AP Cooks the Books on Iraq

Dafydd ab Hugh has done the spade work needed to expose bad statistics AP used to counter recent Iraq success. The media’s story line is “Iraq’s a failure.” The media embrace numbers supporting their story line, ignore other numbers, and counter positive numbers when, in spite of media efforts to control, good numbers get through. AP’s bad civilian death numbers are one example of the ongoing anti-Iraq effort that plays fast and loose with facts.

Here’s the original AP story:

• “Civilian deaths rose in August to their second-highest monthly level this year, according to figures compiled Saturday by The Associated Press. That raises questions about whether U.S. strategy is working [emphasis added] days before Congress receives landmark reports that will decide the course of the war.”

Here’s ab Hugh’s deconstruction of AP’s figures:

• AP said civilian deaths rose from 1,760 in July to 1,809 in August. But they embargo a critical fact until later in the article: the August total includes the huge triple-bombing on August 14th that killed 520 Yazidis (AP's count). The attack occurred far away from the counterinsurgency forces, up in Kurdistan. [Without the Yazidi incident,] the civilian death toll would have dropped to 1,289, by far the lowest level this year. So what looks . . . like bad news is, in fact, very good news. . .

• [The Yazidi incident] was an anomalous attack: Nothing like it had been done before, and it's not likely to be repeated anytime soon. [And as to the overall] Iraq death toll, even the 1,809 figure is well below the deaths in November (1,967) and December (2,172), as is the worst month this year, May (1,901).