I just called the DoD regarding the casualty discrepancy

The excellent ICC page first brought this to light:

http://icasualties.org/oif/

...when they reported:

"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."

The exact discrepancy is 137 soldiers. The DoD report is here:

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

I called the DoD press office and got a nice lady who said the error was personally her fault, and that the report will shortly be revised to remove those 137 soldiers. She said it was a simple clerical error.

My question: Do you buy that explanation?

to me.

desert Southwest.
Too much plausible deniability surrounding this war for comfort.

:eyes:

the REAL discrepancy is MUCH larger....

most of the possible ones. However, 137 is an odd number to be explained away by the slip of a finger on a 10 key pad or on a typewriter setup.

This is fishy.

I see that cable news no longer reports the daily deaths.
At least that "liberal scum crappy idiotic" PBS News Hour has the decency to read off the names, with photos of the children who died because of a lie.

I hope this "nice lady" is telling the truth.

and people who answer phones at the DOD are not the same who write the casualty numbers, imho. That 137 number came from somewhere - where?

not like misplacing a zero or something.

I wonder what she'd make of this.

so I'm sure she's on this.

This 'clerical error' could have occurred due to a number of things, e.g.:

She decided not to count the soldiers who died from their injuries when they tripped over all the flowers and candy they were greeted with when they arrived in Iraq.

She's taken out the deceased soldiers who died recovering huge caches of WMDs that were strewn all over the country -- in the east, the west, the north, and some in the south.

She initially counted the death certificates manually -- but then ran them through a DIEBOLD-2000 death-counting machine and got a completely different result.

But seriously, I saw someone on a PBS program over a year ago, who was doing some research on the topic of US casualties in Iraq, and was told he had to contact each branch of service individually for their numbers (Navy, Marines, Air Force, etc.), as they all kept their own count.

He did so -- and the numbers he got totalled WAY MORE than the 'official' number was at that time.

I have NO DOUBT that they're lying about the real numbers, just like they've lied about everything else. Maybe that's what causes such 'confusion' when someone makes an inquiry.

reason for a mistake. She looked at the numbers from ??/??/?? that also included ALL dead in BOTH wars? Where did this mysterious number come from? Did she make it up? If so, she should be FIRED! Otherwise she pulled that number from SOME report SOMEWHERE?

I used to be charged with finding lost files and the ONLY way to find them is to BELIVE that the mistake has a LOGICAL reason to exist, and not just sloppyness..and it worked 90% of the time.

MOST mistakes are not just out of THIN air...Maybe she posted the REAL number MISTAKENLY?

card they gave her in case the press called. :eyes:

;( 137 soldiers lost in a weekend would be horrifying.

this doesnt seem like a typical error.

a foogle/google type of error.

Fishy fishy FISHY. I do data entry for a damn living...there is no real keypad error that justifies this AT ALL. It is not wrok/work it/ti fo/of type of typo.

The BEST you can hope for is 37, however, that is still a high discrepancy, and I hope to heck that LynneTheDem (as mentioned above) is ALL over this.

any number and it is divisible by 9..also to hit a 3 rather than a 6 or 9, see a 10 key and any can be mistaken, but most are transpositions. 54 not 45...93 not 39 take note. 54-45=(divisible by 9) 93-39=(divisible by 9) try any number works 100% of the time. 983 not 893..is 137 divisible by 9..OH YES..but be EVENLY divisible by 9..no leftovers!

I find it quite odd that you placed a cold call to the DoD and just happened to get the person who was personally responsible for the error? Sounds like they are BSing you.

uh huh.... :eyes:

not buying it

Rose Mary Woods, demonstrating how she might have created the Watergate tape gap by reaching for a phone, hitting a wrong button, with her foot on a pedal, accidentally erasing part of the tape.

the calculator was waaaaaaaay over there, and the phone rang, and it was waaaaaaaay over yonder ...

You called the DoD and the person who happened to answer the phone is the same one who made the "clerical error"?

Is the DoD so short-handed that the press people answering the phones are the same ones doing the math for the casualty reports?

I ain't buying what they're selling.

the decedent affairs/casualty database does not lie with the PRESS OFFICE. Public Information/Public Affairs runs the website, and posts the stuff, but they do NOT do the database entry.

It could well be that she is "responsible" because she failed to run the rough copy through the chain, or failed to check numbers against names to make sure that someone ELSE didn't mess up and do double entries, but this is not an addition and subtraction type thing. You put in the entries, and the program does the math for you.

The only other way I can imagine that this happened is that the problem occurred with TRANSCRIPTION of the data into a cutsey little easy-to-read format that is scrubbed to eliminate some brutal details in the database that we taxpayers don't need to worry our pretty little heads about. But a simple typing error? 2108 versus 2245 does not even seem like a typo to me--the fingers just don't hit the keys in the same fashion--2298, 2109, even 3298 I could buy as a typing error...but this seems rather odd to me.