Thursday, March 15, 2007

Talking Point Retort On Troops

Attytood: UPDATED: Matt Drudge rules their world...and spreads a Big Lie on Iraq

"...The thing is, I work with the casualty numbers three or four nights every week, producing a feature for the Philadelphia Daily News called the Numbers Racket. And I could tell that the figures in this Kuwait article/press release are nowhere even in the ballpark of reality. For that, we look to the indepedent Web site icasualties.org, which is used by many major news orgs and bases alot of its info on Pentagon releases.

This is the table of all the deaths. First, the one piece of good news. Overall deaths did drop during the period addressed by the article. But the grim news is that the totals are much, much higher than suggested in this story, that tens of thousands of Drudge readers are relying upon for talking points.

The number of American troops killed from Feb. 14 through March 13 is 73, not 17, or more than four times higher. In the prior month, from Jan. 14 through Feb. 13, which was a remarkably bloody period, 116 American troops died. So the tally did drop overall, and that's great news, by it was 37 percent, not nearly the 60 percent as the story reports. And the decline in deaths per day is even less -- because, as the article also fails to note, February only has 28 days.

Here's what I find most significant. The U.S. death rate for the 28-day period in question is 2.61 deaths a day. The daily American death rate since the war began four years ago is 2.37 deaths a day -- so even now, Americans are still dying now in Iraq at a higher-than-average rate for this conflict.

Is anyone really happy with that? As we've argued on this site almost every day since we started it, even 1 American death is one too many in an unnecessary and useless war, based on lies from the start. And now the proponents of more war continue to lie in a desperate effort to keep it going..."

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