Pentagon Covering up 10s of 1,000s of US Casualties In Official Reports

[AtomicKitten]

Pentagon Covering Up Tens of Thousands of U.S. Casualties In Official Reports
http://www.thinkprogress.org/

Seven Members of Congress issued a letter this week charging that the Pentagon is systematically “under-reporting casualties in Iraq by only reporting non-fatal casualties incurred in combat.” They asked for a full accounting of the accurate numbers.

Their letter cited a CBS News report:

"The Pentagon declined to be interviewed, instead sending a letter that contained information not included in published casualty reports. “More than 15,000 troops with so-called ‘non-battle’ injuries and diseases have been evacuated from Iraq,” wrote the Department of Defense. John Pike, Director of GlobalSecurity.org told 60 Minutes in that segment that this uncounted casualty figure “would have to be somewhere in the ballpark of over 20, maybe 30,000.”"

But that CBS report came in November 2004. Today, more than a year later, those numbers have risen significantly. This morning, Salon.com published details of an October ‘05 Veterans Affairs report showing that 119,247 off-duty Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are receiving health care from the V.A.

"The statistics seem to show that a lot of those health problems are war-related. For example, nearly 37,000 have mental disorders, including nearly 16,000 who have been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. Over 46,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan receiving benefits from the V.A. have musculoskeletal problems. These are all veterans who within the last four years were considered by the military to be mentally and physically fit enough to fight."

These men and women have suffered injuries that will impact them for the rest of their lives. The Bush calculation: better to have higher Iraq approval numbers than recognize their sacrifices.

[RoyGBiv]

1. Confirms what my eyes are telling me ...

The official casualty count is somewhere around 15,000, IIRC. Within the last 6-8 months, however, I have started encountering wounded (some seriously, some not) Iraqi veterans on a regular basis -- at least one a week -- and it's not the same people. Since I live and encounter these people in one city with a population of around half a million total and do not spend my day looking for these individuals, nor do I work in a place that would draw an inordinate number of them, statistically, this has never added up.

The ~120,000 figure gets closer to making sense. I wonder, though, how many are not receiving health care from the VA.

[bananas]

2. direct link to article

http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/10/casualty-cover-up/

[leveymg]

3. As the Generals say, Bush is "running the wheels off" the Army

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,81710,00.html
General: Few Options in Iraq
Atlanta Journal Constitution | December 01, 2005

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran who was one of the top commanders in the first Gulf War, said Wednesday in Atlanta that the U.S. military is "in a race against time" to train its Iraqi replacements before running short of Soldiers and Marines next summer.

"The wheels start falling off the Army and Marine Corps next summer," McCaffrey said. "We can't sustain the current deployment cycle beyond that without changing the law."

McCaffrey said the United States has little alternative to reducing the number of troops in Iraq, since it is also quickly running out of Reserve and National Guard forces to send.

SNIP

Asia Times
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE25Ak02.html
The wheels come off
By Jim Lobe
May 25, 2004

WASHINGTON - It was just last Thursday that US President George W Bush was reassuring nervous Republican lawmakers that the transition to Iraqi sovereignty was really going very well and that the Iraqis were ready to "take the training wheels off" their bicycle to US-guided democracy. But the Republicans did not seem much reassured by Bush's remarks, particularly when the commander-in-chief, who rarely goes to Capitol Hill, quickly left the caucus room without taking a single question.
Bush also is considered unlikely to take questions on Monday when he is scheduled to deliver a major policy address on US plans for Iraq at the Army War College, the first of a series of speeches designed primarily to dispel the palpably growing notion that it's not so much "the training wheels" that are coming off as it is the wheels that run US policy, whatever that is at the moment.

"I am very hopeful that the president and his administration will articulate precisely what is going to happen as much as they can, day by day, as opposed to a generalization," noted the ever-polite Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar over the weekend, suggesting, perhaps a little too bluntly for his usual manner, that "generalizations" are all that have been forthcoming to date.

The auguries, however, are not good. Consider just a few events of the past week:

It began with the assassination of the then-serving president of the Iraqi Governing Council while his car was lined up to enter the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA) "Green Zone". More than one Iraqi noted that Washington's inability to protect the highest-ranking Iraqi official raised questions as to its ability to protect the yet-to-be-determined government to which the CPA is supposed to hand over some form of sovereignty as of July 1. By mid-week, more photos and some videos of prisoner abuse - although the word "torture" is beginning to catch on a little in the media here - were disclosed to the public eye, as were reports that the Pentagon is investigating many more deaths of detainees in custody - both in Iraq and Afghanistan - than it had let on previously.

Then there was the testimony before Congress of the top military brass in Iraq who, in fact, only seemed slightly less confused about who was in charge at Abu Ghraib prison and what interrogation methods were approved than their superiors at the Pentagon the week before. Meanwhile, new reports suggest that the Judge Adjutant General Corps - the military's lawyers - have been warning everyone who would listen for most of the past two years that the Pentagon's civilian political appointees, Bush's attorney general, and the White House itself have quietly been tearing up the Geneva Conventions.

Then on Thursday, just a few hours before Bush's non-interactive pep rally with his fellow Republicans, joint US-Iraqi forces carried out raids on the home and offices of the Pentagon's erstwhile favorite, Iraqi National Congress (INC) chief Ahmed Chalabi, apparently in search of some files and INC loyalists relating to kidnapping, extortion, bribery and other rather questionable dealings which, if true, suggest that Chalabi may not be the "Iraqi George Washington" that his neo-conservative fans back in Washington have been promoting him as all these years. On Saturday, the news got worse for Chalabi's neo-con champions when Knut Royce, a seasoned journalist at Newsday, reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded, after a review of thousands of intelligence documents, that the INC's Information Collection Program (ICP), which until last week had received millions of dollars in US taxpayer funding in the last decade, has essentially been an Iranian disinformation operation designed to get the US to oust Saddam Hussein and that the ICP's chief, currently on the lam in Tehran, was an Iranian agent.

Ouch!!!

On Sunday, however, the situation did appreciably improve. It began with an unusually frank and clear-eyed appraisal of the situation in the Outlook section of the Washington Post by associate editor and senior correspondent Robert Kaiser titled "A Foreign Policy, Falling Apart" and whose basic message - exceedingly rare for what is essentially a court newspaper - was that the emperor has no clothes. Comparing recent events in Iraq to Vietnam's 1968 Tet offensive which "humiliated an ignorant, over-confident America and destroyed political support for the war in the United States", Kaiser noted that the administration still shows no readiness "to confront what threatens to be a terminal crisis for George W Bush".

Kaiser's article quoted at length the four-star former chief of the US Central Command, General Anthony Zinni, who, as it happened, was the subject of the feature story on the most widely-watched US public-affairs program, CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday night. Zinni, who also has compared the Iraq invasion to Vietnam (particularly the government's "lying" to US soldiers and public about the war), did not pull many punches. Washington's Iraq invasion, he said, was "the wrong war at the wrong time with the wrong strategy".
He accused the Pentagon leadership of "true dereliction" in planning for the war and its aftermath and suggested that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - as well as administration neo-conservatives who supported the war - should resign or be fired. In the latter connection, he named Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary Douglas Feith, National Security staffer Elliott Abrams and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the "architects" of the policy. "I'd definitely resign if I were them. I certainly would expect them to be gone," he said. (He also named as an architect former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, but he resigned from the board earlier this year.)

"And to think that we are going to 'stay the course'," Zinni told 60 Minutes, which noted that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had declined invitations to give a response. "The course is headed over Niagara Falls." (Note to Bush speechwriter: "Stay the course" may not be the best line to use on Monday at the Army War College.)

SNIP

[teryang]

5. McCaffrey said this a year ago

Maybe this is why the number of violent incidents a day in Iraq has increased five times since a year ago.

[burythehatchet]

4. probably another reason why Murtha acted

in a way that surprised so many.

[lebkuchen]

6. The lack of ceremony when the coffins arrive is likely evidence that

there are too many bodies arriving to handle w/such care, and too little money with which to do it.

[Lone_Wolf]

7. Almost every local town around me has seen one of sons die...

in Chimp's misadventure. I don't believe the official casualty rate. I live in a small city in upstate NY, and there have been 7 local soldiers who have died since the war began. Seven out of 2144 seems disproportionatly high. The real death toll is probably at least 3 to 4 times higher than what the war pigs are telling us.