For School of Music Prof. Dr. Scott Lipscomb, measures and counts are more than just music. They are a political statement.
Lipscomb, a professor of music education and music technology, is an assistant researcher and U.S. spokesperson for Iraq Body Count, an international organization that calculates the number of civilians who have reportedly died in the Iraq conflict.
The organization’s Web site, www.iraqbodycount.net, has been counting casualties since Jan. 1, 2003. Lipscomb and his Body Count colleagues have tallied nearly 40,000 civilian deaths.
“I’m a compassionate human being first,” Lipscomb said. “I was stunned at the deafening silence here on campus since the bombs began to fall. I only wish that my fellow colleagues would raise their voices as if in song together about the conflict.”
With Body Count’s Web site and his role as its U.S. spokesman, Lipscomb hopes to wake up a general audience he said is unaware of the number of civilian deaths in the Iraq War.
He appeared on “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” in April 2004 and has done interviews with reporters for a variety of publications.
Body Count arrives at the daily tally by “aggressively” searching through all online media sources for reports that specify Iraqi deaths, Lipscomb said. Body Count then posts both the minimum and the maximum number of reported deaths on the Web site.
The total will always be an undercount, Lipscomb said, because only deaths, not estimates, reported by the media are counted.
Thursday’s maximum number was 37,895, a figure that grew at an increased rate with each passing year since the Web site’s inception. Thursday”s minimum count was 33,773 civilians.
According to Body Count, the number of civilian deaths in the first year averaged 20 per day. In the second year, the number grew to 31 per day and in the third, the number reached 36 per day.
Hamit Dardagan,the project’s co-founder, said in an e-mail that the Body Count is needed to provide evidence of the war’s grievous impact on innocent lives.
“I hope that we are able to ensure that any continuing death toll resulting from our (country’s) illegal and ill-fated military intervention in Iraq is monitored, hopefully better than it is now,” he said.
Elizabeth Hurd, an NU political science professor who specializes in international relations theory, international political sociology and political culture, said via e-mail that she applauds the Iraq Body Count’s work.
“This is precisely the kind of organization that makes American democracy function,” she said. “We need all the information we can get so that Americans can make informed decisions at the polls in November and so they can express informed and well-grounded views on an everyday basis about the effects of U.S. foreign policy.”
Communication junior Roswell Mueller agreed that Body Count has a great impact on the public’s awareness of the war, because news sources generally report on daily deaths but not the overall tally, he said.
“When you hear the total number it comes as a shock,” Mueller said. “The more people hear it, the better.”
Reach Carrie Porter at [email protected].
