Washington Post staff writer Bradley Graham was online Monday, Oct. 24, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his story on the U.S.'s use of body counts, a practice abandoned after the Vietnam War but now unofficially reinstated to demonstrate success against the insurgency in Iraq.
Enemy Body Counts Revived. ( By Bradley Graham, Oct. 24, 2005
The transcript follows.
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Washington, D.C.: Bradley,
Given how much the Pentagon strove to avoid Iraq/Vietnam comparisons, why would they reinstate enemy body counts as part of the daily news cycle? If anything, those counts were part of what ended up souring so much of the public on Vietnam, as they seemed to become a symbol of the administration's detachment from reality.
Bradley Graham: There's no plan that I found to make the enemy body counts part of any daily cycle. The trend lately has been to release such figures only occasionally, when the estimated numbers of enemy killed are particularly significant. As for why they are releasing any at all, they say it has to do mostly with an attempt to counter enemy propaganda and also convey to the public the scale and significance of certain operations.
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Alexandria, Va.: Has the death of the 18 children been confirmed in the death of 70 "insurgencies" last week. That brings up the question of how are targets confirmed to be insurgence before an attack is made.
Bradley Graham: I'm not aware of any military confirmation of the 18 number. And the Marines are standing by their initial estimate of 70 insurgents. They're saying they had multiple confirmations of that figure, but they haven't specified who or what those confirming sources were.
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Toronto, Canada: One of the most shocking aspects of the U.S. occupation of Iraq has been the American unwillingness to acknowledge the number of civilians killed by U.S. forces. But, at least, they weren't putting forward "body counts" of suspected enemies killed, as they did in Vietnam.
Now that the policy has changed to report the number of suspected enemies killed, will DoD spokesmen to report the number of innocent civilians killed?
Bradley Graham: I'm not aware of any plan to start reporting on the number of innocent civilians killed. One of the questionable gaps in the U.S. military's approach to targeting, as I've pointed out to senior officials many times, is the lack of effort that goes into determining just how many civilians were killed in an air strike. This contrasts with the meticulous pre-strike planning that the military says is done to reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties.
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Alexandria, Va.: How can they count bodies of enemies when the enemies don't wear a uniform or identifying clothes? Since many civilians are apparently killed in the course of killing these enemies, won't they get counted too? I don't think it'll show how successful we are to be counting dead civilians. How will they differentiate?
Bradley Graham: Military officials say they have ways of differentiating. But in the field, soldiers talk about the difficulty of knowing who all the bad guys are and distinguishing them from the rest. This is the point that Conrad Crane, the military historian, makes in the story.
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Falls Church, Va.: Any fear of 'My Lai II' in an effort to 'pad the numbers'????
Bradley Graham: Sure, some worry about such falsification creeping into the process again. And it's not clear to me what steps are being taken to guard against that.
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Pacifica, Calif.: So the failed policy from Vietnam of reporting on the number of enemy killed has returned.
I haven't seen corresponding reporting by the Pentagon of the number of civilians, mostly women and children, killed during military engagements. I suppose the U.S. "precision" strikes rarely involve civilians.
Please explain how the Pentagon counts the number of insurgents killed from a jet traveling near supersonic speed at an altitude of 25 to 30,000 feet. At times, these numbers seem to come out of thin air, literally.
When reports on the ground clearly contradict the claims that civilians are not killed in these attacks it throws into question all that we are told. How can a mere observer of events (i.e. your readers) make heads or tails of what is really going on?
Bradley Graham: For air strikes by high-flying, fast-moving jets, the casualty counts appear to be derived from advance estimates of how many bad guys were suspected of being at or in the targeted site just before it was struck. Military officials say a lot of work goes into determining this number, using various surveillance and reconnaissance methods. The estimate, they say, weighs heavily in the decision to hit the target in the first place. As for sorting out differing accounts after a particular incident, there's often nothing a reader can do at first except to keep an open mind and wait for further reporting to determine the truth.
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San Francisco, Calif.: The attack on Fallujah in April, 2004 by the Marines was apparently cut short by the Pentagon when reports of mass civilian casualties (600 or more) were released by reporters on the ground there. The soccer stadium was actually turned into a burial ground.
I believe the release of enemy body counts became more common in this general time frame. Do you think reports from events like Fallujah helped lead the Pentagon and military leaders in Iraq to counter the "on the ground" reporting of "collateral damage" with their own numbers?
Bradley Graham: My impression is that at least part of the impetus for the revival of enemy body counts has come from the military's desire to counter reports of collateral damage, which are indeed played up by Zarqawi's network and others.
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Vienna, Va.: I was a bit surprised and disturbed by the prominence of your article about enemy body counts in Iraq on the Post's front page.
I follow war news as closely as anybody and have not gotten the impression at all that the military or administration is trying to make their case through tallies of enemy dead a la McNamara and Vietnam. In fact, it's been the opposite -- they repeatedly emphasize that Iraq will not - and cannot - be won by conventional military means.
The examples cited in the article are from official counts of engagements where it would have made little sense to NOT give the estimated enemy casualties (along with the American and Iraqi dead and wounded). And if the military hadn't announced the enemy dead, wouldn't journalists like yourself pressed them for an estimate?
Aside from what's in the article itself (and this is directed at The Post's editors, not you) the placement and headline suggests what many in the military suspect about the elite media --- that as a cultural and political matter their instinct is to turn Iraq into the Vietnam narrative, regardless of what's actually happening on the ground.
Bradley Graham: The purpose of the article wasn't to argue that the selective release of body counts is a good or bad thing. Simply that it had started up again. It may be, as you suggest, a sensible thing to try to do. But the fact is, it wasn't being done for years. And there are risks associated with doing so, which the story points out.
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Washington, D.C.: Thanks for your columns and chat. Do you know why we don't have independent reporting on the Iraq war as we used to have for Vietnam?
Bradley Graham: I think we have a lot of excellent independent reporting, with a number of journalists putting their own lives at risk to deliver it.
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Philadelphia, Pa.: On the question of whether civilians would be counted towards the death count, will there be a distinction between civilian terrorists killed and professional combatants killed, and how will they make such a determination as to how fits into a category that is counted?
Bradley Graham: So far, no such distinction is being made in the numbers being released. And I doubt there'll be an attempt to differentiate between hardcore insurgents and others drawn into the fight.
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Winthrop, Mass.: Are you sure that the military is not putting the effort into real civilian body and damage counts? That would be a serious betrayal of future military efforts to not gather this vital data. It's made even worst by the uniqueness of the current military effort combined with its likelihood of being repeated else where time and time again. Does the military give a reason for not gathering the data? Perhaps they are simply suppressing the information.
Bradley Graham: The military does do extensive bomb-damage assessments, looking at how close a munition came to hitting where it was supposed to hit. But it doesn't try to determine exactly how many innocent victims actually died in an attack. The reason I've been given is that this would be too time consuming and require too many resources to do so. But I agree that gathering such information would seem essential to ensuring that targeting methods improve and that even more is done in the future to avoid civilian casualties.
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Raleigh, N.C.: Since the military seems to have so much information about the Iraqis and other "insurgents" before they call in those precision strikes, can they give estimates on approximately how many people they will have to kill in Iraq to win the war?
Bradley Graham: Seems they're having a hard enough time just trying to figure out how big the insurgency is. Such estimates vary widely and often are caveated with statements from military officials saying no one really knows.
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Montgomery, Ala.: Wouldn't you agree that releasing the enemy body count could boost the morale of our soldiers and their families.?
Bradley Graham: I think that's certainly part of the rationale for releasing some of the numbers.
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Belmond, Iowa: Does the U.S. military of 2005 have a policy on what to do with corpses after a battle? I know in WWII they had a "Graves Registration" detail to handle the bodies of both American and Axis dead after a battle. What are they doing in Iraq after the fighting has stopped in a particular area?
Bradley Graham: Normal practice, I'm told, is either to bury enemy bodies or hand them over to local representatives for burial. You may have noticed the recent story from Afghanistan alleging that some U.S. troops there burned and desecrated two Taliban corpses. That purported incident is now under criminal investigation.
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Washington, D.C.: Has there been much discussion about the reasonableness of continued prominent reporting of deaths and "body count" from enemy strikes in the media? In other words, is it not a bit misleading -- and not a very helpful exercise in understanding the progress of the war -- to have newspaper headlines (like in today's Washington Post Express) on the death tally from enemy terrorist attacks in Iraq?
Bradley Graham: I hope we never get to the point in the Iraq conflict, or any other conflict in which U.S. soldiers are dying, where we fail to give appropriate prominence to the sacrifices those troops are making.
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Richmond, Va.: The problem with body counts has always been that the objective of war is to defeat your enemy, not just kill people. Does the Pentagon have any figures on what parts of the country are under the control of, or endangered by, the insurgency? That's the only meaningful measure.
Bradley Graham: The Pentagon doesn't provide that kind of statistic. What it likes to point out is that most of the fighting is concentrated in 4 of Iraq's 18 provinces, although those 4 include some of the most populous. Commanders in Iraq will acknowledge that some parts of those provinces--which tend to be where U.S. or Iraqi military presence is lightest--do have insurgent groups moving around relatively unchallenged and effectively controlling some towns and villages.
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Bradley Graham: Regretfully, I need to sign off now. Apologies to those whose queries I haven't been able to answer. Thanks to everyone for participating.
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