corrente

Ken Dilanian and Drew Brown of my own Inky report:

Iraqis and international observers say that the military's tactics - including use of overwhelming force against houses filled with women and children - have resulted in the detentions of hundreds of innocent people and the deaths of others. They say the coalition is creating new enemies as fast as old ones are eliminated.

U.S.-led coalition troops have shot and killed at least 58 and possibly as many as 81 civilian noncombatants since major combat was declared over May 1, according to a review of reports first compiled by Iraq Body Count, a London research group that bases its estimates on published or broadcast reports by news agencies and human-rights groups.

The military says it does not count civilian deaths. Asked about the issue, L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, said: "The loss of life is a tragedy for anyone involved, but the numbers are really very low."

When pressed, Bremer acknowledged that he could not say how many civilians the coalition troops had killed.

"It is the same scenario every day," said Eman Ahmed Khammas, the director of Occupation Watch, a Baghdad-based advocacy group. "The number of civilian casualties is increasing. But there are no statistics."
The most frequent complaints from Iraqis and observers are that soldiers fire indiscriminately in crowded civilian areas, that they often base raids on faulty information, and that they erect poorly marked checkpoints and fire without warning on cars that approach without stopping.

That's the malAdministration, isn't it? If they don't want you to know, they just don't collect the numbers. (Gee, first I was thinking of economic statistics, but it works for Florida 2000 too, doesn't it?)