Counting the dead

Mother Jones has a commentary up about the lack of certainty regarding the number of Iraqi civilian deaths. The article points out something that I had not realized, that Iraq Body Count only counts deaths resulting from coalition led forces, so their median estimate of 23000 dead does not even include all of those killed by insurgent/terrorist attacks.

Something else I misunderstood is that the new upper level estimate for civilian deaths reported to the UN of 39,000 is taken from the Lancet study, which included total Iraqi deaths rather than just civilians.