Important: Any buzz on major combat in Iraq?

Fellow DUers,

You may have noticed that the official Pentagon KIA count for Iraq suddenly went up by 130+ today. One possible explanation being bandied about is that the Pentagon has been hiding KIAs.

An alternative is the possibility that there is major combat going on somewhere in Iraq that has resulted in heavy casualties. While it would be hard to keep that sort of thing quiet, it has to be considered until we find out what the exact story is.

For those people who have family, friends, or acquaintances in Iraq, are you receiving any hints that there's something major going down? Rumors, dropped hints, reports of redeployment, whatever. Lack of information may in itself be a clue--if certain units have gone silent, it could indicate something is up.

Original DU thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5466841

ICC talking about the unexplained spike:

http://icasualties.org/oif/

The link to the official DOD report:

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf

out of Fairbanks has been taking some heavy hits lately.

http://www.strykernews.com/memorial.html

I just can't tell, that wasn't sarcasm, was it?

Editing to say, I should have looked closer, you seem to be in or caring about Alaska. Oh man. That was the AF base I was stationed at. So many moons ago. Eielson.

This possibility of heavy combat making the death total jump like that, it sounds likely. Can't insert enough curse words to do it justice.

Although, when I read it, I hoped it was, for a short foolish minute.

Why would you say that? For the number of people who are in Alaska, every single soldier's death from here hits very hard. You have to remember that Alaska, the whole state, only has 600,000 residents or so. There have been a lot of soldiers connected with Alaska -- either stationed here or born here -- who have been killed over there in the past few months.

Why in the world would you say it was sarcasm?? Just because other states have 20 times more people than we do and thus more soldiers' deaths ... please....

:shaking head:

and I tried to phrase it neutrally, but it still has that insulting assumption.

No, please believe, I was stationed there myself once, I mean no disrespect. I saw the terrible winter of 1988/89, I remember Alaska well. I wasn't sure, at first, if what you said was factual or something else, maybe something having to do with a story or something I wasn't familiar with? Do you know what I mean?

But I meant no insult, I'm sorry it sounded so flip, I edited that post to say I hadn't looked closely enough the first time. My stupid, my bad.

:hug: What I said was entirely factual. We have been seeing more and more Alaska boys, both native sons and men stationed here, losing their lives just in the last couple of months. Also the son of a former Green party candidate for governor (who is adamantly against the war) had both his legs blown off and lost an eye just a couple weeks ago, so we are feeling the pain up here. Most of them have been just boys, 22 years old. It's so sad to read or hear their friends talking about what great people they were, their coaches and teachers reminiscing about their high school days. One boy was a poet, another played music. It's almost more than a person can bear, even a stranger like me. I can't even imagine how it must feel to be the parent of one of these kids. It has to stop soon.

some people want to spread around: they say, So, you're smaller than we are? weaker than we are? Under our thumb? Hah! Well fuck you, we'll take what little you have, then.

At the point of a DU-tipped high-yech what's more chemical weapon. Resist? we'll torture you.

And if you try to get angry, we'll call foul and bring down all the fires of hell dat wot's rit rite hear in mai guhd buk so hulp duh Lord.

Yeah, and righteous :sarcasm: intended s'long as you folks just ain't prepared even to begin to contemplate the genuine pain, suffering and sacrifice on the other side, as Jesus really said.

All thanks to your governmental (of course not the fault of you good people here) longstanding military-industrial-political corruption.

What, after all, are these innocents, soon rendered extremely guilty, supposed to be fighting for?????

130? That's almost like the bad ol' days in Vietnam.

Ridiculous error, but just an error.

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf

About Bush running round his office going nuts, terribly upset when he was told that 3 Brazilians had died in action.

"Sir, sir, are you alright?"

Finally he stopped hitting his head against the chair, looked up and asked sheepishly, "I can't seem to remember, how much is a brazilian again?"

(As if Bush would notice or even care!)

Besides, it's been posted around here at least 19 times already.

"Today’s casualty report from the DoD states that the total U.S. deaths for Operation Iraqi Freedom is 2245. This is over 130 more than our count and the total number of DoD death confirmations.
The DoD has given no explanation for the sudden increase in fatality totals and there has been no mention in the press as to why the totals have increased dramatically over the past week."

I wasn't aware the KIA had gone up that much.

I know it is done-- the Soviets evidently lowballed casualty counts in Afghanistan for years, and Iraq is increasingly striking me as more like Afghanistan than Vietnam, but wouldn't there be a significant number of family members clamoring for info about their "missing" soldiers? Not any MIAs that I know of so you can't hide them there.

Am I missing something? Is that what you were talking about?

Who's going to check that Jim-Bob from rural Alabama is on the official list? Or the Mexican kid who joined up on the promise of citizenship? They could just issue all the appropriate letters of condolence, and only report some of the deaths. It's pretty horrifying to contemplate, but if you're ethically unhindered, there's lot you could do to play with the paperwork.

It would be very difficult for someone other than the Pentagon to try and add non-citizen KIA's up to check the Pentagon's math...

Do you happen to have a source on that?

...according to PBS NewsHour.

Link from 2003:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june03/noncitizens_04-21.html

I would have to think the numbers have grown since then, however.

What do you expect? You don't count casualties, not even civilians, also not prisoners on the other side???

The US is not perceived as 'civilized' any more...

(ed. guess that's a zee in us english).

Few in NJ or Ak and it goes right over your head.And we never see the coffins or can any one get to see who is going into the German Hospital. Their was a reason to hide it all. We hardly have a Robert Capa taking pictures on the front either or a Life Mag. willing to show them.

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf


I hope that this is a typo and that somebody reported the total in the second line by error. If not, the Pentagon has a lot of explaining to do.

My take is that it isn't, because they'd already have a talking head denying it if they could, this late in the day. Bad pr, they always pay attention to bad pr.

Especially since the truth seems to be rather toxic to them. Pathological liars, they have a terrible time with truth, it's easier to manage with more lies. But there I go again rattling off crap that everybody already knows. Sorry all.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051128/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_us_deaths;_ylt=Atu2ukxArNeZShG6TXib.hkLewgF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhdA--

This would make 131 soldiers killed this week-end?

stats are so much more important for our beautiful minds.

they "stepped" too far and got into some retaliation they don't want to talk about. Maybe they made a deal with Assad just to keep things quiet until they can cover it more thoroughly. Some kid or whistleblower wannabe put the real numbers out and screwed up their plans. :shrug: :tinfoilhat:

ALL Iraq news. That's what 'embedded' means.

just told me he hadn't heard of any new action taking place.

That doesn't mean much, considering how the news out of Iraq is being strangled by the Pentagon and the Bush gang.

I was about to take you to task for saying all news is Pentagon-filtered. There is Al Jazeera. But when I just went to the Al Jazeera home page--www.english.aljazeera.net/HomePage--I got this:

Information Alert



Status : 504 Gateway Time-Out

Description : Unable to connect to origin web server. The web site you are attempting to access is currently unreachable. This may be due to a network outage, or the web site might be experiencing technical difficulties.

What the heck is going on?

(I'm serious) Maybe someone just flipped?

All "news" may be filtered, but that's a positive and a negative. Numerous news programs and web sites purport to have a list (with pictures!) of every soldier that's died in Iraq. Now, once you can explain to me how nobody associated with a "hidden" killed soldier has 1) checked these lists, 2) seen that their friend, lover, sibling, child, father, coworker, girlfriend's ex-boyfriend, high school buddy, neighbor, mechanic, ice-cream man is NOT on the list and 3)informed people in whatever way of the discrepancy, then, and only then, will I believe that there are "hidden" casualties. Remember, that is a 100% success rate in getting everybody who has even the slightest connection with a killed soldier to hush up about it. ZERO. Not one! Of course, I don't think you can explain that, primarily because it is fucking IMPOSSIBLE. But hey, go nuts trying.

after the wounded were evacuated?

OMG, this is horrible.

maybe deaths that occurred some time after being treated outside of iraq were not being added in a timely fashion and have been added in a big chunk :shrug:

This makes me feel,...scared.

I think I read that Bush wants the death count to go down so more air war, and maybe it back fired. Also Cole has some thing on it on his site. Also maybe a new count on Fallauja? Why not all armies lie to make them self look better. I recall when my husband was in the service the navy kept shipping body bags to the air force but you never heard of any one who died. The navy used to wonder what was going on with the body bags.

The DOD/Pentagon has changed the casualty report. It's now back to 2106 casualties. Not a single word of explanation, not even a simple statement that it was an error.

Something is definitely wrong here. If it were really a simple mistake, one would think that they'd want to point that out. Changing it back and hoping no one notices strikes me as the thing you would want to do if you didn't want to attract scrutiny to the numbers.

even though it has changed since 10:00 AM...

WTF is going on?

I imagine reporters were calling and asking the same questions that many of us are asking.

I guess DoD officials decided that they didn't want to answer those questions.

It's really, really sick what is going on over there.

The only reason that we knew about the horrors of Katrina---is because the media actually did their job. Their crimes could not be covered. In Iraq there is no viable media. The crimes are covered. The unspeakable atrocities that are happening there are not being reported and that is why those acts continue.

These thugs are not held accountable in Iraq, because there is no legitimate journalism that flows back to the United States.

700 Americans killed or wounded in the battle for Falluja.
I wonder if they underreported the deaths in that battle.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051205fa_fact

Syria actually has an army.