WaPo Supports ‘1,300 Killed’ Report

A week ago, I was surprised to see the Wasington Post go out on a limb and publish that over 3 times the widely reported official number of nearly 400 Iraqis had been killed in the days of violence following the destruction of the al-Askariya mosque.

Numbers as high as the Post’s reported 1,300 dead have yet to be mentioned anywhere else in the media and even the venerable Post itself seemingly retreated from its initial reporting — apparently garnered from Iraqi morgue reports.

Today, they’re back, and they appear to have trimmed the number to 1,000, without being “clear whether that covered only Baghdad or all of Iraq.”
So Jaafari’s competent in his U.S. style manipulation of facts, but will anybody else please report a number different from the official government lie? Or us ol’ Rumsfeld still somehow succeeding at instilling fear in the media — fear to tell the truth?