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In grim task, Web sites are keeping count of war dead

Scott Lipscomb and his wife learned the hard way not to broach the subject with their neighbors.

And Michael White can't talk about some of the e-mails he's gotten without choking up.

Both have spent months on the emotional, exacting task of tracking deaths during the war in Iraq - tallying numbers that outline the human cost of the conflict in stark, sometimes surprising terms.

"When we first started, you would hear people say "How many died?' " said White, who culls military press releases and news reports for the detailed statistics on U.S. and coalition military deaths (554 from March 20 to Wednesday) that fill his Web site, Lunaville.com.

"Over the summer, there was a slow awakening to the fact that so many soldiers were dying over there," added the Web master, who works as an information technology technician for a trucking company in Decatur, Ga., when he's not assembling death figures. "I think a lot of people . . . heard "mission accomplished,' saw the statue getting pulled down and thought it was all over."

Lipscomb approaches the issue from the other side. As an assistant researcher for the antiwar site IraqBodyCount.org, he's among a team of 16 volunteers who comb media accounts worldwide to develop an estimate of Iraqi civilians killed in 2003 (minimum: 7,950; maximum: 9,781, as of Dec. 18).

"We have complete confidence in the military to report every military death," said Lipscomb, an associate professor at Northwestern University's school of music, who spent up to two hours each day processing fatality counts when the Iraq war was at its zenith. "We're counting the civilians because no one else is."

Using different methods, the two sites have documented the mounting deaths and injuries in Iraq - describing different sides of the same dangerous coin for those seeking a continuous, methodically documented tally.

Along the way, they've faced the chaos of a distant war, the reluctance of U.S. military sources and resistance among many in America against dwelling on death tolls that may dampen enthusiasm for the conflict.

Some say American media outlets - particularly in television - have been reluctant to visit the issue of casualties in depth, cowed by fears of appearing unpatriotic and a U.S. administration that won't even allow media coverage of coffins coming back to the country from Iraq.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin criticized a "Pekinese" press that "tiptoe around" the issue of casualties. He began printing the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq in his columns earlier this year, most recently in a Dec. 15 column published the day after Hussein's capture that listed 25 soldiers killed since President Bush's surprise Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad.

"At the time I became interested, it seemed like nobody was doing it," said Breslin. "They were printing the names in (small) race track agate type . . . and it became intolerable. The heavy thing in there was the ages: 20, 21, 22 . . . good Lord. These people, dead and wounded, are coming home into darkness . . . and the government wants to keep them that way."

Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives think tank, released a study in October indicating that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis (combatants and civilian) were killed. He agreed with Breslin and others who fault U.S. media for treading lightly on coverage of casualty numbers.

"It seems strange to spend billions of dollars to fight a war, send hundreds of thousands of Americans in to fight that war and turn cameras away when it comes to showing the cost of the war," said Conetta, whose group has concluded the costs of the war outweigh any benefits. "If you don't think war is about severed limbs and dead children, then you don't know what you're talking about."

But finding such tallies in reliable detail often isn't easy.

U.S. Central Command in Tampa issues press releases on each incident involving the death of an American soldier, minus names. Once family is notified, the U.S. Defense Department provides its own release with name, age, unit and hometown of the deceased.

But the government doesn't track coalition deaths outside U.S. forces or index its releases, and its tallies are not very detailed. Though some outside groups (including Fox News, CNN, the Washington Post and Antiwar.com) provide their own tallies, sometimes the information is incomplete, inaccurate or lacking details.

And when it comes to the deaths of Iraqi civilians or soldiers, military officials are blunt: They don't track them.

One Defense Department spokeswoman - asked why a military that works hard to avoid civilian deaths doesn't maintain public statistics on the issue - referred to a 2001 press conference by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"With the disorder that reigns in Afghanistan, it is next to impossible to get factual information about civilian casualties," noted Rumsfeld then, in a quote that the Defense Department spokeswoman said now applies to Iraq. "We're not going to make claims that we can't back up with facts, and I would think it would be best if others didn't either."

Lipscomb of IraqBodyCount.org said the Bush administration avoids discussing such figures because it fears a public backlash over the mounting civilian deaths.

"Our goal is to dispute with facts all of this nonsense about smart missiles and intelligent bombs," he added of the site, which only tallies deaths if they have been reported in two or more media sources. "Every time a bomb is dropped, there is what is referred to as collateral damage. This is our way of putting a face on these incidents."

Those without an antiwar stance also see value in counting civilian casualties.

Associated Press correspondent Niko Price spent five weeks this summer leading a team of reporters that combed through records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals. Their goal: a minimum number for how many civilians may have been killed in Iraq from March 20 to April 20.

They knew the figures were "fragmentary," with large numbers of records either inaccessible or too vague to be included (some Muslim customs, for example, require burying the dead on the day they die - leaving little time for documentation).

But Price also found the importance of paperwork in Iraqi society led many to take their dead to hospitals. Eventually, they discovered at least 3,240 provable civilian deaths, with 1,896 casualties in Baghdad alone.

"I think there are some elements in the U.S. military that care very deeply about these subjects, and there are other elements that don't," added Price, who also reported on the Iraqi Health Ministry's decision earlier this month to stop a more comprehensive civilian death count based on all hospital records. "Hopefully, greater public attention will encourage the military to pay more attention."

At first, his work on Lunaville felt a little detached - like an academic exercise. Then the e-mails came.

From hopeful relatives, girlfriends, spouses, friends, they said the same thing: Thank you for giving us details the government hasn't. Now, each time White gets a casualty report, he has a new addition to his routine.

"I check my e-mails to make sure I haven't gotten a (message) from that person's family before," he said, choking up a bit (thankfully, he hasn't found a match yet). "Although I don't have any family over there, it feels like there's a connection that I wouldn't have had otherwise."

Lunaville presents figures on deaths and injuries among U.S. and coalition forces with impressive detail - offering charts that separate tallies by fighting force (U.S., British or other) and month, with filters allowing users to sort attacks by date, place, age and other details.

Tallies are also listed from useful benchmarks - U.S. deaths since Baghdad's April 9 fall (334), or since President Bush's July 2 "bring 'em on" boast (258). Each incident is classified according to the explanation the military provides, though White said he has seen an incident classified as an accident that occurred as a vehicle was fleeing enemy fire.

White started Lunaville with San Francisco-area activist Pat Kneisler in June, suggesting they work together to update a chart Kneisler initially created (the site's name comes from a personal Web site he operated).

Now White spends one to two hours each day working on his end of the site - he has designed and maintains it, while Kneisler handles the data research - which attracted more than 500,000 hits last month.

Though other areas on Lunaville can be passionately antiwar, White said he tries to keep the casualty page relatively neutral.

For example, he won't link directly to the IraqBodyCount site, though they link to Lunaville, and he has no plans to list Iraqi civilian casualties.

"I don't want to offend people," said White, who personally opposes the war. "If people who are coming to this site have family over there, they may not understand. And if I started putting my 2 cents in there, it might lower the value of the site."

Such sensitivities even brought him into conflict with Kneisler - whom he has never actually met in person, communicating through e-mail and telephone calls - when White refused to list as a casualty a servicewoman who was killed in the U.S. while on leave attending a wedding. Kneisler quit for three weeks, until White could persuade her to get involved again.

Despite his efforts, White has taken some brutal criticism from war supporters who note the conflict has involved more than 120,000 U.S. troops - concluding the total U.S. military deaths amount to less than half of 1 percent.

"It is small . . . but I don't think the families of the people dying would feel that way," said White. "Each death is a waste, as far as I'm concerned."

These days, Lipscomb and his wife, Jordana, rarely watch TV news, irritated by the superficiality of war coverage. Discussions with neighbors, who just don't want to hear about the death counts, rarely end well.

Isolation, it seems, is the biggest personal cost that comes from regularly tracking Iraqi deaths.

"When you spend an hour sifting through reports - one of them about a family shot . . . as they were trying to get home before curfew - there's a cloud that doesn't exist for most people," he said. "We have a much clearer idea of what's going on as we sit in our comfortable homes."

Lipscomb joined the effort soon after British-based researchers Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda began developing the idea in December 2002. Using an Internet bulletin board, the site's team evaluates reports of civilian casualties published worldwide; deaths are added to their tally only if they are confirmed in two or more reports which have been approved by at least three researchers (the maximum and minimum totals come from different death tolls for the same incident confirmed by multiple sources).

The group does count deaths from the impact of specific U.S.-led military actions - say, contamination deaths after the bombing of a water treatment plant. Those already in the region but working for the United States, such as translators, are counted; civilians who came to the area to work for the coalition or firms involved in the reconstruction are not.

And even though critics say relying on media reports from a war zone seems risky, Lipscomb has a simple answer: it's the best they can do right now.

"This is a way we can truly put a face on an individual life . . . a family that no longer has a head of household or a child killed by a cluster bomb," he said. "What is frighteningly implicit in what (some people) say, is that because we can't be sure, we should do nothing. And that's not something I can do."