't what I mean--it's more like this one; I scanned that example last year when I thought the probably bogus 100,000 figure had been introduced by careless weekend editors. Wrong!

The footnote, which I can't find online, typically reads:

The Pentagon does not tally civilian casualties. A 2004 study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore found that 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died as a result of the war. That number was extrapolated from household surveys in Iraq.

As I said in my first post this afternoon, today's story by David Brown refers to the 2004 study as "controversial." The Saturday footnote never does.