Salon: Hiding the Bodies (US Casualties)

[kskiska]

U.S. casualties have spiked in Iraq over the last three months, but security expert John Pike says the Bush administration -- with the help of the media -- is succeeding in keeping the carnage out of view.

By Jeff Horwitz

During August, Iraqi insurgents proved themselves more capable of inflicting casualties on American troops than ever before. Sixty-six American soldiers were killed and more than 1,100 were wounded, according to information released by the Department of Defense. But even with extensive coverage of the intense conflict in Najaf last month, the U.S. media was relatively quiet about the cost of battle to U.S. soldiers.

That cost has been steadily rising for months, says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a think tank in Washington specializing in military and international security issues. "The amount of combat that U.S. soldiers are seeing is going up, but the amount of combat the American public is seeing is going down," he says. "Iraq has almost turned into the forgotten war -- it's just faded into the background."

(snip)

But are they being forthright about the rate of U.S. casualties?
I think if you look at the information being released, you can see all types of information not being covered. The Army gives out casualty evacuation numbers; the Marine Corps does not. And there's very little information being given out on combat stress casualties. The Army gives out information on how many psychiatric evaluations they've had from the war theater, but some significant multiple of that number must be in the combat stress care system in the theater. But they'd only evacuate somebody due to combat stress if all else failed. So we're getting an extremely incomplete portrait of what the human cost to American soldiers has been.

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/08/us_casualties/index.html