This week the New York Times started a series called "War Torn: Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles." Their first 6,253 word installment creates a negative impression of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and, by extension, the mission they served. Excerpt:
Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: "Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife." Pierre, S.D.: "Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress." Colorado Springs: "Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring."
Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.
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.
On and on the article goes (it's nine pages on the web, so printing in the paper took a considerable amount of ink) filled with anecdotes about the 121 alleged crimes. Yet, the Times' approach is astonishingly unsystematic and filled with little useful information for the reader. The stories are sad and no doubt some returning soldiers and veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, but where's the context for this story? How does this report of a "cross-country trail of death and heartbreak" compare overall to the general United States and the murder rate of young men in this age group? Apparently, the Times didn't bother to ask themselves that question or refused to print the numbers. Marc Danziger checks the math and spots an obvious problem. Among returning soldiers, Danziger finds that the Times' 121 murders represent about a 7.08/100,000 rate. Turning to Department of Justice statistics, the US offender rate for homicide in the 18-24 year old range is 26.5/110,000 and for 25-24 its 13.5/100,000. Antimedia likewise crunches some numbers and finds that the rate is smaller than among the civilian population.
Note also that the national rate of 27 homicides per 100,000 is an annual rate, but the Times' 121 alleged crimes occurred over a six year period. So based on the Times' numbers, the rate of homicides by military personnel is only a fraction of the homicide rate for other Americans between 18 and 24. The Times' nine pages neglects that fact. We can see now that the anecdotes have little context and, in fact, the 121 cases of physical violence by vets are a small fraction of a percent of hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. The Times' clumsy effort to disparage our veterans and discredit the war is stunning.
UPDATE: More from John Hinderaker and Bruce Kesler. Plus, the Army responds.
UPDATE: Phillip Carter isn't happy with the New York Times vets-as-murders story: "So, basically, the reporters went trolling on Lexis-Nexis and other databases to find 'murder' within the same paragraph as 'veteran' or 'soldier,' and built a front-page story around that research. They compared the pre-war numbers to the post-war numbers and found that, voila!, there's a difference. And then it looks like they cherry-picked the best anecdotes out of that research (including the ones where they could get interviews and photos) to craft a narrative which fit the data."
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