MARCH 2004

LETTER FROM AMERICA

Coastal Post Online

March, 2004

Washington Conceals US Casualties in Iraq
By David Walsh

The Bush administration is deliberately concealing from the American people the number and condition of US military personnel who have been wounded in Iraq. The efforts by those few politicians and media figures who have pursued the issue make this clear.

Estimates on the number of US soldiers, sailors and Marines medically evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003 because of battlefield wounds, illness or other reasons range from 11,000 to 22,000, a staggering figure by any standard. Thousands of these young men and women have been physically or psychologically damaged for life, in turn affecting the lives of tens of thousands of family members and others. And the war in Iraq is less than one year old.

A recent piece by Daniel Zwerdling on National Public Radio (January 7) highlighted some of the difficulties in establishing the truth about US casualties. Zwerdling began by noting that few Americans seemed aware of the large number of US wounded in Iraq. He questioned a few dozen people on the street about the total number of American soldiers who had died in Iraq, and most answered more or less correctly. However, when the NPR correspondent asked about the number of US military personnel who have had to be evacuated with wounds, no one was close to the actual figure. The answers ranged from a few hundred to a thousand.

Zwerdling set about finding the actual number by contacting the appropriate government and military offices. A spokesman for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told him to call US Central Command in Tampa, Florida. A spokesman there informed him that only Rumsfeld's office had such information. A spokesman for the Army provided with him the number of its personnel wounded seriously enough to be evacuated out of Iraq by the end of 2003-8,848-but he had no figures on Marines, Navy Seals or other forces. The United States Medical Command told Zwerdling they were still searching for the numbers.

Zwerdling contacted Sen. Chuck Hagel (Republican-Nebraska), a Vietnam veteran and former deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration. Hagel explained that he had been trying to obtain certain information from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, including the "total number of American battlefield casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. What is the official Pentagon definition of wounded in action? What is the procedure for releasing this information in a timely way to the public and the criteria for awarding a Purple Heart [awarded to those wounded in combat or posthumously to the next of kin of those killed or those who die of wounds received in action]?"

The Nebraska senator also wanted an updated tally on the number of US military personnel who had received Purple Hearts and the dates they were awarded. Six weeks later, Hagel received the provocative reply: the Department of Defense did not have the requested information.

The information on the number of Purple Hearts awarded is significant because it speaks to the total number of battlefield casualties.

In December, Mississippi Democratic congressman Gene Taylor raised the possibility that the Pentagon was deliberately undercounting combat casualties when he brought to light the case of five members of the Mississippi National Guard who were wounded in a booby-trap bomb explosion, but whose injuries were listed as "noncombat" by the military. The truth emerged only because Taylor happened to speak to the most seriously injured of the five at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Taylor indicated that he would send a memo to the other members of Congress "and ask if anyone has had a similar incident."

Other commentators have noted the discrepancy between the number of wounded in combat listed by the military and the large number of service personnel medically evacuated from Iraq, an action, one would imagine, that the military does not encourage or take lightly. In passing, for example, an article in the November 5 European edition of Stars and Stripes noted that the Landstuhl military hospital in Germany had "treated more than 7,000 injured and ill servicemembers from Iraq." At that time, the military had recorded some 2,000 combat casualties.

The Landstuhl facility, located near the huge Ramstein US airbase, reported January 23 that the total of US medical evacuations from Iraq to Germany by the end of 2003 was 9,433. The number of hostile and "non-hostile" wounded by that point listed by the Army was approximately 2,750.

Julian Borger in the Guardian last August noted the odd imbalance between combat and "non-combat" deaths and injuries. He cited the comments of Lieut. Col. Allen DeLane, in charge of airlifting the wounded into Andrews air force base near Washington, who had already seen thousands of wounded flown in and who told National Public Radio, according to Bolger, "90 percent of injuries were directly war-related."

US Casualties Mount

As casualties mounted last summer, US military officials did their best to suppress any discussion of the wounded total in particular. Only on July 10, almost four months after the launch of the invasion, CNN reported that for "the first time since the start of the war in Iraq, Pentagon officials have released the number of US troops wounded from the beginning of the war through Wednesday [July 9]."

In keeping the number of wounded from the public, the military high command was aided by the American media. Editor & Publisher Online observed in July that while deaths in combat were being reported, the many non-combat deaths were virtually ignored and the numbers of wounded, in and out of battle, were being under-reported. Questioned by E & P Online, Philip Bennett, Washington Post assistant managing editor of the foreign desk, acknowledged blandly that "There could be some inattention to [the number of injured troops]."

The sharp increase in the number of US wounded in the autumn-the official number of combat wounded alone averaged nearly 100 a week between mid-September and mid-November (lunaville.org)-made the reluctance of the military to provide figures increasingly problematic. Even the servile US media was beginning to request figures. Still the Pentagon officialdom put up as much resistance as it could.

In September 2003, the Post itself noted, "Although Central Command keeps a running total of the wounded, it releases the number only when asked-making the combat injuries of US troops in Iraq one of the untold stories in the war."

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, one-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination and ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared around the same time that he wanted to know how many US soldiers had been wounded in Iraq, but had been unable to find out because the administration would not release the information.

An article in the October 13 New Republic by Lawrence F. Kaplan noted: "Pentagon officials have rebuked public affairs officers who release casualty figures, and, until recently, US Central Command did not regularly publicize the injured total either." Ten days later, however, E & P Online commented, "Current injury statistics were easily obtained... through US Central Command and the Pentagon, so getting the numbers is no longer a problem."

In that same New Republic piece, Kaplan discussed the state of many injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He pointed out that modern medical technique meant that a far higher percentage of wounded soldiers now survived who would have died in previous wars. The use of Kevlar body armor had also reduced deaths. The result, however, was that many of the wounded were left with debilitating injuries, particularly amputated limbs. Because of the higher survival rate, information about the seriously wounded is essential to any accurate picture of the Iraq war.

Kaplan wrote: "The near-invisibility of the wounded has several sources. The media has always treated combat deaths as the most reliable measure of battlefield progress, while for its part the administration has been reluctant to divulge the full number of wounded."

The number of "combat injuries," however, is far from the whole story. That leaves out the thousands who have become physically or mentally ill in Iraq. As noted above, estimates of the real number of US servicemen and women evacuated from Iraq by the end of 2003 vary widely.

The British Observer newspaper asserted September 14 that the "true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures...which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously. The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light."

By the end of November, Roger Roy in the Orlando Sentinel could place the number of those "killed, wounded, injured or...ill enough to require evacuation from Iraq" at approximately 10,000. Roy noted that such figures were hard to track, "leading critics to accuse the military of underreporting casualty numbers."

Mark Benjamin of United Press International (UPI) has been one of the more assiduous in pursuing an accurate total of the number medically evacuated from Iraq. On December 19, Benjamin reported that in response to a request from UPI the Pentagon had provided a figure of nearly 11,000 US wounded and medical evacuations-2,273 wounded and 8,581 medical evacuations.

Benjamin cited the comments of Aseneth Blackwell, former president of the Gold Star Wives of America, a support group for people who lose a spouse in war, who said the country had not seen such a total since Vietnam. "It is staggering," she added.

Benjamin pointed out that the Pentagon's official casualty update as of December 17 reported only 364 soldiers as "non-hostile wounded."

The largest estimate of the number of medical evacuations from Iraq is to be found in a December 30 article by retired US Army Col. David Hackworth, "Saddam's in the slammer, so why are we on orange?"

Hackworth writes, "Even I...was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq-about the number of warriors in a line tank division." The former colonel adds that the figure "means we've lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number" of available personnel-135,000-"has been evacuated back to the USA!"

Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the US military's Transportation Command told Hackworth that as of Christmas his "outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries," a total 21,972 servicemen and women. Ross, however, cautioned that his figure might include some of the same service members counted more than once.

The major categories of "non-battle" evacuations included orthopedic surgery, 3,907; general surgery, 1,995; internal medicine, 1,291; psychiatric, 1,167; neurology, 1,002; gynecological (mostly pregnancy-related), 491.

Hackworth concludes that "it's safe to say that, so far, somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been medically evacuated" from the war zone in Iraq.

"Treated Like Dogs"

Once back in the US, the injured are stored in dozens of military medical facilities around the country, their existence virtually ignored by the administration, their plight largely unreported by the media.

Until a public outcry improved matters, many wounded veterans, UPI reported in October, had to wait "weeks and months for proper medical help" at military facilities such as Fort Stewart in Georgia and were "being treated like dogs," according to one officer. The indifference of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to the fate of US servicemen and women is a part of their general contempt for the broad layers of the working population, Iraqi and American.

The deliberate obscuring of the human toll of the war and occupation in Iraq is an indication of considerable nervousness within the Bush administration. Despite the official claims of overwhelming popular support, the political and media establishment knows full well that opposition to this war is growing, and that an accurate picture of the war's devastating consequences would further turn the tide of public opinion.

U.N. Spying and Evasions of American Journalism

By Norman Solomon


     Tony Blair and George W. Bush want the issue of spying at the United Nations to go away. That’s one of the reasons the Blair government ended its prosecution of whistleblower Katharine Gun on Wednesday. But within 24 hours, the scandal of U.N. spying exploded further when one of Blair’s former cabinet ministers said that British spies closely monitored conversations of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq last year.

     The new allegations, which have the ring of truth, are now coming from ex-secretary of international development Clare Short. “I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan’s conversations,” she said in an interview with BBC Radio. “In fact I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war thinking ‘Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying.’” Short added that British intelligence hadbeen explicitly directed to spy on Annan and other top U.N. officials.

     Few can doubt that some major British news outlets will thoroughly dig below the surface of Short’s charges. But on the other side of the Atlantic, the journalistic evasion on the subject of U.N. spying has been so extreme that we can have no confidence in the mainstream media’s
inclination to adequately cover this new bombshell.

     For 51 weeks -- from the day that the Observer newspaper in London broke the news about spying at the United Nations until the moment that British prosecutors dropped charges against Gun on Wednesday -- major news outlets in the United States almost completely ignored the story.

     The Observer’s expose, under the headline “Revealed: U.S. Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War,” came 18 days before the invasion of Iraq began. By unveiling a top secret U.S. National Security Agency memo, the newspaper provided key information when it counted most: before the war started.

     That NSA memo outlined surveillance of a half-dozen delegations with swing votes on the U.N. Security Council, noting a focus on “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policy-makers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals” -- support for war on Iraq. The memo said that the agency had started a “surge” of spying on U.N. diplomats, including wiretaps of home and office telephones along with reading of e-mails.

     Three days after the story came out, I asked for an assessment from the man who gave the Pentagon Papers to journalists in 1971. Daniel Ellsberg responded: “This leak is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers. ... Truth-telling like this can stop
a war.”

     But even though -- or perhaps especially because -- the memo was from the U.S. government and showed that Washington was spying on U.N. diplomats, the big American media showed scant interest. The coverage was either shoddy or non-existent.

     A year ago, at the brink of war, the New York Times did not cover the U.N. spying revelation. Nearly 96 hours after the Observer had reported it, I called Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale and asked why not. “We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting,” Smale replied. She added that “we could get no confirmation or comment.” In other words, U.S. intelligence officials refused to confirm or discuss the memo -- so the Times did not see fit to report on it.

     The Washington Post didn’t do much better. It printed a 514-word article on a back page with the headline “Spying Report No Shock to U.N.” Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times published a longer piece emphasizing from the outset that U.S. spy activities at the United Nations are “long-standing.” For good measure, the piece reported “some experts suspected that it could be a forgery” -- and “several former top intelligence officials said they were skeptical of the memo’s authenticity.”

     Within days, any doubt about the memo’s “authenticity” was gone. The British media reported that the U.K. government had arrested an unnamed female employee at a British intelligence agency in connection with the leak.

     By then, however, the spotty coverage in the mainstream U.S. press had disappeared. In fact -- except for a high-quality detailed news story by a pair of Baltimore Sun reporters that appeared in that newspaper on March 4 -- there isn’t an example of mainstream U.S. news reporting on the story last year that’s worthy of any pride.

     In mid-November, for the first time, Katharine Gun’s name became public when the British press reported that she’d been formally charged with violating the draconian Official Secrets Act. Appearing briefly at court proceedings, she was a beacon of moral clarity. Disclosure of the NSA memo, Gun said, was “necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed.” And: “I have only ever followed my conscience.”

     A search of the comprehensive LexisNexis database finds that for nearly three months after Katharine Gun’s name first appeared in the British media, U.S. news stories mentioning her scarcely existed. When Gun’s name did appear in U.S. dailies it was almost always on an opinion page. News sections were oblivious: Again with the notable exception of the Baltimore Sun (which ran an in-depth news article about Gun and Ellsberg on Feb. 1), mainstream U.S. news departments proceeded as though Katharine Gun were a non-person. She only became “newsworthy” after charges were dropped.

     “Mr. Blair’s spokesmen were conspicuously silent on Wednesday, apparently hopeful that the case would disappear from the public agenda,” the New York Times reported in Thursday’s paper. But the case had never been on the public agenda as far as the Times news department was
concerned.

     (Background about the Gun case has been posted at www.accuracy.org/gun, a web page of the Institute for Public Accuracy, where my colleagues and I have worked to make information available about the U.N. spying story.)

     Overall, the matter of Washington’s spying at the United Nations has been off the American media map until February. Whether the major U.S. news outlets will do a better job on the subject this spring remains to be seen. But it would be a mistake to assume that they will.

     Although the prosecution of Gun has ended, the issue of U.N. spying has not. At stake is the integrity of a world body that should not tolerate intrusive abuses by the government of its host country.

     We can assume that Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a former Mexican ambassador to the United Nations, did not speak lightly when he made a strong statement that appeared in an Associated Press dispatch from Mexico City on Feb. 12: “They are violating the U.N. headquarters covenant.” He was referring to officials of the U.S. government.

     That statement now resonates more loudly than ever. With British and American intelligence agencies working closely together, both have been locked in a shamefully duplicitous embrace. In the interests of war, their nefarious activities served as direct counterpoints to the deceptions coming from 10 Downing Street and the White House. In the interests of journalism, reporters should now pursue truth wherever it might lead.


Norman Solomon is co-author of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t
Tell You.”