I was unaware the possibility of a discrepancy myself until today. While many may check the list, many may not. If Brian Harring or others follow up on this and bring it to the attention of survivor families, we may well see the reports of discrepancy increase. Or not; it just bears looking into before dismissing it out of hand. His claim of documentation from Dover that was at odds with the official number was what peaked my interest. If that turns out to be a fabrication, the validity of his claims would be diminished in my eyes.
Just as two counterexamples, here are official DoD press releases announcing the deaths of two Marines who were wounded in Iraq but died of their wounds after being evacuted to medical facilities in the U.S.:
Staff Sgt. Chad J. Simon
Cpl. Antonio Mendoza
Here’s a case from the CNN site that lends further doubt to the Rall claim:
Here we have an explicit case in which someone died stateside from wounds received in Iraq, and is listed among the war dead.
Don’t your local papers carry obituaries for soldiers with local ties? The obituary writers try to get their facts straight, they get information from the military itself. If the paper suddenly started printing stories like, “PfC Doe was killed in a tragic helicopter training exercise in Germany”, don’t you think the parents are going to call in and complain that PfC Doe was actually in Iraq?
And that the number of mysterious training accidents would be gigantic? How do you keep that secret? Do you think some DoD spokesman just makes up a number on the spot when they provide casualty lists? The idea that they could keep this secret “for years” is just ludicrous. When PfC Doe comes home in a box, his parents and local paper are sometimes going to look up his records, if they don’t claim he died in Iraq, what’s going to happen? Haven’t you seen those lists of every soldier killed in Iraq? If my son had been killed in Iraq, don’t you think might look on that list? What will I do if my son isn’t on the list? If thousands of people aren’t on the list?
It would be pretty easy to cover up the actual cause of death for a dozen or so soldiers if they died in embarrassing circumstances, people really do die in training accidents, they die of friendly fire and the military calls it enemy fire. But they can’t cover up the dead bodies.
Give me the names of a few hundred soldiers that died in Iraq but aren’t listed in official military records as having died in Iraq. It can’t be done. Yet it is claimed that thousands of dead soldiers have disappeared. It would be trivial in that case to come up with the names of a few dozen confirmed disappeared soldiers. Where are they? Where are their families? Where are the local reporters?
Here is a list of more who died after being evacuated, but in light of the fact that over 6,600 have been official reported as wounded and not returned to duty, this list of 61 is conspicuously short. Our doctors are good, but are they *that * good?
It is not necessary to fabricate a cover story to simply falsely report a numeric total.
It hasn’t been done. Maybe it can’t be done. Doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Given the low level of candor this administration has sunk to in this conflict, I am not inclined to simply shut this case without a little more investigation. A lot of people used the same arguments you are making here before the war to convince me there were WMD’s.
The thing is, you’re imaging that the Pentagon just provides a raw number. “Oh, yeah, 1634 guys died in Iraq”. But they don’t do that. They provide a list of names. “PfC Doe died 04/04/05 in Iraq. Cpl Jones. Pvt Smith. Sgt Roe”, and on and on for hundreds of names. It isn’t like the total casualty figures are uncheckable, untraceable, unsourceable.
I’m not claiming that the Pentagon never tries to cover up embarrassing incidents, look at how they tried to cover up that Pat Tillman died of friendly fire. But you can’t cover up the dead bodies of thousands of servicemen just by not counting them.
That’s what I am counting on; I am just less willing to declare all the data completely checked, traced and sourced as you are.
We should have pretty good hospital services in Iraq by now, and you don’t really want to fly someone who’s likely to die to another country if you don’t need to. Especially to Germany, which is not exactly next door.
As to those 61, you can also see them on this page on the DOD website. Besides their names it says “(from wounds sustained in Iraq)”.
The names printed in the media show service, rank, name, age, home, date, cause of death, and you almost always see an immediate cause of death somewhere in Iraq. (Here’s an exception, event on June 6, death on August 5.)
Since the military state (cite: see above) that they do not give our newspapers deaths that occur after evacuation, the apparent cost is minimized to the voters, and the post-evacuation numbers referred to above look as if there may be ‘nice’ use of definitions to minimize visible cost. 61 sounds very low. You can tell I have little confidence in this Administration, which is far from forthcoming about this kind of cost.
Photographs of coffins draped in flags are not something shameful to the families, or an invasion of privacy, but an acknowledgement of the ultimate sacrifice and something I would be bitterly proud of.
OK, here’s the thing. If there were large numbers of unreported deaths, it would only take a committed activist a few hours to prove it. Every week local papers print obituaries of servicepeople killed in Iraq. If those deaths aren’t reported on the official list it would be trivial to find that out.
So here’s my challenge. Go to your local newspaper and get a list of 20-30 servicepeople reported as killed in Iraq. Check to see whether those names are listed on the official death toll.
If the actual number of deaths were around 9000, that would mean that only 1 death in 4 is counted. That would mean that out of 20 dead servicepeople, you should be able to find 15 that aren’t listed on the official tally. All it would take is a few hours of sluething. If you aren’t willing to spend a few hours doing crosschecks and come up with a list of a dozen dead soldiers swept under the rug by the Pentagon, I submit you aren’t very interested in this underreporting charge. If the charge is right, only a few hours work will confirm it, and you’ll have a scoop you can trumpet from the rooftops and possibly get Bush impeached, or at least crush his approval ratings down to single digits. Once you’ve got a few dozen unreported deaths confirmed, a little more digging should turn up hundreds. If the story is incorrect, you’ve only wasted a few hours.
So which is it? Is the story plausible enough to risk wasting a few hours of your time to confirm it? If it isn’t worth wasting a few hours of your time, then I submit that you aren’t really interested in the truth of the story, you just want a chance to spread a juicy rumor. Again, which is it?
One or the other, huh? Two choices, that’s all you can come up with, so I have to choose now, dammit?
** Lemur866**, meet Bifurcation; Bifurcation, Lemur866.
News out of Iran today had this to say to the U.S. %#@^&*#@ YOU!!
If you want our bombs or anything else, we’ll give it to you detonator first…
I don’t think they are going to cooperate, but then, why should they? The process of elimination in light of evident science and technology would certainly lead many of their scientific community to understand Uranium enrichment. (who says evolution is dead?) This administration miscalculated many areas and it is hard to make amends when you’re dropping payload on the “little children.” (I don’t think Rummy anticipated this situation) and now with North Korea taking a defiant stand on giving up anything, well, it looks like we got ourselves an old fashion standoff. Of Course, launching against the U.S. could prove fatal for either nation. Knowing this is possibly the only reason we are not lobbing weapons at one another.
I say, "Let’s get it on! Move close to a major target set by the enemy’s coordinates and LET’S GO NUCLEAR!!!
Look, you do what you like. All I’m saying is that if over half the servicemen killed in Iraq aren’t listed in the official death tally, but yet are listed as killed in Iraq in newspapers all over the United States, someone who mistrusts the Pentagon could come up with the evidence in a few hours.
I believe it would be extremely easy to come up with the evidence, but it would require getting your hands dirty with searching the web for a few hours. If you or some other activist aren’t willing to do that to expose the dastardly tricks of the Bush administration, what can I do about it? Or you could explain why the data would be harder to collect than I believe. If it would be harder, explain why.
Since you haven’t come up with the evidence I feel free to draw my own conclusions from that. If you don’t like it, prove me wrong.
Which is what you would have done regardless of what I did.
On the second site, there’s a (short) list of “soldiers who have died of wounds outside of Irak”.
Wait, I don’t think that’s true, I’m certainly open to new evidence. If you came up with a list of 20-30 names of servicemen who were said to have died in Iraq in their local paper’s obituaries, yet the names aren’t listed on the official Pentagon tally, I’d be convinced.
I’m trying to point out that exposing this would be very very easy. You don’t have to wait for families to come forward, you don’t have to go to Iraq and audit hospital records, you don’t have to wait for a whistleblower, you don’t have to wait for a leaked Pentagon memorandum. You just have to look up local obituaries and compare the official list.
Why can’t you–or someone else who doubts the official version of the truth–do this?
I know that you haven’t said that you’re sure this is happening, only that we can’t take the Pentagon’s word, and they should be subjected to heightened scrutiny due to their obvious incentives to distort the truth. I agree completely. Check the facts. It is my contention that checking these facts would be a trivial exercise, the kind of thing reporters do every day. And if the mainstream media won’t do the job, then independent media and activist groups will have to do it for them. But this job would be so easy, one guy with an internet connection could do some preliminary investigation in a few hours.
I don’t think the story is at all credible. You don’t think it’s likely, but you’d like the story investigated anyway. So investigate it. If you can’t investigate it, explain why. If you can’t explain why, explain why you can’t explain. You’ve already spent an hour or so typing on this message board about the topic, so it’s clear you’ve got some interest in the question. Why won’t you do some research on your own? I can’t assign you a research project of course…but still…
But I would not of, if you could show even an inkling of misconduct with the death count. I did more searching today and could not find anything beyond the normal tin foil conventions.
I even did a local newspaper search with the names of the 13 KIA from around here, and cross referenced it with the “official” reports, they all matched up. I then dug a little deeper with the help of Google and found the only websites purporting to show any amounts of KIA near that number where the “Insurgents” supposedly post the accomplishments they made.
Most seemLink clearly delusional, but the numbers they portray may be in the range your looking for.
Billdo’s link makes this pretty easy. Here are casualties listed by state.
http://icasualties.org/oif/ByState.aspx
Find your local paper and see if the casualties listed in your local paper for your state are listed on the website. If not, I’ll admit I was wrong and write a letter to my congressman and senator and local paper recommending a full investigation.
Obviously, I can’t prove that the Pentagon isn’t hiding Iraq deaths by this method, but it would be pretty easy to prove they were.
But I am curious about the alleged differences between the Dover manifest and the official count. That, I have no access to, and neither do you. If no further information is forthcoming, I will chalk it up to fringe raving. But just because I don’t choose to devote all my available resources to dotting i’s and crossing t’s in the way you demand, doesn’t mean I can’t continue to consider alternatives until such time as I decide the conclusion no longer jibes with the known facts.
So why can’t you accept that? I’m not saying you are wrong, but I 'll be damned if I’ll feel obligated to say you are right just because you stamp your foot.