Kills

In case you haven't caught on, the US military has resorted to using "enemy" body counts as part of its good news from Iraq campaign, a move explored by Mark Benjamin in a column available at Truthout.

The body counts are back. For the first time since Vietnam, the US military has begun regularly reporting the number of enemy killed in the war zone -- in contradiction, apparently, to prior statements by its own top brass.

I first started to realize that there was a numbers game going on in the media a few weeks ago -- and it turns out I was very slow to catch on. Benjamin fixes the date back to the battle of Fallujah in November 2003.

[And] since Fallujah, headlines from the Department of Defense's American Forces Information Service have touted body counts in articles about apparently successful operations. "IED Kills US Soldier; Nine Terrorists Die in Firefight" read one headline in May from the Pentagon's information service. "Ten Insurgents Are Killed in New Round of Battles in Iraqi City" announced a headline in the New York Times last month, citing information from the US military.

In addition, the Defense Department is increasingly highlighting the number of alleged insurgents detained in raids -- though from the information released, there is no way to judge the intelligence value or guilt of the detainees labeled insurgents.

Top military officials in Washington have also begun citing body counts to support comments by Bush administration officials about the military's progress in Iraq.

Officially, the Pentagon has a "no body counts" policy; however, commanders in the field are allowed to tally up numbers "if it helps the public's understanding of the operations." Right.

A former Vietnam veteran quoted in Benjamin's article brutally sums it up:

Once you go to body count, anyone who is dead is an enemy. It will creep into everything and the perversions will multiply with reporting actual battlefield conditions and the actions of our troops….Only terrible things can come from it.