The claim is that there are 6,300 additional dead? More than 8000 minus the 1700 we know about, right? Let's do the math, shall we?
6,300 KIA X 20 family/friend/teacher/comrade/coworker each = 126,000 people connected to these KIAs.
Of those 126,000,
NOT ONE is aware of icasualties.org, or the dozens of news sites purporting to list all the KIAs, OR, if aware
NOT ONE has looked up the name of their loved one and found it missing, OR, if they've looked it up
NOT ONE has contacted those sites (and especially icasulaties.org) to report this defect in the list.
Let's also remember that Nightline has TWICE presented what it purported to be a complete list of the dead for a determined period, so we can transfer those same numbers to NIGHTLINE itself, thus:
NOT ONE was aware that Nightline was running a list of names, OR, if aware
NOT ONE watched Nightline to see their dead relative/friend/comrade/coworkers/student, etc. named OR, if they watched
NOT ONE contacted Nightline about the defect in their list, OR, if you choose to believe that Nightline would then cover that up,
NOT ONE otherwise publicized the defect in the various ways we have of publicizing something.
NOT ONE. ZERO. OUT OF 126,000 (and that is a VEEEEERY conservative estimate of the number of people who would otherwise have known 4,300 different people!) Never before in the history of human events has a cover-up managed to include so many people who have no interest in perpetuating it, and - in fact - have a strong emotional interest in EXPOSING IT! It's a miracle cover-up, a magic cover-up...just like the magical thinking that would allow anyone to believe it.
Is that reasonable? No. It is, in fact, completely unreasonable. It is absolutely absurd. But that's what we'd have to believe to believe that there are 6,300 KIAs being hidden by the US government. So, who believes that?
To counter this argument, many have begun proposing the canard that the US government doesn't count non-citizens military personnel who die in Iraq. Apart from the ludicrous idea that ALL 6,300 of these additional casualties would have to consist of these non-citizen personnel for this theory to make any sense, and the equally ludicrous correlate that the insurgents doing the killing manage to (luckily for the Pentagon!) hit non-citizen personnel at a rate THREE TIMES that of citizen personnel - a contention that may indeed even violate laws of physics ;-) - apart from the further
explicitly racist or xenophobic assumption that non-citizen family and friends are less likely to seek the whereabouts of their loved ones and friends or publicize their fate if known (these phantom dead soldiers are often imagined as coming from Mexico and Central America, where people supposedly don't care about their dead or disappeared loved ones! :sarcasm:), I have found that this absolutely laughable defense of the "phantom KIA" nonsense is almost always unsourced, or, if sourced at all, comes from the following article - a website special with no sourcing or evidence of its own:
http://www.axisoflogic.com/cgi-bin/exec/view.pl?archive=86&num=14852Mr. Jubran, the author of the piece, has apparently set this bit of nonsense out into the wilds of cyberspace, where conspiracy minded folks with no evidence or reasonable argument predominate, and source his own unsupported assertions as if these counted as evidence for a claim. We shouldn't be surprised. What's interesting when we look at the thing, however, is the fact that even one of the most staunchly anti-war groups - and one of the only ones supporting immigrants, mainly Latino and Chicano, serving in the armed forces, says no such thing. See the following site for evidence of that:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/22/MNGQ2CSURU1.DTLMind you, this is an organization run by Ferdinand Suarez de Solar, the father and anti-war activist who lost his son, Jesus Suarez, in Iraq. Is he too involved in the cover-up? And oh, by the way, his son was a "green card" Marine, or non-citizen military personnel, and he is listed among the official KIAs for the war....
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