Still lying after all these years
Feb 20th, 2007 at 5:05 pm by Dr. S
What’s 30,000, give or take?
Veterans groups and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama say U.S. government officials are obscuring the actual number of wounded in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars by leaving out of some public documents troops who suffer non-combat injuries.
From the Pentagon Web site to press materials handed out at the opening of an amputee center in Texas last week, the number of wounded in the wars often circulated publicly is around 23,000.
That number only accounts for those wounded in combat. When troops from those wars who were wounded in other ways are counted, the number more than doubles, to about 53,000.
That latter number is not heavily circulated by the Pentagon. Recently, a Defense Department official publicly criticized a researcher who used it and pressured another government agency to change a public document to report the smaller number.
They also do something similar with deaths —
flying dying troops out of Iraq to military
installations in other countries and letting
them die there so that those deaths are not
counted as Iraq casualties.