Close Watch on Casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq
?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.
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