Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I'm going to write about this in more detail today, David, but let me point you to "What's in a Number?", an excellent episode of "This American Life" which tried to answer this question

The show took a very close look at a statistical study that estimated - over a year ago - that there had been at 98,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, mostly from US bombs. Ira Glass and crew ask some very interesting questions about why this study was so widely dismissed, why it's so hard to count civilian casualities and what sort of obligations we have to count the civilian dead. Very much worth listening to...

This administration has taken the old adage, "If you don't want to know, don't ask the question," and made it a central part of its policy formulation process.