Sunday, July 03, 2005
9000 U.S. troop deaths -- rumor or fact?
The "official" Iraq U.S. troop death toll may be a wild underestimate, according to this article. It reports
We have received copies of manifests from the MATS that show far more bodies shipped into Dover AFP than are reported officially. The educated rumor is that the actual death toll is in excess of 7,000 . . . The DoD lists currently being very quietly circulated indicate almost 9,000 dead . . .snip
The government gets away with these huge lies because they claim, falsely, that only soldiers actually killed on the ground in Iraq are reported. The dying and critically wounded are listed as en route to military hospitals outside of the country and not reported on the daily postings. Anyone who dies just as the transport takes off from the Baghdad airport is not listed and neither are those who die in the US military hospitals.I am skeptical of this rumor, but note, as this article in Halifax Live, on the alleged number fudging, says,
. . . if a government has been caught in a major lie which led to a major war, how does one know whether or not they're still lying in a concerted effort to maintain said war?There's nothing in Snopes on this. It remains a rumor. But as our secretary of defense says, Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; I'd like to see some follow-up, pro or con.
Comments:
David. Pat K and her people at http://icasualties.org/oif/Methodology.aspx have talked about this.
The link is to their methodology, and the site is pretty well distributed among military families.
Pat has also said that they get pulled up within hours if there is so much as a pip missing from somebody's rank, she doesn't believe that 9,000 or any other large number could go missing with that kind of scrutiny.
Cheers
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The link is to their methodology, and the site is pretty well distributed among military families.
Pat has also said that they get pulled up within hours if there is so much as a pip missing from somebody's rank, she doesn't believe that 9,000 or any other large number could go missing with that kind of scrutiny.
Cheers
