Check this story out, Press Reports on U.S. Casualties: About 17,000 Short, UPI Says. It's a tale about how the military is not reporting accurate casualty numbers. Here is how the story says the Pentagon defines a casualty:

"Any person who is lost to the organization by having been declared dead, duty status/whereabouts unknown, missing, ill, or injured."

That was the definition at least until this war started. Here is the what the Pentagon now says about what a casualty is:

In a statement Wednesday, the Pentagon gave a different definition that included casualty descriptions by severity and type and said most medical evacuations did not count. "The great majority of service members medically evacuated from Operation Iraqi Freedom are not casualties, by either Department of Defense definitions or the common understanding of the average newspaper reader."

Isn't that a beautiful phrase, "the common understanding of the average newspaper reader."? What exactly is that and how do they know what that is? Now lets get back to why this is happening. What type of injuries are we talking about? These types:

It cited such ailments as "muscle strain, back pain, kidney stones, diarrhea and persistent fever" as non-casualty evacuations. "Casualty reports released to the public are generally confined to fatalities and those wounded in action," the statement said.

So why does the military not want these types of things listed as casualties? Well I think there are a few. The obvious of course is that it keeps the casualty numbers down. It also helps them hide some of the realities of war like this:

Among veterans from Iraq seeking help from the VA, 5,375 have been diagnosed with a mental problem, making it the third-leading diagnosis after bone problems and digestive problems. Among the mental problems were 800 soldiers who became psychotic.

Most people just want to think war is very patriotic and honorable and that when someone comes home from war they just go right back to the way they are before they left. But unfortunately they do not. So we have all of these people coming home from war with major mental problems and we are probably not giving them the treatment for this they need. Now I'm no expert on this but I'm sure you could Google iraq, post traumatic stress disorder and find some interesting things. And then right after that Google the words "depleted uranium" (DU). What is DU you ask, well it's similar to what you probably remember from Vietnam as Agent Orange, it's radiation posioning. It causes all kinds of mental and physical problems that I'm sure the military/MIC does not want anything about DU becoming well known. So we have 17,000 thousand more casualties than previously known, mostly mentally ill. They are coming home and not getting treatment because they are not recognized as being casualties or sick. So remember if Bush is reelected he is coming after your family and friends to send them to Iran or some other hell hole to experience this type of reality.
- posted by Mom/Dad @ 7:18 AM