[lbo-talk] Sad Leninism.

[Gar Lipow]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> The figure actually comes from the South Ossetian government's initial statement. IIRC HRW (look at all those acronyms) obtains its figure from looking at numbers of bodies in the morgue, and so does not include bodies lost under rubble, etc. How you could shell a city for a day with heavy artillery (nerf missiles?) and only kill 44 people is hard for me to understand.

Which is why I said I did not believe either number.  The South
Ossetian government has obvious motives for lying on this issue. Human
Rights Watch has minimized this type of statistic when dealing with
official U.S. allies before. But  if there are 44 people in the morgue
total - doesn't that make 1,500 look a bit high? Especially since
Russia has now occuiped South Ossetia long enough to dig out survivers
(there are usually survivors trapped in rubble) and recovering some of
the bodies while they are at it. Why can't you just admit we don't
know all the facts on this, but that there is at  least as much reason
to be skeptical of Russian and South Ossetian claims as of Georgian
claims?  The HRW morgue survey is not a final number - but it is a
data point.