Arghh!! Rep. Rangel on MTP just said 1200 service members Dead!

[leftchick]

He was making a good point about not letting our soldiers die for a fraud but it is almost 1500 DEAD!!! I wish he had not made that mistake. :(

http://icasualties.org/oif/

Military Fatalities: By Time Period News

Period US UK Other* Total Avg Days
3 600 26 28 654 2.84 230
2 717 27 58 802 1.89 424
1 140 33 0 173 4.02 43
Total 1457 86 86 1629 2.34 697

To View Period Details Click The Period Number
Time Periods Defined
Latest Fatality: Feb 11, 2005


Military Fatalities: By Month
Period US UK Other* Total Avg Days
2-2005 17 0 1 18 1.38 13


These don't even include the suicides after they come home!

[rodeodance]

1. oh no!!

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

2. If the Defense Department...

Had a shard of honesty in it, and truly respected the memory of the dead and wounded, not to mention respected the American People, they would report the real numbers honestly.

But they don't, and they don't.

[gademocrat7]

3. the casualty list

is not being reported...how do we get the accurate count out???

[madrchsod]

4. 1200 combat dead-

killed by hostile fire, the rest are "accidents"...they would be dead if they were in the states anyway so they don`t count. to bad he didn`t mention the number of troops struck down by disease-close to 8000 with a large percentage severe enough to be sent to germany or the united states

[Igel]

5. I always have problems with "1500 killed".

I can say "John was killed in a car crash", but if I leave out "in a car crash" the sentence is bad in this context: "John was killed." It's meaning isn't what I intend. ("John was killed by an intruder" can be truncated to "John was killed" because a person did the killing.)

I can say "1500 dead in Iraq" (although statistically speaking at least some soldiers would have died had they stayed in the States). But I can't say "1500 killed in Iraq" unless I know they were killed on purpose.

Did Rangel say 1200 killed or 1200 dead?

[leftchick]

6. killed, dead, ceased to exist, murdered by the BFEE?

wtf is the difference? dead is DEAD.

[Igel]

7. One point is grammar.

I couldn't just say "3 people were killed" if they died in a car crash. It may be my variety of English, and it's not quite up there with "Fred washed Fred's hands" or "Fred saw that Sue bought himself a shirt", but it's still infelicitous.

The other point is that there's a hefty casualty figure for troops based in Texas. In 2000 there were 774 active duty military deaths, 400 were accidents (others were from illness, homicide, suicide, etc.). The accidental death rate's a little higher than for civilians. With a chunk of military overseas (even accounting for the increased size of active duty), there are going to be accidents.

I like things in context. It's not 1500 dead versus 0 dead if we hadn't gone into Iraq.

http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/casualty/castop.htm

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

8. If folks aren't outraged at the number of dead as being 1...

...what will the difference between 1200 and 1500 make?

Getting into a numbers game is ghoulish and counterproductive, imo.

[nebula]

9. The tally doesn't include the soldiers for hire,

or US mercenaries who died fighting in Iraq.

I heard there were at least 20,000 of them over there, perhaps much more by now.

When they get killed or wounded, it's like they never existed since they don't get counted in the figures.