BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. More and more, the news from Iraq brings word not just of insurgent attacks on passers-by in daylight, but of targeted violence in the shadows – midnight abductions by men in uniforms, death squads, some say, with ties to the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry. On Wednesday, 50 members of a Sunni security company were kidnapped in such a raid. In a separate incident that day, police found 24 bodies in Baghdad, all of them strangled or shot at close range.

BOB GARFIELD: On Thursday, an article in The Washington Post claimed that a cover-up was underway. According to an unnamed Health Ministry official, the government's majority Shiite party had ordered the Health Ministry to stop counting execution-style shootings and tally only deaths by bombing and other insurgent attacks. If true, it explains the Post's earlier report that more than 1300 Iraqis had been killed in sectarian fighting after the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra. That controversial number came from officials at Baghdad's morgue, but it was immediately denied by the morgue's director and by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who put the number at 379. Ellen Knickmeyer, the Post reporter who wrote both stories, was less surprised by the disparity in the death toll than by the failure of other journalists to check it out.

ELLEN KNICKMEYER: I was kind of surprised that more people didn't go to the morgue to see for themselves, after what we all knew was five or six days of stepped-up violence here in Baghdad. A lot of the killings now, they happen at night and they're one by one, for people who are taken from homes, and they wind up dead someplace. And that's the easiest kind of killing to miss. We reported that the Health Ministry official claiming that the orders to minimize the casualties came during the weekend of the worst of the violence.

BOB GARFIELD: And that was the official who told you later, “no, please, forget what I said.”

ELLEN KNICKMEYER: That's right. Yeah. We went back for more information, and he said, “I'm not going to talk to you, and forget what I said.” Iraq is pretty lawless now, and the people who stick their necks out do put themselves in danger here, yeah.

BOB GARFIELD: We're speaking on Thursday. As I read your piece this morning, it struck me as a kind of microcosm of all of the problems of reporting from Iraq at the moment where, you know, all information is as much a weapon of the various warring parties as, you know, bullets and bombs themselves. Does that kind of complicate life for you there?

ELLEN KNICKMEYER: In a way, Iraq's government has been strangely open, especially when you consider the fact that it's coming out of the Saddam era when, you know, every bit of information was treated as state property and was only released if there was approval from higher-ups. I mean, officials have actually been pretty forthcoming, and our access to stories has actually been good. I mean, one of the problems is that the government is fragmented and ministries are fragmented, and there's lots and lots of infighting going on. And I don't get the sense that the government itself really has a handle on what's going on in all of Baghdad, let alone, you know, in cities just outside Baghdad or all of Iraq.

BOB GARFIELD: It sounds like some sort of grim good news/bad news joke. The good news is people are forthcoming with information. The bad news is -- it might not be true.

ELLEN KNICKMEYER: I guess so. That's why it's always important in any situation you're in, especially in wars, to go out and see the situation for yourself. And, you know, that's kind of what we did when we've gone back and forth to the morgue and we've gone back and forth to the Health Ministry and say, show me the records, show you me how you break down the deaths. We went to the morgue the day after the mosque bombing and saw that there had already been substantially more bodies brought in than the government later indicated. And I went back to the morgue the day the curfew was lifted, so I could see for myself the situation there.

BOB GARFIELD: What did you see? I mean, were you actually counting bodies?

ELLEN KNICKMEYER: I wasn't allowed in the morgue, myself. I was looking in the door, but I wasn't allowed to enter the door. They had a computer screen set up where relatives could see pictures of the dead and try to identify the dead. And the bodies I saw all had been killed violently. Some of them had been strangled. Some of them had plastic bags over their heads. Lots of them had their hands tied in front of them or behind their backs. It was a pretty dramatic scene; there were lots of bodies there.

BOB GARFIELD: But there was no way, based on your eyewitness reporting, to know whether there were, you know, 100 or 1300?

ELLEN KNICKMEYER: There was no way that – later on, putting together the numbers of the capacity of the morgue, I mean, they had to bring in refrigerated trucks to handle the dead, and their capacity is somewhere around 300 at a minimum. So their numbers that they say they handled over the six days of the worst of the violence after the bombing of the mosque don't fit with the situation at the morgue.

BOB GARFIELD: If you're right and the majority of the violence at this point is being perpetrated by Shiite militias, and if there's a stranglehold on good information, are we, in the coming weeks and months, going to actually know less and less about what's going on there?

ELLEN KNICKMEYER: I'm afraid, because of the attention paid to the morgue, that it's going to be more difficult to get numbers out of the morgue. We were only getting a part of the picture as it is, and maybe we're going to be getting a smaller part after this.

BOB GARFIELD: Ellen Knickmeyer is Baghdad Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. Well Ellen, thank you very much.

ELLEN KNICKMEYER: You're welcome. Thank you.