The New York version of Al Jazeera continues to spit on the troops:
In a smear piece titled: “Across America, the Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles”, they re-hash the old reliable “psycho war vet” that was used ad nauseam after the Vietnam War.
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.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/13vets.html?_r=2&hp&oref=login&oref=slogin
A succinct, pointed response to the NYT editor was penned by Thomas Lipscomb, a Senior Fellow at The Heartland Institute. (http://www.heartland.org/)
It reads in part:
Apparently violent veterans are streaming home “across America” from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. So far, out of hundreds of thousands of service personnel who have served there, The New York Times has decided to devote more than 6,000 words beginning with three columns out of five and a color montage above the fold of its Sunday front page to “At least 121” veterans, who happen to be, at best, a fraction of 1% of those who have served.
And the Times piece shows the same carefree contempt for statistical validity Soros’s Johns Hopkins hirelings just got nailed with. The Times claims their sample of “At least 121” veterans makes it possible to “paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.” It’s a “patchwork” all right. A Pentagon spokesperson tried to point out to the reporters that a sample: “lumping together different crimes such as involuntary manslaughter with first-degree homicide” makes it rather hard to draw intelligent conclusions.
Which is probably why there are none in the piece. Instead we get hand-wringing extrapolations like this: “… these killings provide a kind of echo sounding for the profound depths to which some veterans have fallen, whether at the bottom of a downward spiral or in a sudden burst of violence.” “A kind of echo sounding?” “Some veterans?” And the article is full of useful hedge words like “some,” “appear,” “most likely” more common to a gypsy fortune teller than an investigative reporter. Now assuming “some” is more than one and less than 121, that isn’t very helpful, is it? And none of it is statistically relevant enough to reawaken the stigma that veterans of the Vietnam War remember well.
Hat tip to Power Line News:
Link: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/01/019539.php
The NYT is a black hole of nihilism.
Every war has its casualties, physical and psychological, but the Left exploits it for their own acidic agenda. They use body counts and the injuries suffered by returning war veterans as a means for malicious intent. They neither care about the troops nor the noble sacrifice in protecting Western civilization from Islam’s envisioned world Caliphate.
The NYT editor covers his ass by using words like “some,” and “most likely”. This gives the appearance of an accusation without “really” accusing. God, I hate that rag. Between their front-page printing of national secrets, slander against American troops, and blatant hatred of this country, you could swear its being published in Iran.
Kudos to Thomas for staying calm in his letter. As an Iraq War veteran, I wouldn’t be as lenient.