Words, words… words!
A while back, there was a story in circulation which claimed that combat death stats were severely underestimated by a policy in which “combat deaths” are only those who are dead at the scene of action, and others who expire thereafter are not included in the counts, whether that death occurs on the way to local hospital, later on the way to Germany, the US, or wherever.
But there’s more. It seems that we have a number of non-citizens in our armed forces (principally ground troops), most of whom are from Central America. These people have been recruited with the promise that upon completion of their hitches they will be granted US citizenship automatically (although this begs the question of what exactly is a “US citizen” if it may apply to someone who is not a citizen of a particular State). It is also claimed that deaths among these troops are not counted, either.
And still more. There are apparently something on the order of 30,000 mercenary “contractors” under arms (out of over 100,000 total “contractors”, most of whom are in construction, food service and various other logistical support areas), and the dead among these also are not counted.
As one might expect, these claims were denied, ignored, or refused comment by both military and civilian government offices, and I have not seen much repetition of them… of course, one sees little repetition of the stories regarding large numbers of apparent facts regarding election fraud, strange ocurrences on 9/11, and so on.
These contortions of words towards newspeak is remarkably consistent with other similar ones, for example “unemployment” figures in which those who have been out of work for more than six months are no longer “unemployed” and consequently are not included in statistics.
… and let us not forget the coinage of entirely new terminology, such as the “enemy combatant” who is not only not a “prisoner of war” but may be any person so “deemed” by the UNitary Executive or his designated assistants, and may therefore become a recipient of “aggressive interrogation” which although it may be differentiated from “torture” is immaterial inasmuch as neither the Geneva Convention nor the US Constitution applies to such person or persons.
Doubleplusungood?
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