What’s all this about then?
Here, http://www.ucomics.com/tedrall/2005/08/08/ Rall says that there’s a Pentagon internal document that says 9,000 US personell have died fom the Iraq war.
What’s he talking about and where can I find more information aboutit?
Maybe online comics aren’t exactly the best source of hard news?
Nope. No chance.
Lists of the dead are readily available. Has any family chimed saying Daddy’s name is not on the list?
Therefore either there is no coverup, or about seven thousand families are being aid off, or perhaps held at an Undisclosed Location. Take you pick.
This should be fairly easy to settle, if people who lost a relative in Iraq find he or she is not in the official list, then that would lend credence to the claim.
Of course, people have to first be aware of the possibility this deception has occurred. I think and hope this type of thing would pick up steam, if indeed people start finding that their loved ones are not on the official list.
Well, the claim seems to be that anyone who is wounded in Iraq but dies in a hospital elsewhere is not counted as an Iraq casualty. I am highly skeptical. I think we would have heard about that by now. There are a lot of people keeping close tabs on the costs of the war in Iraq, and something tells me that such an enormous lie would not have gone unnoticed.
I wanted to send Mr. Rall an email asking for a cite but I noticed this little jewel:
A quick Google search comes up with other pages referring to this “internal Pentagon document” but none that I have seen have a cite for it.
The best source seems to be from a Brian Harring of Domestic Intelligence Reporter. You can read his claims here
OK, OK. Preview tells me I type too slow, and this has already been covered.
I suspect he’s not just the “best” source, but the only source. Everything I’ve found on the subject uses him as their source.
The more I think about this, the more skeptical I become. I think a lot of folks who lost somebody in the war would look at the official list, not so much to verify that he or she was there, but for other emotional reasons, like just to see the person’s name. I haven’t lost a loved one to the war, so this is just speculation though.
It’s an intriguing rumor, but no one’s proved it as true, yet.
See this page for background:
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a1749.htm
Here’s what’s current known fact (i.e., can be backed up with actual reports/cites, not just “the educated rumor” or “The DoD lists currently being very quietly circulated”):
The US military is reporting deaths from OIF at around 1,800.
Reported deaths from other causes throughout the military do not appear to be high enough to account for a “missing” 7,000 dead. How do I know? I asked the military.
They have a web site that lists statistics on US military casualties:
http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/casualty/castop.htm
On it is a PDF document:
http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/casualty/Death_Rates.pdf
It lists all military deaths from 1980 onward, and says how they happened–combat, terrorism (you can see the uptick from when the Beirut marine barracks were bombed, for example), homicide, suicide, etc.
But, until recently (more in a moment), it stopped in 2002. For 2003 on, the DOD only listed (in separate documents) how many people died in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. No more total deaths. No more deaths from other operations, suicides, accidents, etc.
So I wrote to the DOD.
They responded:
Which is why that PDF link above now includes 2003 and 2004. You can see the totals there for yourself.
So, to sum up:
Is the US concealing Iraq combat deaths? Unknown. But there is currently nothing more than rumor to support such a claim.
Are total reported military-wide deaths high enough to account for 7,000 unreported dead? No.
So, while it is possible that those dying en route to/in Germany are not being listed as combat deaths, they also aren’t being listed anywhere else. They are not merely being “reassigned” to another column in the total casualties chart. So the claim that they are not being listed as combat deaths in Iraq but are being listed somewhere else (since they died somewhere else) is false. If such a coverup about the number of combat deaths is indeed occurring, then it is total, and the numbers are being hidden completely, not reassigned, and there would seem to be no reason why the perpetrators should restrict themselves to those who died outside of Iraq–they could just as well undercount those who died on Iraqi soil, too.
But, again, there is no real evidence of any such undercounting or coverup. Until someone comes up with an actual document proving it, or does a census of military dead that doesn’t match up with DOD figures, it is all just a rumor.
For anyone else who was wondering, CNN claims 1,830 Americans dead and 13,769 wounded. Plenty, in my book. 
Thank you all for your input. At least now I have an idea of what he’s on about.
Umm…duh
Tapioca Dextrin’s remark aside, I doubt this matter is a dead issue, PatriotX.
Be patient.
I’m sure whether or not it has any substance to it, it’ll come up again. I wasn’t even askig if there “was something to it.” I just wondered where Rall had gotten that idea. I hadn’t heard of it. And my initial Googling came up with unrelated results. I rightly assumed that someone here had already heard of it. What’re the odds of Rall getting at something before a Doper?
I’m confused.
How exactly would the Pentagon cover up these deaths? First of all, it would mean thousands of dead soldiers. Do they cover up that these soldiers died? Obvously that’s impossible, soldiers have families and buddies, they can’t just disappear soldiers.
So they have to pretend that the soldiers died, but didn’t die in Iraq. How can they keep that secret? If a soldier is deployed to Iraq it certainly isn’t secret. How can they trick the soldier’s family into believing he died in a training accident in Germany when last they knew he was in Fallujah? It isn’t just as simple as changing the number 9000 to 1500 on a report, you’d have to falsify the numbers the reports are based on, which means changing the official cause of death for each death. You can do that for a small number of deaths for people on special operations missions, especially if their special forces buddies see the need to keep quiet about what really happened in the name of national security, but thousands of times? For regular soldiers? Are you keeping this a secret from the press, but not the soldiers and families? How exactly does this work?
You’ve got a dead body of a soldier that was deployed to Iraq, and you have to explain it. You can sweep a dozen or so under the carpet, but how can you do that with thousands?
I don’t think it is that difficult. The cause of death is irrelevant, it is just creative accounting, Pfc. John Doe is mortally injured in Fallujah, flown to Germany and dies there. Family is informed he died courageously from enemy fire, but the death accountants simply fail to count him in the official death statistics for Iraq. Until a comparison is made between the official list of Iraq war dead by those who lost family members, the discrepancy could lay unnoticed for years.
They’re being held at the same facility where they offloaded the passengers from flights AA 11, AA 77, UA 93 and UA 175 before the empty planes were re-launched and flown by remote control into the WTC and elsewhere.
Well, it makes just as much sense, in any case. :rolleyes:
How can you come to that number even with the total number of deaths from any cause in any place is less then the 9000 used in the comic world?
That is part of the discrepancy in the death accounting. For purposes of reporting total deaths, these fatalities have disappeared; they appear nowhere. I’m not saying it is confirmed, just that it is possible and should be investigated.
And I will add this report that has them by State with the added bonus of being updated July 16th 2005
My point is that if someone in my family or a friend was KIA and I knew they where in Iraq and they where not on a list such as this Link I would be raising some stink somewhere, and as of yet I could not find a single source complaining of that let alone 7,000.
I will not say its not possible some Iraq deaths are not reported as such and you can find some discrepancy in some of the reports, but in no way can 7000 soldiers be KIA without any paperwork being found.
I don’t think so. In the papers every day they have a listing of the official DoD reported deaths, which show that Pfc. John Doe, of the X Division, of Town, State was killed in action. These reports are compiled, with casualties listed by name, at websites like these.
I would imagine that if there were thousands of Pfc. Does killed in Iraq but not listed in the reports and compilation, there would be some friend or relative who would inquire about why their casualty was not listed, and raise holy hell if there was such an obvious deception.