- SACRAMENTO -- Move America
Forward, the nation's largest grassroots pro-troop organization, today
announced that after vetting the numbers cited by The New York Times in
their Sunday, January 13, 2008 story, "Across America, Deadly Echoes
of Foreign Battles," it became clear that the Times had engaged in
demonstrably erroneous and false reporting.
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- It took seven New York Times researchers to find 121
cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in
the United States, or were charged with one, upon returning home to this
country.
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- The Times made the false conclusion that: "Taken
together, they paint the patchwork of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country
trail of death and heartbreak."
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- The Times documentation of 121 potential killings out
of more than 1.5 million veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) and
Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), divided by 6 years of conflict
results in a murder rate of just 1.34 incidents per 100,000 veterans per
year.
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- That murder rate is far lower than the murder rate for
the general population, demonstrating that the experiences of military
service - including having served in Iraq and Afghanistan - actually made
it less likely for returning veterans to commit murder once they returned
home, than the general population.
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- Given a census-estimated population of the United States
of 300,000,000 persons in this country as of October 2006, and FBI-compiled
statistics of 17,399 homicide offenders for 2006, the murder rate of the
general population was 5.80 offenders per 100,000 on average - and a rate
of approximately 7.67 per 100,000 for men.
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- Since all but one of the veterans cited by the Times
who committed a killing in the U.S. was male, the comparable rate is approximately
7.67 incidents of murder per 100,000 people among the general male population,
compared to just 1.34 incidents per 100,000 returning Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans (of both genders).
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- "It's obvious that the New York Times has an agenda
of undermining the missions of our troops in the War on Terror, so much
so that they are willing to resort to demonstrably false statistics to
support their anti-troop bias," said Melanie Morgan, Chairman of Move
America Forward.
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- "The slander of our troops and veterans by the New
York Times is unfortunately all too familiar. We heard this kind of nonsense
about our returning veterans from Vietnam. It's the same insult, different
war.
-
- "Perhaps the shameful staff of The New York Times
has run out of war-time secrets to publish for America's enemies to read,
because now they've resorted to an all-out smear campaign of America's
finest men and women, who have served this country bravely and with distinction,"
Morgan said.
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- In place of hard data to support their premise, The New
York Times was instead forced to devote almost the entire portion of 6,321
word hit-piece to anecdotes of wrongdoing by individual veterans.
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- The New York Times even went so far as to trace back
the phenomenon of murderous veterans to Greek mythology to back up their
assertions of their report.
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- "The real mythology is the reporting by The New
York Times," Move America Forward's Melanie Morgan concluded.
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- Original: http://www.moveamericaforward.org/index.php/MAF/MAFNews
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- 1) ( website:
- http://www.MoveAmericaForward.org/ )
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- http://newsbyus.com/more.php?id=10808_0_1_0_M
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