U.S. Reconfigures the Way Casualty Totals Are Given

[babylonsister]

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=9143

February 5th, 2007 2:33 am
U.S. Reconfigures the Way Casualty Totals Are Given

By Denise Grady / New York Times

Statistics on a Pentagon Web site have been reorganized in a way that lowers the published totals of American nonfatal casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of force health protection and readiness at the Defense Department, said the previous method of tallying casualties was misleading and might have made injuries and combat wounds seem worse and more numerous than they really were.

The old method lumped many problems under the label “casualties,” including illnesses, minor injuries and injuries from accidents, as well as wounds sustained in combat. But the public may assume that every casualty is a war wound, Dr. Kilpatrick said, so the site was changed to avoid misunderstandings.

On Monday, the bottom line of the Defense Department’s Web page on casualties in Iraq listed a total of 47,657 “nonmortal casualties.”

By Tuesday, the same page no longer showed a total for nonmortal casualties. The bottom line is now “total — medical air transported,” and the figure is 31,493.

The new total excludes 16,164 troops who were wounded but did not require medical air transport because their injuries were minor. The total does include combat wounds, nonhostile injuries and diseases serious enough for medical transport.

more...

[TerdlowSmedley]

1. New "pound of flesh" criteria for designation as casualty.

Anything falling below the one-pound of lost body tissue as a result of battle injury would be classified as "mental health day."

[endarkenment]

2. sniff ... sniff... hmmmmm

this sort of smells like

BULLSHIT

[rpgamerd00d]

3. .... scanning ....

[CoffeeCat]

4. They had to prepare...

...for the horrendous numbers that will be coming in the following
weeks and months.

Junior, and the rest of the neocon jerks--just sent in 20,000 additional
US soldiers into the heart of a civil war. OUr government understands very
well that our soldiers are sitting ducks in the middle of an un-winnable,
situation. Furthermore, BushCo announced that he was doing this--a few weeks
ago. This gives the insurgents and other violent groups plenty of time to
prepare for the arrival of US troops.

It's going to get really ugly, and I weep for our troops.

They're re-defining the statistics--before the numbers shoot up--so
they can hide the horrendous consequences of their reckless decisions.

[JeffR]

5. Fuzzy math...

now where did they get that concept?