From: "Rich Gauszka" 



http://icasualties.org/oif/

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6146072.html

When Michael White, a self-described "Joe Blow off the block,"
set up a Web site to track U.S. casualties in Iraq he never imagined it
would become a leading resource on the subject.

Nothing in his background suggested that White had anything to contribute
to an understanding of the Iraq war.

The 50-year-old joins the traffic every morning to get to work as a
software engineer at a firm outside Atlanta. He's never been to the Middle
East, has no military training and speaks no Arabic.

But his "Iraq Coalition Casualty" site, which keeps a log of the
dead and wounded among the military and contractors in Iraq and
Afghanistan, gets a million hits a day on peak days and at least 4 million
hits a month, White said.

It attracts analysts, journalists and defense departments as well as
ordinary readers with its near real-time updates, statistics, and the names
of casualties. Web audience measurement firm Hitwise calls it "one of
the most visited nonpartisan sites aimed at U.S. politics junkies."

White set up www.icasualties.org in May 2003 when the war was supposed to
be winding down and says it flourished in part because of his obsessive
desire to make the names, dates and places listed on the site as accurate
as possible.

"I wanted people to use facts as opposed to opinions to talk about the
war," White said at his house in Stone Mountain, one of Georgia's main
tourist attractions.

"I didn't think that the mission was accomplished. I had serious
doubts that the mission would run smoothly and I wanted to keep track of
how and where soldiers were dying," he said.

As of Wednesday, it listed 2,970 U.S. soldiers confirmed dead and 13 more
reported dead pending official confirmation as the total crept toward the
3,000 mark. It had recorded 22,032 U.S. wounded.

"I find the site very, very useful...It's well respected. It's always
updated and complete," said Nina Kamp, senior research assistant at
The Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. Kamp said the
institute used the site's graphs for its own Iraq Index project.

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