Anyway, even if this Muravchik is half right somebody needs to have a talk with Professor Herold. People should be able to see clearly how he came up with these numbers, whatever they might turn out to be. One can, of course, make the point that the whole business of tit for tat body counts is sickening, but if you're gonna put a number out there...
At 12:46 PM 9/12/02 -0700, you wrote:
>http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/001/565otmps.asp
>
>The Prof Who Can't Count Straight
>And the journalists who cite him.
>by Joshua Muravchik
>08/26/2002, Volume 007, Issue 47
>
>
>THE TALIBAN MAY BE DEAD, but its propaganda lives on in the European and
>Middle Eastern press--thanks
>in part to the tireless machinations of one hard-left professor at the
>University of New Hampshire and
>to the willingness, nay, eagerness, of some of our foreign "friends" to
>believe the worst about
>America.
>
>On December 10, Marc Herold, an associate professor of economics and
>women's studies, released a
>"dossier," claiming to have "documented" 3,767 civilian deaths in the
>American air campaign in
>Afghanistan. The count is updated daily in a database on the web
>(www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm). Herold's claims have been
>little reported in the United
>States because journalists--at least those who work for what Herold
>contemptuously calls the
>"mainstream corporate media"--have been skeptical of his peculiar methods
>of counting. But outside
>this country, his statistics continue to receive credulous respect.
>
>In mid-July, the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, arguably
>Germany's most respected
>newspaper, commented that in contrast to U.S. government reticence on the
>subject, "a study published
>in January by the University of New Hampshire speaks of nearly 4,000
>civilians killed since October
>2001. Since then, the number is said to have reached 5,000 victims. This
>would mean more people have
>been killed in Afghanistan than through the attacks in NY on Sept. 11."
>The same comparison was drawn
>in Der Spiegel some months back, and that magazine recently reiterated
>Herold's claims.
>
>In Britain, the Guardian called Herold's work "a systematic independent
>study . . . based on
>corroborated reports," while a Times story headed "'Precision Weapons'
>Fail to Prevent Mass Civilian
>Casualties" cited the 4,000 figure sympathetically. The BBC reported
>Herold's conclusions and
>described his methodology in terms that make it sound highly credible.
>Bolstering Herold's claim that
>his was a "very conservative estimate," the network explained that "when
>there were different casualty
>figures from the same incident, in 90 percent of cases Professor Herold
>chose a lower figure."
>
>In France, Le Monde Diplomatique carried a long essay by the American
>journalist Selig Harrison
>characterizing Herold's work as based on "meticulously gathered evidence
>on the ground from relief
>workers and journalists." Harrison returned to the subject in a piece in
>the International Herald
>Tribune, this time calling Herold's count "a credible University of New
>Hampshire study." Still closer
>to home, Canada's leading national newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail,
>reported Herold's numbers as
>well as those of Human Rights Watch and Reuters--which were less than one
>quarter as large--but
>commented that those organizations' "monitoring has been less rigorous"
>than Herold's.
>
>Perhaps of greater consequence, Herold's work has been enthusiastically
>embraced in the Muslim world.
>Islam Online recites Herold's death count as if it were an established
>fact, and Egypt's leading
>daily, Al-Ahram, reports that while "the Pentagon has falsified the facts
>about its war . . . one
>American academic is setting the record straight."
>
>What is this report that has commanded so little attention here and so
>much abroad? Herold's
>"dossier" begins with this:
>
>"When U.S. warplanes strafed . . . the farming village of Chowkar-Karez .
>. . on October 22-23rd,
>killing at least 93 civilians, a Pentagon official said, 'the people there
>are dead because we wanted
>them dead.' The reason? They sympathized with the Taliban."
>
>I tried to follow these three sentences to their evidentiary bases, and
>soon I felt like Alice chasing
>the rabbit down the hole. The above passage is graced with a footnote
>explaining that "the figure of
>93 comes from our data compilation." This is none too helpful but is
>followed by a note in
>parentheses: "see chart later, citing reports from Al Jazeera, the BBC,
>Dawn (November 1, 2001) and
>the Hindu." Alas, there is no chart.
>
>So I began to search. Al Jazeera--the Qatar-based satellite TV
>network--did indeed report the 93
>civilian deaths, but the only stories in the Hindu (an Indian daily) or
>the BBC that I could find via
>Nexis and Google were about a Human Rights Watch report on the incident.
>Human Rights Watch, a liberal
>group aiming to hold Washington's feet to the fire, concluded that "at
>least 25, and possibly as many
>as 35, Afghan civilians died" in the village. Dawn is an English language
>Pakistani newspaper. Its
>search engine yielded nothing for November 1, but did turn up a story from
>October 31, also about the
>Human Rights Watch report.
>
>Herold's footnote had alluded to this report: "Human Rights Watch reported
>a figure of 35 deaths, but
>this was based only upon interviews with survivors in a Quetta hospital."
>This dismissal is odd since
>even if HRW's sources were limited to the hospital, it had conducted the
>only systematic investigation
>of what happened in the village. Moreover, as Herold must have known,
>Human Rights Watch made clear
>that its sources included more than the Quetta patients. To buttress his
>impugnment of HRW, Herold's
>footnote referred readers to an article in the webzine Swans, which
>describes Human Rights Watch
>mystifyingly as "well-funded and . . . well-connected. Its links snake
>through the foreign policy
>establishment . . . , through the State Department, and through the
>government's propaganda arm, Radio
>Free Europe."
>
>Adding to the confusion, the footnote also mentions that a "detailed
>on-the-scene account" of the
>tragedy at Chowkar-Karez could be found in another article in Dawn. This
>turned out to be an Agence
>France-Presse dispatch from one of a group of reporters taken to the
>village by the Taliban. No bodies
>were reported seen, but villagers told the group that 60 people had been
>killed there. Muddling the
>story further, a sidebar in Herold's dossier lists the figure 93 as the
>combined toll of raids on
>Chowkar-Karez and a neighboring village. It cites as its source a single
>article in the Chicago
>Tribune. That article, however, mentioned only the neighboring village,
>not Chowkar-Karez. Moreover,
>it gave no casualty figures for either village, and it pointed out that
>"reports [of civilian
>casualties] could not be independently verified."
>
>So I e-mailed Herold, copying his footnote and asking "what chart?" He
>replied: "I am not quite sure
>which text you are quoting." He added that his death estimate for the
>village was now 52 to 93 and
>referred me to his "massive database" on the web
>(www.cursor.org/stories/casualty_count.htm).
>
>There I found a table with an entry for Chowkar-Karez (now spelled Kariz)
>listing "52-90-93" as the
>count of civilian deaths. Seven sources were given. The BBC and the Hindu
>were no longer mentioned,
>but in addition to Al Jazeera and Dawn (now up to three separate
>articles), there were references to
>Singapore News, the Independent, and Agence France-Presse. For all but Al
>Jazeera, dates were given,
>but in no case was there an author or title. So it was back to the search
>engines.
>
>I found the piece in the Independent. It reported that Al Jazeera claimed
>there had been 93 deaths,
>and it also said that "journalists and human rights advocates who
>interviewed eyewitnesses estimated
>25 to 35 civilians were killed." The Agence France-Presse item at least
>served to explain where the
>number 52 had come from. It said: "The Taliban . . . also reported that .
>. . 52 people died when a
>village . . . was attacked. None of these claims have been independently
>confirmed." The newly
>referenced item in Dawn only mentioned civilian casualties in general- -no
>numbers and nothing about
>the specific case. I could not find anything in Singapore News.
>
>I wrote Herold again, asking for the sources I could not find and the
>method of his own "data
>compilation." He began his reply by wondering "why you are so interested"
>and said his failure to give
>authors and titles was because "I do not have a staff to assist." My other
>questions about sources and
>methods went unanswered, but he appended a brief text, explaining that its
>"purpose . . . is to cast
>doubt upon both the method and reported results of Human Rights Watch." It
>cited new sources: the Oman
>Daily Observer, Al-Ahram, the Hindustan Times, the Jordan Times, and the
>BBC Online. The only piece I
>could find in the BBC Online was one citing Herold's own account. I could
>not find the others through
>Nexis or Google or the search engines of the individual papers. Presumably
>they repeat the same
>unverified assertions that have appeared elsewhere.
>
>Herold provided no further information. He e-mailed that he had learned I
>am a neoconservative and
>therefore answering my queries did not justify "the opportunity cost of my
>time. . . . I 'owe' you
>absolutely nothing." To top it off, he accused me of "dissimulation" in
>signing my e-mails to him,
>Josh Muravchik. "I wonder why you did not 'sign' your full name (Joshua
>Muravchik)," he wrote,
>suggesting that by omitting the "ua" I had slyly cloaked my identity.
>
>Although stymied, I have looked into the episode enough to feel certain
>that these other stories, if
>they exist, will add no new information. There were, in sum, essentially
>four versions of civilian
>casualties at Chowkar-Karez. The Taliban's initial claim was 52 dead,
>which was upped by Al Jazeera to
>93. Human Rights Watch put it between 25 and 35. Then there was the
>Pentagon, which claimed that
>Chowkar-Karez had been "positively identified as a Taliban encampment
>including al Qaeda
>collaborators." (This was the description that Herold paraphrased as
>"civilians [who] sympathized with
>the Taliban.")
>
> From these four versions, Herold concluded that the toll was 52 to 93, in
> other words, the Taliban
>version and up. Indeed, this is the "method" for all his research.
>Notwithstanding reports from Afghan
>journalists after the Taliban's ouster that under its rule they were
>forced to doctor reports of
>civilian casualties ("We could not tell the truth," one told AP), Herold's
>"dossier" contains a graph
>whose civilian casualty count, for every week of the war, exceeds Taliban
>claims.
>
>The White House is reportedly considering setting up a new communications
>agency. It might begin by
>offering classes to Europeans (and Selig Harrison) on the elementary
>canons of journalism and
>scholarship. And someone might tell the state of New Hampshire how its
>name is being used and how its
>children are being taught.
>
>
>Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,
>is the author of "Heaven on
>Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism" (Encounter).