Iraq Body Count: too many questions still wait for an answer

After posting my email to BBC's John Simpson on Media Lens message board, I got some interesting comments from Iraq Body Count's JOSHUA DOUGHERTY. I present here this exchange:

JOSHUA DOUGHERTY: it seems that your accusations ... were not supported by facts nor evidence.

Gabriele Zamparini: good to hear from you man... ... so maybe you can answer the questions I have been posting on here many times ;-)

Hi joshd,

Sorry if you have already posted on this topic...

IBC states: "This is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies. The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks)"

Question 1) How can IBC be "independent" if its co-founder is also Executive Director of Oxford Research Group?

Question 2) If IBC is independent as it claims, why it states: "The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks)." ? Why doesn't IBC use the word "resistance" and prefers the words "insurgent and terrorist"?

Question 3) Have you read the Oxford Research Group's "Iraqi Liberation? Towards an Integrated Strategy" ? Any comments?

Thank you for your time.

All the best,
Gabriele

JOSHUA DOUGHERTY: No thanks.

You haven't read or responded to the substantive points made in our response here:
[www.iraqbodycount.net/editorial/defended] which refute claims you had been feverishly circulating to discredit us. What would have been in order was for you to write "honest and openly self-critical letters" to each of the parties you had been disinforming.

Instead, all you do is whine about supposedly being "insulted" by being quoted circulating the nonsense, and having your errors pointed out. And then you just continue circulating the same nonsense that is "not supported by facts nor evidence", while accusing others of not sticking to claims supported by facts and evidence, no less.

You don't seem to pay attention to anything we say when we do respond. You just go on believing anything at all that you like believing no matter what the facts and pay no attention to our responses. Given this, can you provide me any good reason why I should answer your new "questions" now? I can't find one.

Gabriele Zamparini: your choice, but... in my emails I reported what Les Roberts wrote. Do you honestly consider that "nonsense"?

You can keep creating smokescreens but people are not stupid, you know! As one of your former presidents said, "you may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all of the people all the time".

Best wishes,
Gabriele

JOSHUA DOUGHERTY: Yes, what he wrote is nonsense. And if you were interested in our responses to anything, you would have read our piece, and know exactly why it's nonsense.

But as I said, you don't seem interested in our responses to anything, or whether anything is "supported by facts or evidence".

Gabriele Zamparini: that's great! ;-) You write: "Yes, what he wrote is nonsense. And if you were interested in our responses to anything, you would have read our piece, and know exactly why it's nonsense."

I would just like to remind the readers:

1) Who is Les Roberts?

Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one of the world’s top epidemiologists and lead author of a report published on the medical journal The Lancet;

2) Who is joshd?

JOSHUA DOUGHERTY (Assistant researcher for Iraq Body Count) is a guitarist, private instructor and a graduate student in music at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Please, don't take it personal, but if you don't mind, I still feel more safe with science.

Best,
Gabriele

JOSHUA DOUGHERTY: Thanks for proving my point.

You aren't sticking with "science". You're sticking with whatever utterances have the ring of "truthiness" to you, and in order to defend this ignorant stance you're appealing to fallacious ad-hominem authority as an excuse for ignoring the facts.

As I said, given this, there is no good reason to respond to you and your "questions".

JOSHUA DOUGHERTY:It should be noted too that after posting this silly response, Gabriele has run off to publish a selectively truncated version of our exchange:
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m23962&l=i&size=1&hd=0

What is most striking about the truncation is that it takes out the part that was the basis of my entry into the discussion, and the basis of all my comments that follow about Roberts and the "nonsense".

It's just deleted, so that nobody can know what I was talking about. Furthermore it begins by falsely attributing a quotation to me:

"JOSHUA DOUGHERTY: it seems that your accusations ... were not supported by facts nor evidence."

But those were Gabriele's words, not mine. They are just left quoted in my response, like the important part he made sure to snip out.

As for the rest, and aside from these distortions, my points remain accurate and unaddressed, only getting the ad-hominem evasion below.

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A few days ago, independent journalist Dahr Jamail wrote:

(...) The organization Iraq Body Count (IBC) immediately endorsed this, clearly demonstrating how its tally of Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war is way below the actual numbers. Exclusively referencing samples from the Western media that willingly embrace the official propaganda, IBC can hardly constitute an unbiased or truthful source of information.

In April 2006, their database of media sources cited an AP story and a Reuters story from November 20, 2005, along with a March 21, 2006, London Times article. This is how IBC distilled the stories; "Haditha - fighting between US Marines and insurgents-gunfire" and the number of civilians killed was recorded as 15. It is difficult to understand why IBC has once again opted to cite US fabrications mindlessly repeated by the Western media rather than take into account the readily available English translation of al-Jazeera's Haditha report.

On June 6, 2006, the Haditha Massacre is recorded by IBC as "family members in their houses and students in a passing car" and the declared number of victims is 24. One cannot help wonder how many uncorrected, unverified and unchallenged pieces of US military propaganda lurk in IBC's database. Haditha could be just the tip of the iceberg.

It wasn't until four months after the event that the Western corporate media started to straighten out the story. On March 19, 2006, it was Time Magazine that "broke" the Haditha story in a piece titled "Collateral Damage or Civilian Massacre in Haditha." The primary sources for this piece were a video shot by an Iraqi journalism student produced the day after the massacre and interviews conducted with witnesses. Another glaring evidence of how a few simple interviews with Iraqis and some readily available photographs and video can drastically correct the glaring errors in the Western media's representations of the occupation. (...)

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For more interesting details on this story, please read:

Iraq Body Count - NOT JUST NUMBERS!