Only three of the original brave seven remain alive and healthy

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by Dave Lindorff | Sep 15 2007 - 10:39am |
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/9942

Mysterious Deaths of War Critics

By the way, speaking of taking us all for stupid, how many people think that the death of three enlisted men in a truck crash in Iraq yesterday--three enlisted men who happen to have been among the seven who wrote a powerful op-ed article only a week ago in the New York Times calling the war a failure and saying the solution is for American troops to go home--was an "accident"?

At the time their piece was published, one of the seven had already been injured in the head by a sniper bullet. Now only three of the original brave seven remain alive and healthy.

The mother of one of the dead soldiers is demanding a full and open investigation into their bizarre deaths. Congress must join in that demand.

Sure, coincidences happen, but this is powerful strange. Half a million or more Americans in uniform have passed through the hell of Iraq and only some 4000 have been killed. That's roughly 0.8 percent. So you have a 0.8 percent chance of being killed in Iraq, and here we have three guys killed, all of whom had the courage to very publicly criticize the war.

At the very least, somebody needs to check who sent them out on that last mission together, and follow that order right up the chain of command.

As the paper that published their article, the New York Times really has an obligation to chase this story down to the bitter end.

:tinfoilhat:

to do their bidding. Remember Pat Tillman?

"By the way, speaking of taking us all for stupid, how many people think that the death of three enlisted men in a truck crash in Iraq yesterday--three enlisted men who happen to have been among the seven who wrote a powerful op-ed article only a week ago in the New York Times calling the war a failure and saying the solution is for American troops to go home--was an "accident"?"

For starters, it was TWO men killed, not three. The crash didn't happen yesterday, it was several days ago. And the NYT op-ed wasn't last week, it was almost a month ago. When you get your facts this wrong, you really owe it to your readers to not even pretend like you're conveying real world info.

"Sure, coincidences happen, but this is powerful strange. Half a million or more Americans in uniform have passed through the hell of Iraq and only some 4000 have been killed. That's roughly 0.8 percent. So you have a 0.8 percent chance of being killed in Iraq, and here we have three guys killed, all of whom had the courage to very publicly criticize the war."

Again, two, not three. Furthermore, that math is bogus. Try running the numbers for COMBAT troops, as opposed to all troops--only about 25% of the US forces in Iraq are frontline troops. Second, try comparing that percentage against all the combat troops who've spoke out against the war, of which there are a lot. The simple odds were that sooner or later, somebody who'd spoken out about the war was going to die. In this case, you had a vehicle accident which killed 7 soldiers and injured 10 more. Sure it's improbable, but the thing about probability is that if you wait long enough, the improbable not only becomes probable, it usually happens.

This piece is badly researched innuendo mongering, nothing more.

That's the only explanation I can come up with for having so many "facts" wrong in what he wrote.

The War as They Saw It
hot document
Bonnie Goldstein
http://www.slate.com/id/2173893/
Posted Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007, at 1:22 PM ET

Two military press releases (below and on the following page) describe the deaths of seven soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division in a truck-rollover accident outside Baghdad earlier this week. Similar notices appear almost daily on the Pentagon Web site. What's unusual about these is that just last month, two of the seven men killed, Staff Sgt. Yance Gray and Sgt. Omar Mora, co-authored and published (with five other soldiers) a controversial opinion piece in the New York Times detailing their perspectives on the Iraq conflict under the headline, "The War as We Saw It." Yesterday the Times followed up on the op-ed with a death announcement. (Click here to read a tribute by Slate's Fred Kaplan.)http://www.slate.com/id/2173860/

Gray and Mora both leave widows and small daughters. The other soldiers killed in the crash while "supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom" (Page 2) were Staff Sgt. Gregory Rivera-Santiago, Sgt. Michael C. Hardegree, Sgt. Nicholas J. Patterson, Spc. Ari D. Brown-Weeks, and Spc. Steven R. Elrod. They were all under 30.

Collective America growing a spine would go a long way toward surprising me.

There's nothing to see here.

:sarcasm: