Invisible Deaths

Bob Herbert's column from Friday, "Black and Invisible" is one of the more moving commentaries I've seen about youth crime and violence. This reminded me of similar stories I heard while at the million mom march in May of 2000. I've had students who've told me absences were the result of funerals for friends in the neighborhood.

Also, in news of death and mourning, I heard Randi Rhodes talking about "44 Americans" over and over again as the story that wasn't being covered during the Pope's funeral. Now this led to me several websites that collect casualties in search of this 44 (I thought she was saying "dead") figure. As I did this, I found that antiwar.com a website that will take you to casualty lists of Americans, Iraqis and "coalition forces." The site takes its numbers from the "Iraq Body Count" project, which provides a relatively low number of Iraqi civilian casualties (about 18,000), which has been challenged by the count 100,000 from Lancet. The difference between the two projects has to do with projected numbers as opposed to reported numbers. Lancet's study is based on a small sample of 1000 people surveyed that is projected to argue a 100,000 casualty count. The "Iraq Body Count" collection is based on reported deaths. As IBC points out, "both studies have arrived at one conclusion which is not up for serious debate: the number of deaths from violence has skyrocketed since the war was launched." However, you can also see the way that the IBC's reliance on mainstream news of casualties is resulting in a dramatically reduced body count.
But back to Randi's "44 Americans" - I went to her website and found a link to a story about the attack on Abu Ghraib, the prison in which 3000 Iraqi insurgents are currently being held. I can imagine easily why this one wasn't reported widely, and I'm sure you can too.
As always, you will find an excellent discussion of news from Iraq and media coverage on Juan Cole's website.