Officials deflected casualty accountability by refusing to count deaths.

Evidence

Drawing on historical contrast, Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged the inevitability of civilian casualties but added, “We can take comfort in the knowledge that this war has seen fewer tragic losses of civilian life than perhaps any war in modern history” (Shanker, 2002). General Tommy Franks, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, downplayed reports of civilian casualties in Afghanistan on the grounds that they were impossible to estimate reliably: “And so all of us have opted not to do that” (Lehrer, 2002). … When questioned about the number of Iraqi soldiers killed, he replied, “We don’t do body counts” (Broder, 2003). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2340

Categorization

• SEED: An essay on ‘how institutions refuse to know their own body counts’ — the epistemic choice to not measure as a moral disengagement technology.