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01-15-2008, 03:49 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-27-06
Location: DPRK, Democratik People's Republik of Kalifornia
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The New York Times is at it again
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A series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.
Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles
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The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.
Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.
About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.
A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Specialist Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly and then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.
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Full article:
Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles - New York Times
Notice how the NY Slime didn't bother to do a special report on murders committed by illegal immigrants and welfare recipients. That would be "racist."
But they felt the need to report 121 homicides committed by military personel over the last 6 years. That comes out to be an average of 20 homicides committed per year by an active force of 1.42 million personel.
If FDR were president he would have shut down the New York Times.
__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.
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01-15-2008, 04:54 AM
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#2 (permalink)
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Burgomaster
Join Date: 08-02-03
Location: Minneapolis
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Something around 450,000 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans, the murder rate is actually lower than the national average of 5.7 per 100,000.
__________________
The Buck Stops Here
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01-15-2008, 05:14 AM
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#3 (permalink)
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-27-06
Location: DPRK, Democratik People's Republik of Kalifornia
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Yeah but facts never got in the way of a good story for the New York Slimes.
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01-15-2008, 06:19 AM
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#4 (permalink)
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Military Professional
Join Date: 09-27-07
Location: North Carolina
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FOX News picked this up in a Brit Hume article:
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Killing Fields
The New York Times published a lengthy article Sunday alleging that veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are responsible for 121 killings since their return from combat. The Times wrote the veterans have left — "a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak."But the Times did not compare its anecdotal statistics for military personnel against the averages for the general population. Powerline.com reports that the figure of 121 homicides out of a conservative estimate of 700,000 returning veterans over six years works out to a mere fraction of the national average for homicides committed by males aged 18 to 24.
The Times' figure for veterans involved in fatal automobile accidents is also not placed in context with members of the general driving population — who are 12 times more likely to be involved in a fatality than Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
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FOXNews.com - Did Ron Paul Supporters Cross the Line? - Brit Hume | Special Report
No wonder the Times readership is dropping. |
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01-15-2008, 06:39 AM
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#5 (permalink)
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Lord High Hullabalooster
Senior Contributor
Join Date: 11-23-04
Location: Columbia Heights, MN
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ofogs
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And the ink'll stain your buttcrack.
-dale |
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01-15-2008, 11:42 AM
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#6 (permalink)
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Military Professional
Join Date: 08-28-07
Location: Colorado
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Sounds like the voice of experience speaking, Dale 
__________________
If you know the enemy and yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. - Sun Tzu
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01-15-2008, 12:01 PM
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#7 (permalink)
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 12-19-07
Location: india
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Hmm not a proper comparison
To make a more accurate comparison we must take,
1. The total number of combat troops in the US army
2. The total number of young men in the same age group in the general pop
If deaths caused by 1 exceeds deaths caused by 2, we can then conclude that the war has had an effect
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01-15-2008, 12:04 PM
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#8 (permalink)
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Postmaster General
Military Professional
Join Date: 08-20-03
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Democracy is an expensive exercise.
__________________
"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."
I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.
HAKUNA MATATA
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01-15-2008, 12:40 PM
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#9 (permalink)
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Military Professional
Join Date: 10-18-07
Location: Kingston Ontario Canada
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In Canada we have the Toronto Star which manages the absurd for those perpetually lost in the world of left wing stupid-speak. This paper has a reputation for being so revisionist the D Day landings were Allied terrorists attacking peaceful vacationing German citizens.
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01-15-2008, 12:43 PM
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#10 (permalink)
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Military Professional
Join Date: 09-27-07
Location: North Carolina
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bolo121
Hmm not a proper comparison
To make a more accurate comparison we must take,
1. The total number of combat troops in the US army
2. The total number of young men in the same age group in the general pop
If deaths caused by 1 exceeds deaths caused by 2, we can then conclude that the war has had an effect
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Your comparison isn't an accurate one, either. The articles specifically discuss combat veterans, so we do need to look at the number of returning combat veterans, not total combat troops. This is especially true as some will have left the service, so a more accurate ratio would be the killings compared to the all of those returning from the War on Terror.
Second, we cannot say young men only in the age group of the general population, because, after all, there are women in the military.
Interestingly, LTC Grossman's On Combat discusses the issue the NYT raises:
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The data simply shows that in each of these wars [WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War] we gave hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of men weeks, months and years of training on how to kill. Then we sent them to distant lands to fight for us, sometimes for years on end, and when they came home they were less likely to use their deadly skill than non-veterans of the same age and the same sex. The finest killers who ever walked the face of this earth were the boys who came home from World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and yet they were less likely to use those skills than a non-veteran. The reason is clear: Combined with learning to kill, they acquired a steely warrior discipline-and that is the safeguard.
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01-15-2008, 13:55 PM
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#11 (permalink)
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Patron
Join Date: 10-08-07
Location: God Bless Ohio, USA
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Ny Times Treason
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01-15-2008, 14:20 PM
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#12 (permalink)
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Distant Deeps or Skies
Senior Contributor
Join Date: 07-19-05
Location: North London, UK
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Did they even attempt to make a proportional analysis? Jeez.
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HD Ready?
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01-15-2008, 18:40 PM
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#13 (permalink)
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WAB Bartender
Defense Professional
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Join Date: 11-24-04
Location: Vacaville, CA.
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Peters fires back:
Quote:
SMEARING SOLDIERS
By RALPH PETERS
January 15, 2008 -- THE New York Times is trashing our troops again. With no new "atrocities" to report from Iraq for many a month, the limping Gray Lady turned to the home front. Front and center, above the fold, on the front page of Sunday's Times, the week's feature story sought to convince Americans that combat experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan are turning troops into murderers when they come home.
Heart-wringing tales of madness and murder not only made the front page, but filled two entire centerfold pages and spilled onto a fourth.
The Times did get one basic fact right: Returning vets committed or are charged with 121 murders in the United States since our current wars began.
Had the Times' "journalists" and editors bothered to put those figures in context - which they carefully avoided doing - they would've found that the murder rate that leaves them so aghast means that our vets are five times less likely to commit a murder than their demographic peers.
The Times' public editor, Clark Hoyt, should crunch the numbers. I'm even willing to spot the Times a few percentage points (either way). But the hard statistics from the Justice Department tell a far different tale from the Times' anti-military propaganda.
A very conservative estimate of how many different service members have passed through Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait since 2003 is 350,000 (and no, that's not double-counting those with repeated tours of duty).
Now consider the Justice Department's numbers for murders committed by all Americans aged 18 to 34 - the key group for our men and women in uniform. To match the homicide rate of their peers, our troops would've had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007.
In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent.
Yes, the young Americans who join our military are (by self- selection) superior by far to the average stay-at-home. Still, these numbers are pretty impressive, when you consider that we're speaking of men and women trained in the tools of war, who've endured the acute stresses of fighting insurgencies and who are physically robust (rather unlike the stick-limbed weanies the Times prefers).
All in all, the Times' own data proves my long-time contention that we have the best behaved and most ethical military in history.
Now, since the folks at the Times are terribly busy and awfully important, let's make it easy for them to do the research themselves (you can do it, too - in five minutes).
Just Google "USA Murder Statistics." The top site to appear will be the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics. Click on it, then go to "Demographic Trends." Click on "Age." For hard numbers on the key demographics, click on the colored graphs.
Run the numbers yourself, based upon the demographic percentages of murders per every 100,000 people. Then look at the actual murder counts.
Know what else you'll learn? In 2005 alone, 8,718 young Americans from the same age group were murdered in this country. That's well over twice as many as the number of troops killed in all our foreign missions since 2001. Maybe military service not only prevents you from committing crimes, but also keeps you alive?
Want more numbers? In the District of Columbia, our nation's capital, the murder rate for the 18-34 group was about 14 times higher than the rate of murders allegedly committed by returning vets.
And that actually understates the District's problem, since many DC-related murders spill across into Prince George's County (another Democratic Party stronghold).
In DC, an 18-34 population half the size of the total number of troops who've served in our wars overseas committed the lion's share of 992 murders between 2003 and 2007 - the years mourned by the Times as proving that our veterans are psychotic killers.
Aren't editors supposed to ask tough questions on feature stories? Are the Times' editors so determined to undermine the public's support for our troops that they'll violate the most-basic rules of journalism, such as putting numbers in context?
Answer that one for yourself.
Of course, all of this is part of the disgraceful left-wing campaign to pretend sympathy with soldiers - the Times column gushes crocodile tears - while portraying our troops as clichéd maniacs from the Oliver Stone fantasies that got lefties so self-righteously excited 20 years ago (See? We were right to dodge the draft . . .).
And it's not going to stop. Given the stakes in an election year, the duplicity will only intensify.
For an upcoming treat, we'll get the film "Stop-Loss," starring, as always, young punks who never served in uniform as soldiers. This left-wing diatribe argues that truly courageous troops would refuse to return to Iraq - at a time when soldiers and Marines continue to re-enlist at record rates, expecting to plunge back into the fight.
Those on the left will never accept that the finest young Americans are those who risk their lives defending freedom. Sen. John Kerry summed up the views of the left perfectly when he disparaged our troops as too stupid to do anything but sling hamburgers.
And The New York Times will never forgive our men and women in uniform for their infuriating successes in Iraq.
Ralph Peters' latest book is "Wars of Blood and Faith."
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__________________
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
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01-15-2008, 19:17 PM
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#14 (permalink)
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Contributor
Join Date: 03-07-07
Location: New York City or Hainan, China
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I actually figured out the crime rate proportional to the numbers by myself quite easily when I read this and I'm definitely not the smartest here, but what's your opinion of the average American reading this. Do you guys think the average subscriber to the New York Times will realize the samething as us or what?
__________________
Those who can't change become extinct.
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01-15-2008, 20:28 PM
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#15 (permalink)
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Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-27-06
Location: DPRK, Democratik People's Republik of Kalifornia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wkllaw
I actually figured out the crime rate proportional to the numbers by myself quite easily when I read this and I'm definitely not the smartest here, but what's your opinion of the average American reading this. Do you guys think the average subscriber to the New York Times will realize the samething as us or what?
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That average New York Slimes reader? No. They will see this as the war unleashing a horde of mass murderers on our home soil. And George Bush is at fault.
The average Americans don't read New York Slimes, and certainly don't take it seriously. |
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