LAT: "Why the Numbers Don't Add Up in Iraq"

[leftchick]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-spin10sep10,1,2143488.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage

<snip>

During weekly news briefings deep inside barricaded compounds, commanders regularly display slick charts, multicolored bar graphs and PowerPoint presentations, all heralding good news.

"One more indicator that operations are in fact reducing the amount of attacks on civilians is shown here on this graph," Caldwell assured reporters the other day, pointing to a bar chart dutifully placed on an easel by a stone-faced uniformed subordinate. But all the numbers had been carefully scrubbed. They were classified.

"We typically characterize trends in ways that do not divulge raw data," explained a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson.

Commanders have consistently declined to say how many civilians have been killed by U.S. forces, although officials have acknowledged tracking the number. Avoiding the Vietnam-era stigma of "body counts," authorities also refuse to divulge "kill" totals for suspected insurgents.

<snip>

Gradually, as it became clear that Iraq was in the midst of a protracted guerrilla war, the U.S. military rejected the title "resistance," with its connotations of legitimacy, and settled on "insurgents" or "terrorists" as operative labels.

[leftchick]

1. and there is this....

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15474438.htm

<snip>

U.S. count of Baghdad deaths excludes car bombs, mortar attacks
By Mark Brunswick and Zaineb Obeid
McClatchy Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren't counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country's sectarian violence.


In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.


That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.


But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.


Johnson declined to provide an actual number for the U.S. tally of August deaths or for July, when the Baghdad city morgue counted a record 1,855 violent deaths.

[theanarch]

2. WHAT!?!

The Pentagon is lying to U.S.? I'm shocked, SHOCKED i say...

[mother earth]

3. What is it going to take to get the real numbers? I am so sick

of the lies being spouted by the propaganda machine.

[Karenina]

4. The REAL NUMBER is...

The entire population of Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon has been POISONED by the depleted uraniun ordnance the U.S. has used. They and anyone else from wherever else have ALREADY been exposed and poisoned.
It's just a matter now of waiting for them to die painful deaths and obscuring the cause. The Jews murdered during the Third Reich at least had IBM's systems on the job.