Or so says Harley Sorensen of the SFGate.com.
Common sense tells us we're being lied to again.If you follow the news even loosely, you know that American soldiers and Marines are killed and wounded on a daily basis in Iraq. Just offhand, the number of wounded appears to be three times the number killed. So, roughly -- very roughly -- one can estimate about 1,000 troops wounded in Iraq. It could be twice that, or more. I think it's a lot more.
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But, judging from press reports, none of these wounded ever dies. Maybe I don't know where to look, but I haven't been able to find one single report of a soldier who died later of his or her injuries.Not one. Isn't that curious?
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If you go to the Department of Defense news Web site www.dod.mil/news/, you can find the names of newly killed GIs: 46 reported in the month of October. A few of those casualties died before October. No explanation is given for the delay in reporting.I was unable to find any listings that said someone died recently from injuries or wounds suffered some time ago.
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President George W. Bush has asked Congress for $87 billion to run his war in Iraq, and apparently he's going to get it. But that money is just a small portion of the cost of his war.
The broken bodies and shattered lives of our GIs add immeasurably to that cost.But our government doesn't want us to know about that. We've gradually become a secret society. The military news blackout is not a new phenomenon.
Ooooh, the military's imposed a "blackout" and is trying to keep the number of wounded in Iraq a secret. Nobody must ever know!
There's a problem with this idea. He links to the web site www.dod.mil/news/. You go to the bottom of that page and what do you find under "Current Information"? A link titled "OIF Casualty Update". And if you click on that? Why, it's a pdf listing that super secret exact number of wounded in Iraq as of 10AM yesterday at 2176. (1836 WIA, 340 non-hostile) That's 217.6% higher than Sorensen's "very rough" estimate of 1000.
Those that had been evacuated and then die don't get reported by the DOD? How about Spc. Craig S. Ivory or Lt. Col. Paul W. Kimbrough or Spc. Jarrett B. Thompson or Pfc. David M. Kirchhoff or Spc. Zeferino E. Colunga? Those are the deaths reported after evacuation since August 1 by the very same DOD web site Sorensen linked.
This isn't exactly Pulitzer Prize winning reporting on Sorensen's part. He gets his understanding of how our wounded are treated from a letter from a soldier, he quickly peruses the DOD news website, and gives up after one phone call and one e-mail go unanswered by a military spokesperson. Hell, I probably did more research for this post than he did for his column. This is plain and simple crappy reporting. This shouldn't be a column on the site of a major newspaper; this shouldn't even be a blog post.
If the DOD really is trying to hide this stuff from the public and a guy sitting in his kitchen at 3 in the morning in Ohio can find it all then it's really time for the DOD to reconsider its conspiracy procedures, before you know it we'll be able to find pictures of the aliens they've got hidden in Roswell.
Just for a little background on military medical evacuation, this from Lawrence Kaplan of The New Republic:
Horrifying as it is, the number [of wounded] contains a silver lining as well. The wounded have been maimed. But they have also been saved. During the Second World War, on in every three casualties died. During the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars, the figure declined to one in four. In the present conflict, that number has nearly been halved, to one in eight.
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In a war where nothing else has proceeded according to plan, the medical-evacuation system has worked exactly as intended.
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Among those who die on the battlefield, roughly half die within 30 minutes of being wounded. By contrast, if an injured soldier makes it to even a field hospital, the likelihood he or she will survive improves exponentially.
So to sum up: Harley Sorensen and his latest column are full of crap.
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