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Topic: What A Surprise...Casualty Reports Short? (Read 106 times) |
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Navybrat
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What A Surprise...Casualty Reports Short?
« Thread started on: Sep 17th, 2004, 09:32am » |
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Press Reports on U.S. Casualties: About 17,000 Short, UPI Says
By Mark Benjamin, UPI
Published: September 15, 2004
NEW YORK (UPI) Nearly 17,000 service members medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan are absent from public Pentagon casualty reports commonly cited by newspapers, according to military data reviewed by United Press International. Most don't fit the definition of casualties, according to the Pentagon, but a veterans' advocate said they should all be counted.
The Pentagon has reported 1,019 dead and 7,245 wounded from Iraq.
The military has evacuated 16,765 individual service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to combat, according to the U.S. Transportation Command, which is responsible for the medical evacuations. Most are from Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The Pentagon's public casualty reports, available at www.defenselink.mil, list only service members who died or were wounded in action. The Pentagon's own definition of a war casualty provided to UPI in December describes a casualty as, "Any person who is lost to the organization by having been declared dead, duty status/whereabouts unknown, missing, ill, or injured."
The casualty reports do list soldiers who died in non-combat-related incidents or died from illness. But service members injured or ailing from the same non-combat causes (the majority that appear to be "lost to the organization")are not reflected in those Pentagon reports.
In a statement Wednesday, the Pentagon gave a different definition that included casualty descriptions by severity and type and said most medical evacuations did not count. "The great majority of service members medically evacuated from Operation Iraqi Freedom are not casualties, by either Department of Defense definitions or the common understanding of the average newspaper reader."
It cited such ailments as "muscle strain, back pain, kidney stones, diarrhea and persistent fever" as non-casualty evacuations. "Casualty reports released to the public are generally confined to fatalities and those wounded in action," the statement said.
A veterans' advocate said the Pentagon should make a full reporting of the casualties, including non-combat ailments and injuries. "They are still casualties of war," said Mike Schlee, director of the National Security and Foreign Relations Division at the American Legion. "I think we have to have an honest disclosure of what the short- and long-term casualties of any conflict are."
A spokesman for the transportation command said that without orders from U.S. Central Command, his unit would not separate the medical evacuation data to show how many came from Iraq and Afghanistan. "We stay in our lane," said Lt. Col. Scott Ross. But most are clearly from Operation Iraqi Freedom where several times as many troops are deployed as in Afghanistan.
Among veterans from Iraq seeking help from the VA, 5,375 have been diagnosed with a mental problem, making it the third-leading diagnosis after bone problems and digestive problems. Among the mental problems were 800 soldiers who became psychotic.
A military study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July showed that 16 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq might suffer major depression, generalized anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. Around 11 percent of soldiers returning from Afghanistan may have the same problems, according to that study.
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Navybrat
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Re: What A Surprise...Casualty Reports Short?
« Reply #1 on: Sep 17th, 2004, 10:11am » |
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Just about a month ago, I stumbled across a statement from a military guy in Germany, who said that more had died than people knew or had been reported, because they were medically evacuated from Iraq when injured, then died later in Germany, therefore they didn't list those casualties in the totals they gave to the press.
I have yet to see any real investigation on whether or not that is a true statement. Yet, considering the above article, I have to wonder if it's just the tip of the iceberg. According to that American soldier in Germany, the death toll is much closer to three thousand.
True or not, the article above show another aspect of mainstream media complicity in misinforming Americans. Why? Because it was through a UPI investigation, NOT any mainstream media network, that this information has come out. How much of this have you heard on Fox News? See what I mean? You're not going to hear Shrill O'Reilly spreading this around!
Again, we see that the networks just repeat almost verbatim anything this administration tells them, without doing the in depth verification that used to be standard operating procedure for all of them. The only way you hear any counter propaganda info is when it's couched in such a way as to ridicule it. And if it's proven to be true, they very quickly move on to something else. They pay lip service to full coverage, while they in fact spin their reports to favor the extreme right wing elements that have gathered the reins of control and power to themselves behind the scenes for the past two decades.
This is not in the best interests of We the People! Having a media that is little more than a lap dog serving their masters, instead of providing honest and balanced facts to the people so the people can make well informed judgements, only serves to manipulate the people for the benefit of the minority, a wealthy elite who have profitted from the labor of the people and wish only to secure their own positions of control and power and wealth.
That's what happens when you remove the protections set in place long ago to ensure a REAL fair and balanced press, regardless of the medium. That's what happens when you allow corporations to buy our sources of information out from under us, giving them control over that information, and along with it, the power to shape and mold public opinion and manipulate people and events.
This is a systematic destruction of our free press. Our founding fathers knew just how dangerous such bad choices would be. They knew it so well, it's why they put special protection for it in our Bill of Rights. When we lost the Fairness Act, it was the first step towards losing our free press.
I think We the People need to join together and fight to reclaim our free press. We need to begin now to wage the battle to re-establish the Fairness Act and demand that any source of news be completely uninfluenced or manipulated in any way by the government or special interests or corporations. News should be factual and documented, not a tabloid version of manipulated crap.
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