5.08.2004

Casualties?

People like Kate O'Beirne and Tom DeLay and other mental miscreants have insisted that telling these tales of prisoner abuse will only kill more of our soldiers.

On some points of this, that could be true. But suddenly, we're hearing less of "10 killed here", "6 there", and so on. It's certainly not that US GI deaths have stopped. There have been fatalities in the past 10 days (on all sides). But the facts don't stand behind what the nimbots are saying.

I'm surprised by this. Sure, the US could just be hiding the figures, since there are relatively few journalists in Iraq who are not embedded and heavily vetted through the US military as to what they report. But it would be in the Bush Administration's only screwy self-interest to claim that the reports have driven up attacks on GIs (as a means to get the criticism to die down), while that appears not to be the case.