iCasualties.org Still There Giving the Realty to War: Casulties

Especially for those in this Country, who don't visit nor mention except at pointing their own hate towards others, others they don't even know nor care to understand. Who've led in the failed policies while now they whine about their personal freedoms being infringed on with body pat downs, not torture, a direct result of the enhancing of the hatreds by the death and destruction wrought for a decade now and still no call for accountability!

Close Watch on Casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq

21 November 2010 - “EVERY morning I wake up and go looking for dead people,” says Michael White, a computer programmer from Stone Mountain, Ga., who publishes the Web site iCasualties.org, which tracks deaths and injuries among coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is grim work of trolling through news sites and official releases about each episode, assessing the reliability of those accounts and then entering the details about the wounded and killed into a database.

Mr. White, 54, has done so since the 2003 invasion of Iraq — “when everything was flowers and chocolate,” he said. Yet he had a hunch that events might not continue so smoothly.

He has kept at it, even as the public and news organizations have moved on to other topics, particularly the economy.

Traffic on the site has dropped by at least half since the days of the surge, when the conduct of the war in Iraq was an issue in the 2008 presidential election. Now the site gets about 25,000 to 35,000 unique visitors a day, Mr. White says.

Also, donations have dried up — less than $1,000, far short of the costs and down from $8,000 to $10,000 in a typical year. And no more people volunteer to enter the data and free Mr. White to improve the design of the site. In part, Mr. White says he keeps updating the information on the site because it is a calling, an obligation he wants to see through until the war ends. Ultimately, he would like to create a more permanent record of what he has compiled, maybe even publish a book.

There is another reason: People are counting on him — reporters, that is. {read rest}