Forwarded with Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE):
Free Americans Resisting the Fourth Reich on Behalf of All Species.
NOTE: Thanks to Rick Davis for this. -- kl, pp
http://forum.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?act=ST&f=28&t=2590
Washington Conceals US Casualties in Iraq
By David Walsh
4 February 2004
The Bush administration is deliberately concealing from the American
people the number and condition of US military personnel who have
been wounded in Iraq. The efforts by those few politicians and media
figures who have pursued the issue make this clear.
Estimates on the number of US soldiers, sailors and Marines medically
evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003 because of battlefield wounds,
illness or other reasons range from 11,000 to 22,000, a staggering
figure by any standard. Thousands of these young men and women have
been physically or psychologically damaged for life, in turn
affecting the lives of tens of thousands of family members and
others. And the war in Iraq is less than one year old.
A recent piece by Daniel Zwerdling on National Public Radio (January
7) highlighted some of the difficulties in establishing the truth
about US casualties. Zwerdling began by noting that few Americans
seemed aware of the large number of US wounded in Iraq. He questioned
a few dozen people on the street about the total number of American
soldiers who had died in Iraq, and most answered more or less
correctly. However, when the NPR correspondent asked about the number
of US military personnel who have had to be evacuated with wounds, no
one was close to the actual figure. The answers ranged from a few
hundred to a thousand.
Zwerdling set about finding the actual number by contacting the
appropriate government and military offices. A spokesman for
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told him to call US Central
Command in Tampa, Florida. A spokesman there informed him that only
Rumsfeld's office had such information. A spokesman for the Army
provided with him the number of its personnel wounded seriously
enough to be evacuated out of Iraq by the end of 2003-8,848-but he
had no figures on Marines, Navy Seals or other forces. The United
States Medical Command told Zwerdling they were still searching for
the numbers.
Zwerdling contacted Sen. Chuck Hagel (Republican-Nebraska), a Vietnam
veteran and former deputy administrator of the Veterans
Administration. Hagel explained that he had been trying to obtain
certain information from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, including the
"total number of American battlefield casualties in Afghanistan and
Iraq. What is the official Pentagon definition of wounded in action?
What is the procedure for releasing this information in a timely way
to the public and the criteria for awarding a Purple Heart [awarded
to those wounded in combat or posthumously to the next of kin of
those killed or those who die of wounds received in action]?"
The Nebraska senator also wanted an updated tally on the number of US
military personnel who had received Purple Hearts and the dates they
were awarded. Six weeks later, Hagel received the provocative reply:
the Department of Defense did not have the requested information.
The information on the number of Purple Hearts awarded is significant
because it speaks to the total number of battlefield casualties.
In December, Mississippi Democratic congressman Gene Taylor raised
the possibility that the Pentagon was deliberately undercounting
combat casualties when he brought to light the case of five members
of the Mississippi National Guard who were wounded in a booby-trap
bomb explosion, but whose injuries were listed as "noncombat" by the
military. The truth emerged only because Taylor happened to speak to
the most seriously injured of the five at Walter Reed Army Medical
Center in Washington. Taylor indicated that he would send a memo to
the other members of Congress "and ask if anyone has had a similar
incident."
Other commentators have noted the discrepancy between the number of
wounded in combat listed by the military and the large number of
service personnel medically evacuated from Iraq, an action, one would
imagine, that the military does not encourage or take lightly. In
passing, for example, an article in the November 5 European edition
of Stars and Stripes noted that the Landstuhl military hospital in
Germany had "treated more than 7,000 injured and ill servicemembers
casualties.
The Landstuhl facility, located near the huge Ramstein US airbase,
reported January 23 that the total of US medical evacuations from
Iraq to Germany by the end of 2003 was 9,433. The number of hostile
and "non-hostile" wounded by that point listed by the Army was
approximately 2,750.
Julian Borger in the Guardian last August noted the odd imbalance
between combat and "non-combat" deaths and injuries. He cited the
comments of Lieut. Col. Allen DeLane, in charge of airlifting the
wounded into Andrews air force base near Washington, who had already
seen thousands of wounded flown in and who told National Public
Radio, according to Bolger, "90 percent of injuries were directly
war-related."
US Casualties Mount
As casualties mounted last summer, US military officials did their
best to suppress any discussion of the wounded total in particular.
Only on July 10, almost four months after the launch of the invasion,
CNN reported that for "the first time since the start of the war in
Iraq, Pentagon officials have released the number of US troops
wounded from the beginning of the war through Wednesday [July 9]."
In keeping the number of wounded from the public, the military high
command was aided by the American media. Editor & Publisher Online
observed in July that while deaths in combat were being reported, the
many non-combat deaths were virtually ignored and the numbers of
wounded, in and out of battle, were being under-reported. Questioned
by E & P Online, Philip Bennett, Washington Post assistant managing
editor of the foreign desk, acknowledged blandly that "There could be
some inattention to [the number of injured troops]."
The sharp increase in the number of US wounded in the autumn-the
official number of combat wounded alone averaged nearly 100 a week
between mid-September and mid-November (lunaville.org)-made the
reluctance of the military to provide figures increasingly
problematic. Even the servile US media was beginning to request
figures. Still the Pentagon officialdom put up as much resistance as
it could.
In September 2003, the Post itself noted, "Although Central Command
keeps a running total of the wounded, it releases the number only
when asked-making the combat injuries of US troops in Iraq one of the
untold stories in the war."
Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, one-time candidate for the Democratic
presidential nomination and ranking Democrat on the Senate
Intelligence Committee, declared around the same time that he wanted
to know how many US soldiers had been wounded in Iraq, but had been
unable to find out because the administration would not release the
information.
An article in the October 13 New Republic by Lawrence F. Kaplan
noted: "Pentagon officials have rebuked public affairs officers who
release casualty figures, and, until recently, US Central Command did
not regularly publicize the injured total either." Ten days later,
however, E & P Online commented, "Current injury statistics were
easily obtained...through US Central Command and the Pentagon, so
getting the numbers is no longer a problem."
In that same New Republic piece, Kaplan discussed the state of many
injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He pointed out
that modern medical technique meant that a far higher percentage of
wounded soldiers now survived who would have died in previous wars.
The use of Kevlar body armor had also reduced deaths. The result,
however, was that many of the wounded were left with debilitating
injuries, particularly amputated limbs. Because of the higher
survival rate, information about the seriously wounded is essential
to any accurate picture of the Iraq war.
Kaplan wrote: "The near-invisibility of the wounded has several
sources. The media has always treated combat deaths as the most
reliable measure of battlefield progress, while for its part the
administration has been reluctant to divulge the full number of
wounded."
The number of "combat injuries," however, is far from the whole
story. That leaves out the thousands who have become physically or
mentally ill in Iraq. As noted above, estimates of the real number of
US servicemen and women evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003 vary
widely.
The British Observer newspaper asserted September 14 that the "true
scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new
figures...which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have
been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war,
including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded,
many seriously. The figures will shock many Americans, who believe
that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light."
By the end of November, Roger Roy in the Orlando Sentinel could place
the number of those "killed, wounded, injured or...ill enough to
require evacuation from Iraq" at approximately 10,000. Roy noted that
such figures were hard to track, "leading critics to accuse the
military of underreporting casualty numbers."
Mark Benjamin of United Press International (UPI) has been one of the
more assiduous in pursuing an accurate total of the number medically
evacuated from Iraq. On December 19, Benjamin reported that in
response to a request from UPI the Pentagon had provided a figure of
nearly 11,000 US wounded and medical evacuations-2,273 wounded and
8,581 medical evacuations.
Benjamin cited the comments of Aseneth Blackwell, former president of
the Gold Star Wives of America, a support group for people who lose a
spouse in war, who said the country had not seen such a total since
Vietnam. "It is staggering," she added.
Benjamin pointed out that the Pentagon's official casualty update as
of December 17 reported only 364 soldiers as "non-hostile wounded."
The largest estimate of the number of medical evacuations from Iraq
is to be found in a December 30 article by retired US Army Col. David
Hackworth, "Saddam's in the slammer, so why are we on orange?"
Hackworth writes, "Even I...was staggered when a Pentagon source gave
me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush
unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000
casualties in Iraq-about the number of warriors in a line tank
division." The former colonel adds that the figure "means we've lost
the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10
percent of the total number" of available personnel-135,000-"has been
evacuated back to the USA!"
Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the US military's Transportation Command
told Hackworth that as of Christmas his "outfit had evacuated 3,255
battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries," a total
21,972 servicemen and women. Ross, however, cautioned that his figure
might include some of the same service members counted more than once.
The major categories of "non-battle" evacuations included orthopedic
surgery, 3,907; general surgery, 1,995; internal medicine, 1,291;
psychiatric, 1,167; neurology, 1,002; gynecological (mostly
pregnancy-related), 491.
Hackworth concludes that "it's safe to say that, so far, somewhere
between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have
been medically evacuated" from the war zone in Iraq.
"Treated Like Dogs"
Once back in the US, the injured are stored in dozens of military
medical facilities around the country, their existence virtually
ignored by the administration, their plight largely unreported by the
media.
Until a public outcry improved matters, many wounded veterans, UPI
reported in October, had to wait "weeks and months for proper medical
help" at military facilities such as Fort Stewart in Georgia and were
"being treated like dogs," according to one officer. The indifference
of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to the fate of US servicemen and women
is a part of their general contempt for the broad layers of the
working population, Iraqi and American.
The deliberate obscuring of the human toll of the war and occupation
in Iraq is an indication of considerable nervousness within the Bush
administration. Despite the official claims of overwhelming popular
support, the political and media establishment knows full well that
opposition to this war is growing, and that an accurate picture of
the war's devastating consequences would further turn the tide of
public opinion.
==================================
See Also:
New signs of discontent in the military: "Stop-loss" orders prevent
soldiers from leaving US Army
[20 January 2004]
More questions on the deaths and illnesses of American soldiers
[10 October 2003]
Thousands of US troops evacuated from Iraq for unexplained medical reasons
[9 September 2003]
America's maimed come home from Iraq
[30 July 2003]