Please Don’t Let This Be True
Jim Lampley at the Huffington Post says this:
A Bush-watcher website identified as TBRNews.org is reporting under the byline of “domestic intelligence reporter” Brian Harring that the Department of Defense is using a cynical tactic to mislead the public regarding the true death toll for American military personnel in Iraq. Harring claims he has an internal pdf. file from the D.O.D. which establishes that nearly 9000 Americans have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom, but that the official number has been held to 1713 by designating as Iraq deaths only those who perish on Iraqi soil. The remainder, he says, are military personnel who have died en route to Germany or in German hospitals– casualties of the war, but not listed in the official death toll.If this is true it would explain the apparent statistical discrepancy between dead and wounded. A combat action which produces nearly eight times as many officially wounded– 13000 plus– as officially dead…well, it’s not the norm. It goes without saying it would also further jolt a public majority already disturbed by the war’s “progress” and eager to see the troops come home.
I really hope that this is not true, because it would be one of the most callous things I have ever experienced.
June 18th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
I’ve heard this before and there would have to be some kind of way to independently verify the numbers for this claim to get traction. To think that this crew would lie about something like this would be a lot for “normal” Americans to swallow. I have never believed the reported DOD numbers (I have always felt they were understated), and this would add to the tsunami that will sweep these prevaricators out of office.
June 18th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
Yup. Old news. Anyone who stiffs out in Germany or Kuwait doesn’t count. Possibly anyone who’s not a US citizen doesn’t count either. Then of course there’s the old “driving accident” vs “killed in combat” dodge but the media got wise to that one amazingly enough.
But as to whether 9000 is a better number I don’t know. Frankly dividing by 6 seems a poor performance and before the war I guessed they’d reduce the reported deaths by a factor of ten.
Basing it on wounded numbers is problematic because those numbers are also fiddled - there’s more like double, tripple or quadruple that number.
Another way to guess would be to take the number of Iraqis murdered and divide by 100 — the old Nazi ratio. That suggests something like 4 or 5000 US dead.
Not that anyone cares, right? I mean 1700, 17,000 or 170 thousand - what’s the difference?
June 18th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
This has been going around for a time now. A few people involved in tracking US military deaths (I’m sorry, I forget the name of it but there is a constantly updated site that many reference) have come forward and said that this is simply not true.
One of them said that they do count the deaths on the way to Germany and after they get there and to the US, and that if they were missing 1000,s of names of people that they would surely have heard from their family members, if nothing else.
So, so far, there is nothing to back up this claim.
June 18th, 2005 at 2:39 pm
Daily Kos has a writeup on this site
June 18th, 2005 at 3:15 pm
A little more info:
The site I mentioned earlier is the Iraq Coalion Casualties site, which keeps a detailed list of deaths of US service members in Iraq.
I believe it was the proprietor (or it was someone affiliated) who wrote a diary on dailykos in response to someone posting the TBR information. I can’t find it at the moment, but basically he didn’t buy it at all, as that is that they spend their time doing… keeping track.
It’s been debunked a few times. I’m sad to see it on the Huffington Report without any sort of new verifcation.
June 18th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
Back again. I misspoke… it was the researcher for the Iraqi Coalition Casualties site, and she/he wrote an email which was then posted on DailyKos, in response to the “9000 dead” thing. While they may not have the final word, from what they say it’s highly unlikely that something like this would get by them. Well, they say ‘not remotely possible’, but still.
Here is the diary, with their reasons for disbelief.
9000 dead GIs?? icasualties.org response: “not remotely possible”
June 18th, 2005 at 4:29 pm
Not that the Bushmen wouldn’t love to pull this off, but our historic ratio of killed to deployed troops averaged around 1:15 for every war from Washington’s to Westmoreland’s; Gulf War I was amazingly under 1:1000, and Kosovo was almost casualty free (on our side), but, having decided to have an old fashioned Mesopotamian shooting match for good old fashioned reasons of geo-politics (with the “geo” defined as “swing states”), we revert to that kind of ratio.
As such, given a deployment in the range of 150,000, 8 or 9,000 dead would be right there… assuming the war ended now… or we recycled more and different troops in and out, it might go up.
The reason this is bunk, however, is because of a significant change in medical technology and forward deployment of medical facilities: what WOULD have been deaths in prior wars can frequently “just” be a very serious injury (such as blindness, loss of limb(s), head trauma, etc.) are no longer resulting in actual combat deaths; merely crippling or disabling injuries (followed by fights for the appropriate benefits amidst the Bushmen’s persistent benefit cuts).
Again– we are still (no matter what we say on our blogs) a free country; simply googling local newspapers around the country for those killed in Iraq would get us around the 1700 killed number (yes, our Iraqi and other allies don’t count I’m afraid, though AMERICAN contractors most certainly do). A few more here and there, I’m sure, stats can be fudged; six times? Not a chance.
Conspiracy theories are great. The fact is, most people have no freaking clue (nor care) about the actual facts as they are.
June 18th, 2005 at 4:33 pm
Also… isn’t Lampley the sportscaster who used to have some drug problems? Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
June 18th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
I’m glad that this is not true. But what about all the head injury patients who come home and later die. Are they included in the death statistics?
June 18th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
I really hope it’s not true also. But when you have an administration that’s shown itself wanting of forthrightness and honesty, you have to wonder.
June 18th, 2005 at 7:06 pm
The Talking Dog has this one exactly right, as usual I might add.
June 18th, 2005 at 9:04 pm
I worry about TBRNews as a source. See this Kos entry
June 18th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
Lampley’s bio. I don’t know about the drug allegation. I do recall that he and his wife (whether first or second I don’t know) had some kind of publicity a while back because of a child (adoptive, maybe?) who had suffered a birth defect of some sort. I don’t remember whether it was not disclosing that fact that got them some heat or what.
June 19th, 2005 at 1:55 am
In the Vietnam War, they ultimately included people who died years after the war had ended. I don’t doubt that they’ll do so again, with this war.
I do suspect the current numbers are fudged a bit, but only by dozens, not hundreds. More of a delay in reporting than a total fabrication. In this way, they can withhold how many troops died in a particular action, so it sounds like we’re winning every battle.
The more pertinent stories continue to be the refusal to count the Iraqi lives lost, and the increased severity of the wounds being suffered by our troops. Someday those facts will haunt many war supporters when they finally recognize what they’ve wrought.
Well, for the supporters with any conscience left, I mean.
June 19th, 2005 at 6:49 am
I am still trying to make my point that most of the casualties of the actions “over there” are probably happening right here among us — right on your street. For one thing, the re-institution of warlordocracy in Afghanistan has, by all accounts, increased the rate of heroin addiction among us by several orders of magnitude. But this is only a minor issue.
People keep trying to claim that vaporized depleted uranium is a “rain that falls mainly in the plain” — the “plain” being Iraq. I keep trying to explain that colloidal particles are remarkably mobile in the atmosphere, no matter how much they weigh. You are breathing in depleted uranium from Iraq right now. It does not decay rapidly, so it is not very radioactive on a minute-by-minute basis. But the very fact that it decays slowly means that it will retain its radioactivity essentially forever. We have now dumped about one and a half year’s worth of nuclear power plant waste into the skys of Iraq.
This is going to have many surprising effects. For example, the plastic that encases the silicon chips in these computers is not at all like ordinary plastic. — It must be carefully refined to eliminate trace radioactive substances. If your computer crashes today, your machine might well be a “casualty ” of the the Iraq wars.
Will someone with a few hundred bucks please get monitoring equipment in place? I’ve heard rumors that our dear government — whose sacred “Constitution” is so deftly played by our packed courts — is banning Geiger counters.
But even all the dead soldiers being shipped back, and the radioactive particles in the wind, will turn out to be minor irritations in the short run. This Iraq occupation is about to send our so-called “economy” into a crash that will make the 9-11 incident look like a picnic.
June 19th, 2005 at 7:54 am
Not only is this story BS, it’s BS from a site closely tied to Holocaust deniers.Several people linked to the DKos diary entry exposing TBRNews, but the need to cry “BEWARE” needs to be made louder. This story is almost certainly false, false false. I think it’s also interesting to note the connections of the people behind this conspiracy theory to the same people who advanced conspiracy theories about 9/11 (specifically blaming Israel) and indirectly to conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City Federal Building.I’m always dismissive of such crazy conpspiracy theories. I shake my head and question why people are willing to buy into this stuff so readily. Some of these “left-wing” conspiracy theories actually turn out to be formulated by extreme right-wing crackpots.Read this entry from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Note not only that the 9/11 theories and Holocaust deniers. Note the connections to retired general Partin - supposedly a reputable source who claimed the Oklahoma City Federal building bombing involved multiple bombs. I bet a bit of digging could come up with some other familiar far out theories that tie back to this crowd.There’s far too many real and documentable things out there to focus such crap. It’s especially important now that documents are leaking out of the US and UK governments showing the big players all knew we were lying our way into war in Iraq that we stay focused, vet carefully the information we rely on. We can’t afford to get Dan Rather’ed or Newsweek’ed on this.Watch your backs
June 19th, 2005 at 8:00 am
This report is bogus…everyone needs to be very careful when using tbrnews.org as a source.
“tbr” stands for “the Barnes Review” and the barnes review is an anti-Semitic disinformation web site. Disinfopedia says:
The Barnes Review is an anti-Semitic web site whose primary propaganda goal is disparagement of Jews and denial that the Nazi Holocaust ever occurred.
…
TBRNews.org (http://tbrnews.org) is a website that says it “originally came from the Barnes Review (http://tbrnews.org/aboutus.htm)” but is now “under different management.” However, its website continues to offer links to websites that sell Nazi memorabilia and promote books by authors including British Holocaust denier David Irving.
They pretend to be on the “Left” and post some real ‘left wing” type news… but that’s just their cover.
They are a disinformation clearing house. See this from sourcewatch.org
June 19th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
How many compulsive bloggers really believe in such a thing as “disinterested sources?” Not too damn many. How many bloggers think the Downing Street Gang would be scrupulous about the truth regarding the Iraq occupation casualties? Huh??? Someone should start a site for people who’ve lost loved ones to the Downing Street Conspiracy.
As far as all the nonsense about the “antisemitic” conspiracy goes, well, it’s about 80% excrement. Yeah, there are a few thousand Hitler fans out there. And some of them do deny the holocaust. Big deal. So-called “Israel” happens to possess over 200 nuclear weapons. That is what I would call a real big deal.
Hitler’s Germany was the only entity to ever try to synthesize oil from coal on a significant scale. Rommel lost the middle east simply because his panzer tanks ran out of fuel. Hitler tried to get all the German Jews to go to “Israel,” but that was opposed by orthodox Jews as sacrilegious. He wanted them to go there to establish a sort of stepping stone to the vast oilfields he knew were there. When they didn’t go, he killed them.
Hitler just wanted all the oil. Japan would have folded in a month without it’s supply of oil. WWII was about that oil.