Hi zacchaeus, welcome to the SDMB.
This is the General Questions forum, and your comments are out of line for this forum. Please do not repeat this.
Thank you.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
I have been doing some digging on the tbrnews site.
There are a series of “Supplemental Reports” which share the same Pro Forma as the defence link site:
http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:k2u-H5o2Xc0J:www.tbrnews.org/Archives/0903.pdf+site:www.tbrnews.org+OEF&hl=en
Also available are statistics at the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count at:
which reflect the Defense Department figures and seem to be based on those.
A search for all such sites using Google gives Statistics for Deaths and Injuries for Iraq and Afghanistan. The tbr site runs well ahead of the Defenselink site and the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, so they have been measuring something- the questionsis what.
I cannot find DD figures before April 2004, nor TBR figures after that date but I have interpolated from the ICCC site.
Just listing Total Deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom since Mar 19 2003:
TBR Defenselink ICCC
April 30 2003 393
June 30 610
July 31 677
Aug 31 823
Sep 30 1120
Nov 30 1803
Dec 31 2374
Dec 31 486
Jan 31 2004 2997
Feb 28 3354
Mar 31 3647
Apr 13 681
Apr 26 715
Apr 30 734
May 28 802
Jun 30 862
Jul 2 860
Aug 4 919
Aug 27 971
Sep 8 1005
Aug 4 c9000
Aug 9 2005 1835
Aug 9 1837
So, what do TBR seem to be measuring? I find it difficult to believe that not only have they fabricated a total of 9000 deaths to date, but also that they have been collecting some sort of supportive statistics on a month by month basis. What are they counting?
That table didn’t work. Here’s a simple list
Just listing Total Deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom since Mar 19 2003:
April 30 2003 393TBR
June 30 610TBR
July 31 677TBR
Aug 31 823TBR
Sep 30 1120TBR
Nov 30 1803TBR
Dec 31 2374TBR
Dec 31 486ICCC
Jan 31 2004 2997TBR
Feb 28 3354TBR
Mar 31 3647TBR
Apr 13 681DD
Apr 26 715DD
Apr 30 734DD
May 28 802DD
Jun 30 862ICCC
Jul 2 860DD
Aug 4 919DD
Aug 27 971DD
Sep 8 1005DD
Aug 4 c9000TBR
Aug 9 2005 1835DD
Aug 9 1837ICCC
The only thing I can think of is that the 9000 people are the total number of deaths for everyone, including Iraqi civilians and maybe even insurgents.
If you read the comments on the blog muttrox links to, there are several links that debunk the idea.
Look, the most likely explanation is that someone made up the 9000 number, and all the other references are to that original made-up number, or references to references. Anyway, it doesn’t matter so much what the source for the 9000 number is, what matters is whether it is accurate or not.
Can we take it as given that the individual deaths can’t be covered up, soldiers have families that have to be told that their relative is dead. A small number of soldiers can be disappeared, but not thousands. The reason for that death can be covered up to an extent, but simply assigning the cause of death to something else will only work if the number of miscounted deaths are small relative to ordinary deaths. So if you suddenly have thousands of soldiers dying in helicopter accidents during training that’s a gigantic blip. You can’t publish those figures. So the deaths have to be simply not reported.
I don’t think it would take much research to discover soldiers with obituaries in the newspapers but that aren’t listed on the official tally IF there were thousands of extra deaths not included in the official tally. If the death total were actually around 9000, that means that the tally is of by a factor of 4, which means that any given dead soldier has only a 1 in 4 chance of being included on the list. Given that, it would be very easy to find dozens of dead soldiers not on the list. It seems to me that every death, even deaths claimed to be from other causes, could be investigated this way.
If we suddenly have thousands of soldiers dying every year in training accidents but before there were only dozens that would be easy to uncover. If there are thousands of dead soldiers with obituaries in the local papers that aren’t listed in official death tolls, that would be easy to uncover. We might need access to official documents to prove that the Pentagon death toll is accurate, but not to prove it is inaccurate.
This page:
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a1753.htm
refers to “Supplemental Lists”:
“Mr. Lusk:
…
We have had access to the so-called ‘Supplemental Lists’ that list the number of the actual dead and injured in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We also have located, and published, complete with all the official headings, a report from the Pentagon that between March of 2002 when the conflict with Iraq began, to date, that over 25,000 seriously wounded US soldiers were evacuated to the US military facility at Landesstuhl in Germany and Walter Reed military hospital in the United States. …”
The pdf files on the TBR site that I referred to above are shown as Supplemental Report. The forms from the Department of Defense are of the same form but do not have the Super Title “Supplemental Report”. Are these TBR documents actually copies of the Defense documents, or are they the result of calculations by the author?
I note that the early pdfs from the Defense site have the footnote:
“OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM includes casualties that occurred in Iraq, but could include other countries to include Germany and the United States. These casualties are mutually exclusive of OEF.” (Taken from apr 13, 2004 report, but also covering Apr 26, Apr 30, Apr 28, May 28, Jul 2 Aug 4, Aug 27 and Sep 8 2004)
The equivalent note from the Aug 9, 2005 report from the Defense site states:
“OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM includes casualties that occurred on or after March 19, 2003 in the Arabian Sea, Bahrain, Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Oman, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Persian Gulf, Qatar, Red Sea.”
Now, interestingly, the equivalent footnote on ALL the TBR ‘Supplemental Reports’ between Apr 30, 2003 and March 31, 2004 is the latter quote above.
What is going on?
Why can I find stuff from Defense after April 2004 and stuff from TBR before that date? Why has the Defense footnote changed by this month?
One wonders how the government, which has successfully managed to keep this story out of the hands of every single media outlet in the world, not to mention the relatives and friends of the dead soldiers, let this story fall to an obscure dubious blog.
Unless All the news outlets are part of the con too!! :eek:
Here’s a fairly sensible page from the Daily Kos, who are certainly no fans of the war.
It’s all very well posting repeated sceptical debunking posts, but there is still something odd here. Perhaps if we concentrated on discrepancies and asked what has led a nationally syndicated cartoonist to make this allegation, whether it is founded or unfounded, it would be more in keeping with ‘General Questions’ and might lead to enlightenment rather than point scoring.
There’s nothing odd here at all. A cranky vaguely anti-semitic blog has posted an allegation without any evidence, and has typed up a list of numbers which have no basis in fact. This has been picked up unquestioningly by Ted Rall, a man who makes our late Reeder seem like a loyal RNC staffer by comparison.
There is simply no way the pentagon or anyone else could have kept some 7000 U.S. deaths hidden from everyone. The allegations on TBR of secret mass graves of U.S. soldiers surely isn’t worth the trouble to debunk.
Not one showing of some discrepancy with even 20 KIA names not reported let alone 7K of them.
Thats like asking why people fell for the fake CNN website Link Its because some people believe anything they read.
And this is from Mr. Rall himself
The dailykos site above has a discussion which suggests that the TBR figures may include people directly contracted to the US military as workers, drivers, mercenaries etc.
Now suppose that what we have is two sets of casualty lists- one for serving military and one for military plus camp followers as above. So there is a main list and a ‘Supplemental Report’. The main list is for public consumption, the ‘Supplemental Report’ might be less public- too embarrassing to admit and collect stats on the contractors and mercenaries being killed and injured, but a necessity to provide medical help and to record battle losses.
Now suppose TBR found these ‘Supplemental Reports’ or had them leaked to them, but do not know or believe that they refer to non US non military casualties?
Is that a possible explanation?
Of course not. Just as medicine has advanced since the Vietnam war, so too has the pentagon’s press-savvy. 
Its a possible explaination but that too would be highly suspect, as the numbers right now are in the hundreds, not saying it couldn’t be in the thousands. But thats still 7000 screaming families not making a peep.
I’m not talking about contractors, I’m talking about ‘Gray Forces’- people taken on locally or bought in to do work without too much ceremony or reporting- including the rumors of mercenaries being used.
I have been reviewing those documents again and I would like to post two for comparison, one from the TBR site for Mar 31, 2004 and one from DefenseLink for Aug 9, 2005:
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/0304.pdf
They are so alike in form that it is quite possible that this is not recounting by TBR (who would try to amend a pdf file?) but may in fact be a Supplemental Report issued by the Department of Defense that covers more than just US Military as such who have been killed or injured.
Note that both agree on lives lost and casualties in the Combat Operations phase, but diverge after that.
It is at least possible that after the ‘hot’ war, more ‘Gray Forces’ were brought in and hence two lists developed- one for US Military as such and one headed ‘Supplemental Report’ which covered other non-US forces deployed.
Aside from the overall tinfoil hat flavour of the claims, I find the number of soldiers who are claimed to have died in hospitals in Germany and the US to be suspiciously high as a ratio to the number of deaths in Iraq itself. This might be a reasonable number for WW1 or WW2, but the almost universal use of effective body armour (eliminating or reducing many potentially fatal torso and head wounds) combined with rapid evacuation to well-equipped medical facilities and modern medical advances has had the effect of dramatically changing the casualty ratios in Iraq over earlier wars.
I am not a doctor, but my understanding is that any wound that is not immediately fatal (i.e. before or during evacuation) is very unlikely to result in death. This effect began to be noticable during Vietnam as a result of helicopter evacuation and earlier versions of body armour, and is very noticeable in all military operations in the last couple of decades.
In response to the question Pjen raised about the so called “Supplemental Reports,” those reports posted on the blog are obvious forgeries.
Compare this “Supplemental Report” (which claims that 4,500 plus troops had been killed in Iraq up to 6/30/04) to this official DOD report (which has been reposted on a respected website that deals with military matters), on the same date, 6/30/04.
If you look at them for two seconds you’ll notice several things. First, the yellow color is much brighter on the forged – er, the one posted on the blog. Second, there’s no classification stamped on the pages, and nothing – I mean NOTHING – is kept secret in the government without it being meticulously noted exactly which pages/paragraphs/figures are classified and which are not. (And yes, I DO have a security clearance.) Third, as Pjen has stated, the footnotes do not match up. The footnote used on the forged copy, however, matches with the footnotes that began appearing on DOD reports on June 2, 2005.
Cite: report from June 1, 2005
Cite: report from June 2, 2005. Notice the boxes and the different wording in the footnotes.
Fourthly, a question to ponder: if the Pentagon is willing to deflate the post-war death count by 6 or 7 times the “actual” amount, why do the casualties during major combat operations on both the bogus “Supplemental Report” and the official DOD report match exactly? Does anyone actually believe that the Pentagon was willing to report the number of wartime casualties accurately before May 1, 2003, but then, starting on May 2, they immediately began covering up a huge number of secret military deaths? I would expect that if the powers that be were to lie about the number of casualties during the postwar occupation, they would also lie about the number of casualties during the invasion.
Finally, the whole allegation has a McCarthyistic tactic to it. “There are 6,000 communists in the State Department – er, I mean, Americans who have been killed secretly in Iraq, and I have secret documents that proove it! One of these days, I’m going to name names, but I’m still alphabetizing the lists, so take my word for it.”
This story is made out of whole cloth, period.
I thought the official number of soldiers who died of wounds after evacuation to Germany or the US was 61? 61 out of 1700 combat deaths doesn’t seem unreasonbable to me, especially with iirc something on the order of 15000 wounded.
I agree that nowadays if a soldier survives to get to a hospital he’s very very likely to recover. But things like burns over a large % of the body are very hard to treat. And weren’t people complaining earlier that the number was waaaay to low? That suggests that our intuition about the “right” ratio of deaths to casualties to deaths in hospitals probably isn’t usually accurate unless we have some actual firsthand knowledge.
It’s easy. The Pentagon only lists soldiers who have pesky nosey families. The unmarried orphan soldiers (of which there are plenty in light of the military’s genetic cloning program, in operation since the fifties) disappear without a trace.