Pentagon's/VA's two sets of numbers. As many as 50,000 wounded.

[Dover]

Yet the story of the US wounded reveals yet another deception by the Bush administration, masking monumental miscalculations that will haunt generations to come. Thanks to the work of a Harvard professor and former Clinton administration economist named Linda Bilmes, and some other hard-working academics, we have discovered that the administration has been putting out two entirely separate and conflicting sets of numbers of those wounded in the wars...

...Let me pause to explain those deceptive figures. Look at the latest official toll of US fatalities and wounded in the media, and you will see something like 3,160 dead and 23,785 wounded (that "includes 13,250 personnel who returned to duty within 72 hours", the Washington Post told us helpfully on 4 March). From this, you might assume that only 11,000 or so troops, in effect, have been wounded in Iraq. But Bilmes discovered that the Bush administration was keeping two separate sets of statistics of those wounded: one (like the above) issued by the Pentagon and therefore used by the media, and the other by the Department of Veterans Affairs - a government department autonomous from the Pentagon. At the beginning of this year, the Pentagon was putting out a figure of roughly 23,000 wounded, but the VA was quietly saying that more than 50,000 had, in fact, been wounded.

What Bilmes had discovered was that the tally of US fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan included the outcome of "non-hostile actions", most commonly vehicle accidents. But the Pentagon's statistics of the wounded did not. Even troops incapacitated for life in Iraq or Afghanistan - but not in "hostile situations" - were not being counted, although they will require exactly the same kind of medical care back home as soldiers similarly wounded in battle.

Macabee at DailyKOS: Bilmes discovered that on 10 January the number of wounded listed on at the Veterans Administration dropped from 50,508 to 21,649. Bilmes says it’s tin-foil hat time. The outrageous lies they tell, the information they manipulate happens all under the radar, and completely unreported by a compliant and worthless mainstram press.



http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/3/12/18949/0652

[sam sarrha]

1. it much worse than that.. there are 50,000 head injuries alone

[luckyleftyme2]

2. the math

liars figure,and figures lie or vice versa