Someone trying to make something up will try to do a lot of things including amending pdf files. Notice: I did not even know you could amend a PDF without adobe but there are plenty of freeware/shareware programs that do just that!
I was able to throw some crap into one of the pdf’s in seconds.
The first footnote is also truncated in the 0304.pdf. It ends in a “,”.
Even stranger:
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/0604.pdf
GS and DL share the colors but differ in the way the footnotes are boxed
TBR and DL share the way the footnotes are boxed but differ in color.
Which, if any, are forgeries?
Also truncated on the DefenseLink site
And checking again, the footnotes in the GS site differ from those on the DL site in content, wheras the TBR agrees with the DL site in content:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/milit...20040630cas.pdf
http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/0604.pdf
What is going on?
They also differ on dates. Sometimes when I do reports, I change something to
A: Make it look nicer or
B: Make it quicker for me to do.
So maybe they did the report different on different days depending on who was working on the report.
But that would also apply to the discrepancy between TBR and DL which ravenman claimed as proof of a forgery by TBR.
All I am saying is it is too easy to “make” up and amend a pdf for it to be a legitimate. You cannot validate it, you can look around and compare them. If thousands of “mercs” are dying in Iraq I still fail to see how that would not get out, from family or friends or just mud slingers.
I could just as easily say this http://rapidshare.de/files/3819981/0304.pdf.html
was a legitimate copy and fool at least one person. If someone wants to believe something enough they will clutch to anything no matter how slippery the evidence is.
I’m not really following what you mean by “GS” and “DL.”
But the two DOD reports that you linked to, and noted that they had different boxes in the footnotes, were reports that were produced a year and a half apart. As I said in my previous post, DOD started using a new format for footnotes on June 2, 2005.
Footnotes on DOD reports before June 2, 2005, had no boxes and the text of the footnotes referred to the casualties being exclusive from Operation Enduring Freedom.
Footnotes on DOD reports after June 2, 2005, had boxes and specific references to a list of Gulf states and other countries.
However, the bogus “supplemental report” linked to on the blog’s site has boxes and references to specific countries, so it follows the post-6/2/05 footnote convention, but the “supplemental report” is dated 6/30/04. It does not follow that a genuine “supplemental report,” if one existed, would use a footnote convention in 2004 that would not be adopted for public report for another 11 months. It just doesn’t make sense.
Also, I just noted this. If you look carefully at the boxes in the footnotes of the bogus report and the official DOD report, you’ll notice that the lines are of differing thickness. On the bogus casualty report, the lines on the boxed footnotes are of uniform thickness. On the official reports, the sides and the bottom lines are slightly bolder than the three other horizontal lines.
You can see the same differing thicknesses of these lines on August 5, Aug 4, Aug 3, Aug 2, Aug 1, July 29, July 28, July 27, July 26, July 25, and every other date I have looked at between June 2, 2005, and August 9, 2005 (with the one exception of August 8, which was formatted differently altogether.) Again, these nonuniform thicknesses of the boxes is not evident in the bogus “supplemental report.”
That still does not address why the “Supplemental Report” is not marked as classified. Face it, it is a fabrication, and not a particularly good one.
Hmmm, you maybe right. I smell Karl Rove a la the Rathergate forgeries!
I thought sceptical debunking was the prime goal for a website dedicated to fighting ignorance.
The same “nationally syndicated cartoonist” whose rantings in strips like this one got him dumped from the Washington Post and N.Y. Times.
He should be prime meat for the Guardian, though.
There are enough casualties without trumping up lots more based on venomous conjecture.
Please re-read my threads. I have never said that the TBR lists are counts of US Military deaths. I don’t believe that to be the case.
I am interested in how this information came to be accepted by Ted Rall and what the sources, however doubtful, were.
I would like to know what the additional supports for this were that were claimed by Rall.
I am intrigued about what the status of the documents hidden on the TBR site (the Supplemental reports) actully are- is TBR using the military pro forma to do its own calculations of improbably high military deaths, or are these some other form of accounting used by defense?
I am intrigued by the variation between the Defense, GlobalSecurity and TBRNews presentations of documents.
I note that the term ‘Supplemental Report’ is widely used in the Military and Government (try Googling it).
It would be good to confirm what the true status of the TBR forms is- are they internal TBR ‘recounts’ using questionable information or do they have an official source. Is there a reason why someone might leak falsified documents to TBR. Has TBR just falsified documents and hidden them on their website. What are the motivations of the various people involved?
None of those questions has really been answered, we only have suppositions from differing viewpoints.
I am aware that some people feel so strongly about this that the heat of the matter is causing a little xenophobic fervor.
I suspect that it may take a little more time for further information to come out that will to some extent answer those questions. We shall see.
This needs to be repeated for the conspiracy theory-minded.
We have lots of news media in the United States. They regularly report Iraq-related casualties of all types, military and civilian. This is news. Some sources (i.e. the New York Times) have printed summaries of all casualties including names of the dead.
Now if even a few names were left off those lists (due to an error by the Times, a Pentagon plot or death rays from Mars), how long would it take for relatives and friends of the dead to raise questions about why their loved ones were excluded? If the numbers of “concealed” deaths were up in the thousands, can you imagine the uproar that would have been heard long ago?
This should be obvious even to anyone with a massive agenda about Evils of the Guvmint, and will soon find its final Snopesian resting place, along with classics like the Clinton Cocaine-Dealing Empire and the Big Pharma Vaccination Plot.
This is also where the local media comes in. If someone from CT dies in Iraq, it’s headline news here. Not anonymous numbers in any way.
I’ve met Ted Rall a couple of times, and I’ve heard him speak, as well, and I gotta say: he’s a class act, and his retraction proves it. When you’re mistaken, it’s difficult to come forward and take responsibility for a mistake. This bolsters the integrity of his work. Finding the truth is always a messy business, so beware of anyone who offers to hand you the truth on a nice, neat, easy-to-digest platter, and who never seems to be wrong. They’re probably full of shit.
If you ever get a chance to see Rall speak, do it. He’s good. Particularly when it comes to central Asia.
I read your message.
I feel like I’m in a JFK conspricy thread…. Soilders don’t die all by themselves. They have other personnel around them. Others in their company, medical folks, both Officer and Enlisted around them. How many who knows. Lets say 4 other Soilders know about this one guy getting wounded. 4 X 9,000 equals 36,000 other people that know this guy (or gal) was seriously wounded in country. They will know if they died and why. How do you keep these 36,000 guys quiet, plus their families, plus their friends? Bottom line is you can’t. It’s ridiculous to think that you can. It continues to amaze me at the lengths people will go to portray military folks, as lying, scheming scumbags.
Sorry. I can’t seem to find that story.
(No, really, that’s the message I got when I clicked on that link.)
It’s probably now this story:
That’s the one.