[Commissar Elvis]

I have no real way of corroborating this, of course, but I came across this information and found it interesting; so I decided to share it here.

In a nutshell, there is anecdotal evidence as well as a story filed by a reporter for Russia's RIA Novosti news agency that over 300 Americans were killed or injured in the explosion of the ammo dump known as Camp Falcon in Baghdad on 11 October. Further, a supposed 122 Iraqi personnel were killed or injured. Again, I cannot personally vouch for this information, nor can I prove it to be legitimate, but it's something to read. It is a fact, however, that the DoD is underreporting American casualties in Iraq; every person evacuated from Iraq to Germany or Japan who eventually dies does not go on the list of "Iraq KIAs." Wounded numbers have been underreported since day one, and this is widely known.

Check it out, reply if you feel like it. I don't think there's anything to argue about here -

http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat...#Post295002651

[Chton]

I find this a bit scary.
I follow the news almost everyday, and looking back at newspapers from oct.11 and till now (i have a 2 foot stack of papers...), the only mention was some sporadic grenade attacks. Nothing else.

But over 400 casualties... plus wounded.
This should be all over every newsstation.
But if this is a cover-up, it would crack open any second.

[MechTau]

Well duh. We've politicized WAR after faking it to get in. America is ****ing pissed with the GOP, and they want to hold on for another 4 years.

[Commissar Elvis]

Winter, agreed. The problem here is that they reported no casualties at all. I think 300 may be quite a stretch, honestly, but the document has the names and units of all the alleged casualties! No one is going to make up 300 soldiers and their units and say they were injured or killed in the explosion; what would be the benefit?

There is, however, a benefit of covering up the fact that a metric assload of our troops were injured or killed when Camp Falcon literally exploded, supposedly due to insurgents using Katyusha rockets (the truck-mounted jobbies that Hezbollah favors), which has also been denied (that they have Katyushas at all, much less used them to cause 400+ casualties).

I'm not going to go around waving this paper and going, "Holy baby Jebus, we've been lied to massively...again!" but on the other hand I just have a gut feeling that there's a grain of truth to the document, especially because of the stuff about RIA Novosti. The Russian media has covered Iraq since before we invaded, and they exposed that initial casualties were much higher than the DoD reported (which they still deny, although I've seen footage of almost as many dead troops from the invasion as the DoD claims were lost in total!).

The dam has burst, though; no one in their right mind, not even the people telling us that "we're making progress," believe that Iraq is any sort of "winnable" at this point. I think this is mainly because they had no goal and didn't know what the f***k they were doing in the first place, but we've filled at least 3000 graves with young Americans before they decided to 'fess up.

I'll point you at Justin Raimondo's piece from today to "wrap it up": http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9904

Goddammit, this is getting depressing.

[Praying Mantidae]

Considering I hadn't even heard of this event until today- And I browse Reuters quite regularly- I'd say the event is being grossly underplayed, at best. At worst, its being covered up.

[Commissar Elvis]

CNN ran a live feed of the massive fire raging in the center of Baghdad for like an hour. We were sitting at the bar watching it live the day it happened. Stuff was exploding left and right; it was obvious big artillery and tank shells were cooking off (and likely blasting depleted uranium all over the place). At one point an explosion so big and so bright that it literally looked like a tactical nuke (including a mushroom cloud!) rocked the place. It was all over the Arab networks (a lot of vidcaps are available on Google Video).

I'm surprised you guys hadn't heard about this, honestly!

[LordDemon]

Since there is much questioning about the casualty numbers, I'm surprised that non-govermental groups haven't started up their own register for casualties. I think it would even be quite simple to see if DoD numbers are way off:

I'd assume that by this point of their life the family of the deceased soldier would be classified as antiwar, as seems to mostly be the case. A group could set up a website, then "advertise" on blogs, antiwar sites etc. This sort of ground level advertisement would propably after a while reach far and wide, specially in current political atmosphere. Given the existance of low level peace groups, most who are questioning the goverments decisions about war I would assume they would want to provide this information.

Now, the relatives should be able to check the site, browse the deceased in a database (information available from DoD to make original database?) by name, time of death and/or some other criterias. If they won't find their loved one listed there, they would have a chance to send in a report to group about him/her to be added to the list. At basic level the information needed would only be name, rank, time of death, with additional information being unit and place of death. Some sort of quarantee would be needed of course, maybe death certificate copy/scan (some part blacked out for privacy reasons?), DoD release naming the deseased or something similar. In addition to this they would need to provice contact information (phone number or e-mail so they can be reached if there are questions/problems.)

The basis is simple. To set up a website would not require that much, then start advertising it in the antiwar circles in the internet, where it propably would spread fast is free. Once the word gets out, one can just see if there are any responses. Maintenance required would be small if the number by DoD would be correct, only new casualties would need to be entered to the database. If the DoD number is way off, it whould be visible quite soon. The only problem is that there is no way to see how many relatives have checked the site, so it would be impossible to determine if the site has been used by those who have lost someone close in the war. Estimation could be made by counting visitors of site (less reliable) and searches in database by different visitors (more reliable) but they are still not a perfect method. Neither of these methods would be perfect, but would provide helpful insight on if the DoD number is accurate or the site just hasn't been visited that much by the target audience.

There would be alternative to start with empty database, and see how much names one gets there to track the visits, but this would require more maintenance. However, this database could later be cross referenced against DoD database, so would be more accurate but would also require more resources to manage. Also the emptiness of the database could discourage some users from entering data who assume it is some sort of scam.

One problem with this scenario is that it assumes a high internet accessibility rate among the families of deceased. This is contradictory to common recruiting targets who are usually ethnic minorities with poor background and (below) average school history. Because of the targeting of recruiting, casualties are propably in this group too(more recruits in the group means more casualties in the group). This however is to some extent adjusted by the high amount of national guard troops deployed, as national guard would be seen as way to fund college and could be seen as service with members of higher internet accessibility in their civilian life.

Hmmm, that turned out to be quite long.
Well, I'm bored at work. Can you tell...
So anyone with interest to this sort of stuff, feel free to set up a database, and advertise in blogs.

[Commissar Elvis]

LD, there are plenty of independent sites like this already, although very few NGOs are operating in Iraq (for obvious reasons). Sites like Global Security, Iraq Body Count, AntiWar.com tracks KIAs, I believe.

Video of "tactical nuke" (it's not, though) exploding in Camp Falcon - http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...21336651131261

It's also the very first issue discussed in Mosaic's 11 October show (although the info is very limited and in some cases based on incorrect initial info) - http://www.linktv.org/mosaic/streams...wDate=20061011

[LordDemon]

Originally Posted by Commissar Elvis

LD, there are plenty of independent sites like this already, although very few NGOs are operating in Iraq (for obvious reasons). Sites like Global Security, Iraq Body Count, AntiWar.com tracks KIAs, I believe.

You would think there would be bigger hazzle about people names not being on those lists. Of course none of them actually try to confirm DoD data, but still you would think they would get mails every now and then asking why isn't Mr.X or Mrs: Y on the list.

Or is it just that majority of those who have lost someone donät check those sites?

[israfel420]

We talked about this in one of my history classes the other day. It is true, the DoD's policy on reporting casualties is in essence an aim at decieving the public. This is an election year after all. Basically, if you are injured, you are immediatly flown out of country so that if you die in Japan or Germany or anywhere outside of Iraq, they don't count you as a casualty of war.

This is scary, but not surprising, our government lies to us on a regular basis.
If you want to do something about it check out my thread I'll be putting up in a minuteentitled "Wear a Green Shirt".