Thierry Meyssan, meet Marc Herold. Professor Herold of the University of New Hampshire estimated the toll from America's recent war in Afghanistan at 3,800 Afghanis between October 7 and December 7 alone. Herold was quoted as saying that his estimate was very conservative.
"Completely bogus" is more like it.
Herold's methods involved a lot of double-counting, not to mention blind acceptance of deliberately-inflated Taliban accounts. Statistician Iain Murray has the definitive Marc Herold Afghan civilian casualties debunking, and other reports yield much lower estimates.
As the Newsday article of February 11, 2002 notes:
"Mohammed Ismail - then a Bakhtar reporter, promoted to acting director after the Taliban fled - told AP that in one typical instance, he went to the scene of an airstrike in Kabul's Khair Khana neighborhood on Oct. 20 and saw eight bodies. "But it was changed in our dispatch to 20," he said. When he heard the report later on Taliban-run radio, the figure had gone up to 30, he said. Bakhtar journalists also said they were ordered to report military deaths as civilian ones."This is what Herold based his figures on.
I'd like to think that unlike Meyssan, Herold is simply naive. I don't really believe that, alas, but I'd like to think it.
Thanks to University of Tennessee law professor Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds for help in digging these sources up.
Leave a comment
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.