E-mail on military deaths is shaky on facts

[unhappycamper]

E-mail on military deaths is shaky on facts
By Chuck Vinch - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Mar 25, 2008 19:42:38 EDT

A spam e-mail making the rounds in the military community serves as a reminder that facts can be flexible when they are launched anonymously into the vast void of cyberspace.

The e-mail, entitled, “Some very interesting statistics: Military losses, 1980 through 2006,” states that more U.S. service members died on active duty during the eight years of the Clinton administration, when there were no major U.S. military conflicts, than in the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, during which the military was fighting two large-scale wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The e-mail offers year-by-year U.S. military death totals from all causes — operations, illness, accidents, suicides, etc. — from 1980 through 2006.

The data supposedly were taken from a periodically updated Congressional Research Service report on the subject, which in turn is based on statistics compiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower and Data Center.

There’s just one problem: The figures listed in the email are wrong. They vary markedly from the figures published in the cited CRS source document.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/03/military_deaths_email_032508w/



uhc comment: How Rovian is this?

[Catch22Dem]

1. The link is no good, UHC

I'd love to read the article AND keep it handy for when I receive that e-mail though.

ON EDIT: The link is fine, but it doesn't parse correctly when posted on DU. You have to manually add a slash to the end of it when you go to the Army Times. Or you could just go to the Army Times front page.

[unhappycamper]

2. These guys use something called dynamic addressing which sometimes screws up the links.

The top link works properly.