PENTAGON SPINNING U.S. AND IRAQI DEATHS AND CASUALTIES
Three Dead and severely wounded American soldiers in Iraq ~ Are they being correctly reported ?
Iraq is George Bush's waterloo and he is dragging all of us with him into this black hole of spin, deceit, hubris, humiliation and heartache : Allen L Roland
Last December I reported that there was evidence that the Pentagon has been lowballing its count of the dead and wounded in Iraq ~ which would represent the ultimate spin and deceit of this morally corrupt administration ~ Now it appears they are doing the same thing with Iraqi civilians by reporting only death by drive-by shooting, torture or execution ~ excluding bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks.
This deceit would seem to be confirmed by the Pentagon reporting a 46% decrease in violent civilian deaths in Iraq in August while the Baghdad morgue showed only a 15 percent drop in the number of violent deaths it saw in August.
Here's the reason . As the Associated Press reports, General William B Caldwell was able to come up with such a low number of "murders" in Baghdad in August by simply excluding from his count people killed by "bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks -- including suicide bombings."
So what counts as a "murder" in the tally Caldwell announced ? Only death by drive-by shooting, torture or execution.
This is par for the course for this despicable administration ~ who will go to any lengths to hide their failures and mismanagement.
There has always been the strong rumor that the Pentagon only counts those killed in combat in its daily death totals . So if a soldier was wounded and died in transit to a hospital or in that hospital ~ he would not be counted in that daily death total.
As such, the total number of combat deaths in Iraq would be closer to 10,000 versus the currently published 2800.
That rumor was substantiated by a group of House democrats who claimed last year that the pentagon was seriously underreporting the true extent of casualties by close to 25,000 .
Mark Benjamin, Salon, investigated those charges and filed these explosive findings.
Allen L Roland
Incalculable pain
The Pentagon is underreporting the number of American soldier casualties in Iraq, say House Democrats.
By Mark Benjamin / SALON.COM
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/12/10/casualties/index.html.
Dec. 10, 2005 | A group of seven House Democrats wrote President Bush this week, accusing the Pentagon of underreporting casualties in Iraq.
It's a shocking charge. The letter writers argue that Pentagon casualty reports show only a sliver of the injuries, mostly physical ones from bombs or bullets. But war doesn't work like that, the Democrats declare, adding that the reports skip a horrible panoply of accidents, illness, disease and mental trauma.
"We are concerned that that the figures that were released to the public by your administration do not accurately represent the true toll that this war has taken on the American people," the group wrote Bush on Dec. 7. The Dems are right.
Pentagon casualty reports show 2,390 service members dead from Iraq and Afghanistan and over 16,000 wounded. By far the vast majority of the wounded and dead are from Iraq.
But by Dec. 8, 2005, the military had evacuated another 25,289 service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries or illnesses not caused directly by enemy bullets or bombs, according to the U.S. Transportation Command. That statistic includes everything from serious injuries in Humvee wrecks or other accidents to more routine illnesses that could be unrelated to field battles.
Yet those service members are not included in the Pentagon's casualty reports. That's odd. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a casualty as "a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment or capture or through being missing in action."
"We don't do Webster's," Jim Turner, a Pentagon spokesman told me in 2004 as I was reporting on counting casualties. In a written statement, the Department of Defense told me that the casualty reports describe casualties to fit the "understanding of the average newspaper reader."
Click here for remainder of article ~ http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/12/10/casualties/index.html.
