Body undercount

Don't trust the Iraqi body counts we're getting these days. It turns out they're trying to supress the numbers:

Officials overseeing Baghdad's morgue have come under pressure not to investigate the soaring number of apparent cases of executions and torture in the country, the former U.N. human rights chief for Iraq said yesterday.

John Pace, who left his post in Iraq earlier this month, spoke as Iraqi and U.S. officials offered widely varying numbers for the toll so far in the explosion of sectarian violence that followed last Wednesday's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra...

Pace, speaking by phone from his home in Sydney, Australia, said some of the officials connected with the morgue had been put "under a lot of these pressures"and had been threatened in the past and told not to investigate the killings of those brought to the morgue "precisely because it was considered a way of attributing responsibility for such crimes."

The pressure would be to underreport the numbers "or to ignore them," Pace said. "I think the pressure would be not to take into account the totality of cases.