1115.org

(1)

U.S. authorities have suddenly revised the death toll in yesterday’s Green Zone suicide bombing. Drastically. It wasn’t eight people after all. It was just one.

The U.S. military on Friday revised its death toll in the attack, saying that it had confirmed only one person killed in addition to the bomber, and 22 people injured. An Iraqi official put the number of wounded at 10. U.S. military officials had said Thursday that eight people died in the bombing, which would have made it the deadliest security breach inside the Green Zone.

No explanation was offered for the discrepancy.

Yesterday’s AP account had identified two dead victims by name:

One of the dead lawmakers was Mohammed Awad, a member of the Sunni National Dialogue Front, said party leader Saleh al-Mutlaq. A female Sunni lawmaker from the same list was wounded, he said.

The other legislator killed was Taha al-Liheibi, of the Sunni Accordance Front that holds 44 seats in parliament, said Mohammed Abu Bakr, who heads the legislature’s media department.

AP says today:

The U.S. military spokesman, Major General William Caldwell, had previously said eight people had been killed.

They don’t identify who said today that it was only one.

Apparently Mohammed Awad has stayed dead. Which presumably means that Taha al-Liheibi is miraculously risen from the dead. What is not known is whether any plans are afoot to found a new religion around him.

(2)

Now here’s where it starts to get surreal.

U.S. authorities have also suddenly revised the death toll in yesterday’s al-Sarafiya bridge bombing. Drastically. It wasn’t ten people after all. It was, once again, just one.

Here’s what AP reported yesterday:

In addition to killing 10 people, today’s bombing of the al-Sarafiya bridge wounded 26, hospital officials said, and police were trying to rescue as many as 20 people whose cars plummeted off the span.

Here’s WaPo today:

Elsewhere in the capital on Thursday, a truck bomb destroyed a bridge over the Tigris River, killing at least one person and severing a link between the now Shiite-dominant eastern side of Baghdad with the Sunni-dominant west.

No one else seems to be reporting a reduction in the death toll for the bridge bombing yet (although an Iraqi satellite TV website says: “Police announced that death toll of Al Sarafiya bridge blast has risen to seven people”). Almost everything else I pull up on google says that ten people were killed. Most of these stories are from yesterday, though.

Either WaPo is way ahead of the curve on this one, or we caught them in a moment of great embarrassment.