Yet another BIG piece of info the Shrub admin is hideing!

I watched NOW on PBS tonight. The Bush admin. and specifically the Pentagon, in NOT reporting any soldiers who were injured in non-combat. They report the number who were killed, and the number who were injured in combat, but there is, according to the individual military departments, about 11,700 soldiers injured.....many very seriously....and return back to the States to hospitals, and never reported on or counted!

The reporter contacted the Pentagon to ask why they don't report those, and the response was, they only count those in combat situations where they can learn how not to let it happen again.

You should be able to see a replay at the following link:

http://www.pbs.org/now/

This is yet ANOTHER thing this admin. is trying to hide so as not to influence negative Public Opinion.

How can we get the message to Kerry to persue this?

scary and quite frankly very serious. Democracy calls for an open society and the Looney Head in office is not furthering Democracy with his BS. God, I hate Bush.

I do know that during peacetime, soldiers are killed every day in training. They get run over by tanks, or in vehicle accidents, or somebody drops a hand grenade on the range. You never hear about it though.

Accidental injuries and deaths are considered "normal".

The military is dangerous, man.

It just seems way too convenient to me that the Pentagon has a report that they showed on this program. There are several columns of information in a chart. One column is for those killed, another column is for those injured. Then there are lines for in combat, in non-combat, etc. There are numbers on the lines for the combat injuries and deaths, but on the line for non-combat.........THERE'S NOTHING! SORRY, BUT THAT LOOKS LIKE DECEPTION TO ME!!!

...due to non-combat reasons. And yes, we heard about it when it happened, and nobody told us then to keep our mouths shut.

Yes, the military is dangerous. But it's not nearly as dangerous in peacetime as it is when large numbers of troops are being committed to combat in a war that can't be won. All those hard-won lessons learned in Vietnam have been kicked into the ditch by the NeoCons.

but did your friends at home see it on the news?

What you say is true, accidents go way up when you have massive numbers of troops maneuvering in a hostile environment. ButI think it has always been a matter of course that the military does not include these numbers with "combat" casualties when reporting to the media.

They SHOULD report them, but I don't think there is anything new here.

"accidents" is going a bit far. If you want to claim that 11,700 (unreported) casualties are irrelevant or "normal" you'll have a hard time. The point here is that the Fundicons were suppressing this info. Casualties in Vietnam were all reported (mostly). This gang of liars had to be forced to tell some of the truth about this.

This is the first time any US gov't has carried out such a systematic fraud on the American people about casualties during war. It is, however, quite consistent with their Straussian strategy of lying to achieve their goals.

You might be interested in this analysis of the casualties during Vietnam and now: http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/20031117.asp

A childhood friend of my husband's died in Vietnam. He went down one of those Viet Cong tunnels and it collapsed on him and he suffocated.

A couple of years back, I happened on a website where you could look up any name that's on the Vietnam Wall, so I decided to see what it said about this friend.

It described his death as "non-combat."

At least he was listed.

Suicides and murders are non-combat also. I know of a sgt. in charge of a scout dog platoon in Vietnam who was fragged in his sleep, because he was actively looking for more work for his platoon during slower periods. He was listed as non-combat death, and his killer(s) were never determined. He was a damn good man too.

out sourced security personnel that are guarding the top US officials in Iraq, and you add to that the deaths of both military and private contractors that are not reported - and you get a much higher number than what is out there. Interesting. Disgusting.

It's also my understanding that their total combat deaths don't include people who were injured in combat, removed from the scene and die a bit later. Nor those who were being shot at and rolled their humvees over. Etc.

but suicides are not and i wanna know that fucking number.

Thanks for posting.

Anymore info, please post.

relatively well, so the injuries aren't usually fatal. Their extremities aren't nearly as well protected, however, so there are a lot of injuries that, while not fatal, are crippling.

:kick: