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Army suicides continue to increase

fff

Well-known member
The number of Army suicides increased again last year, amid the most violent year yet in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Two defense officials said Thursday that 108 troops committed suicide in 2007, six more than the previous year. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the full report on the deaths wasn't being released until later Thursday.

About a quarter of the deaths occurred in Iraq.

The overall toll was the highest in many years, and it was unclear when, if ever, it was previously that high. Immediately available Army records go back only to 1990 and the figure then was lower — at 102 — for that year as well as 1991.

The 108 confirmed deaths in 2007 among active duty soldier and National Guard and Reserve troops that had been activated was lower than previously feared. Preliminary figures released in January showed as many as 121 troops may have killed themselves, but a number of the deaths were still being investigated then and have since been determined to have resulted from other causes, the officials said.

Suicides have been rising almost steadily during the five-year-old war in Iraq and nearly seven-year-old war in Afghanistan.

The 108 deaths last year followed 102 in 2006, 85 in 2005 and 67 in 2004.

The increases come despite a host of efforts to improve the mental health of a force stressed by long and repeated tours of duty. Increasing the strain on the force last year was the extension of deployments to 15 months from 12 months, a practice that is being terminated this year.

More U.S. troops died in hostilities in 2007 than in any of the previous years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Overall violence increased in Afghanistan with a Taliban resurgence and overall deaths increased in Iraq, even as violence there declined in the second half of the year.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080529/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/military_suicides
 

aplusmnt

Well-known member
Typical liberal sensationalizing of facts to further an agenda.

You want to be fair and accurate then you need to look at more statistics than just your simple cut and paste

First off we only have 18 years worth of data and there has been peaks and lows. Before the peak was 102 in 1990 and now it is 108 in 2007.

But to be fair you need to look at the size of the military during those year spans. I am almost sure their was more active military in 2007 than there was in 1990. If you look at the number of suicides per 100,000 soldiers the percentage of those killing themselves would most likely be lower. If you care to know then do the research.

Then to be fair you have to look at how this relates to the nation as a whole. Do more soldiers kill themselves than do say your average 20 to 34 year old working a 9 to 5 job? Any year I have seen the military has a lower suicide rate per capita than the average non military peer.

I am not going to spend to much time googling to prove my point because you never seem to know the truth anyways. But I will give you a quick example of how slanted an article like you pasted can be.


In 2003, 24 soldiers deployed to Kuwait and Iraq committed suicide - a rate of 17.3 per 100,000. The overall Army suicide rate during the same time period was 12.8 per 100,000 soldiers. This compares to the Army's rate of 12.2 for 2003 and 11.9 from 1995 to 2002.

Despite the spike, officials said these figures remain lower than the national average of 21.5 per 100,000 for males ages 20 to 34. This is the age bracket for most U.S. soldiers in Iraq.


All in all, a soldier is more likely to have killed himself if he never joined the armed forces and never went to Iraq than if he served in the military!

Just another example of how Liberal media tells half truths or never tell the rest of the story so they can push their liberal agenda, and how the Kool-Aid drinkers like fff eat it up and swarm the Internet to cut and paste it on message boards, while they never really understand the true perspective of any of it. :roll:
 

hopalong

Well-known member
kolanuraven said:
This is NOT about Hillary, McCain, Liberals or the media......this is a DAMN SHAME all around.

Very true, except when the liberals like fff use data to skew opinions about an agenda to degrade someone or something.
 

fff

Well-known member
aplusmnt said:
Typical liberal sensationalizing of facts to further an agenda.

You want to be fair and accurate then you need to look at more statistics than just your simple cut and paste

First off we only have 18 years worth of data and there has been peaks and lows. Before the peak was 102 in 1990 and now it is 108 in 2007.

But to be fair you need to look at the size of the military during those year spans. I am almost sure their was more active military in 2007 than there was in 1990. If you look at the number of suicides per 100,000 soldiers the percentage of those killing themselves would most likely be lower. If you care to know then do the research.

Then to be fair you have to look at how this relates to the nation as a whole. Do more soldiers kill themselves than do say your average 20 to 34 year old working a 9 to 5 job? Any year I have seen the military has a lower suicide rate per capita than the average non military peer.

I am not going to spend to much time googling to prove my point because you never seem to know the truth anyways. But I will give you a quick example of how slanted an article like you pasted can be.


In 2003, 24 soldiers deployed to Kuwait and Iraq committed suicide - a rate of 17.3 per 100,000. The overall Army suicide rate during the same time period was 12.8 per 100,000 soldiers. This compares to the Army's rate of 12.2 for 2003 and 11.9 from 1995 to 2002.

Despite the spike, officials said these figures remain lower than the national average of 21.5 per 100,000 for males ages 20 to 34. This is the age bracket for most U.S. soldiers in Iraq.


All in all, a soldier is more likely to have killed himself if he never joined the armed forces and never went to Iraq than if he served in the military!

Just another example of how Liberal media tells half truths or never tell the rest of the story so they can push their liberal agenda, and how the Kool-Aid drinkers like fff eat it up and swarm the Internet to cut and paste it on message boards, while they never really understand the true perspective of any of it. :roll:

Spin, spin, spin. Perhaps you'll like this report better. I'll make some comments in italics.

The number of U.S. soldiers committing suicide rose again last year, according to a U.S. Army report released Thursday, despite the military's heightened efforts to encourage troops to seek care.

Note - this is from a US Army report. It's not some left wing kook sight. THE US ARMY reported

At least 115 active duty soldiers, National Guardsmen and reservists committed suicide in 2007 compared to 102 the previous year, the report found. Another two incidents are still under investigation, the military said. The Army counted 935 reported suicide attempts.

Note - 113 MORE active duty soldiers killed themselves last year than the year before. And that's active duty. If you read the newspapers, you'll see many more who have left the service have killed themselves within a year.

The study found a "significant relationship" between the risk of suicide to the number of days a soldier serves in Iraq and Afghanistan. About one-quarter died while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, the report found.

Note the bolded portion.

The largest percentage of suicides occurred during the first three months of a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, the report found. The largest percentage of suicide attempts came during the second quarter of deployment.

The numbers mark a 20-year high for military suicide rates, which began rising shortly after the Iraq war in 2003. The military has increasingly tried to address mental health issues, countering the view that they reflect a weak soldier.

Note -This is a US Army report. "a 20-year high for military suicide rates" and you want to spin it! Shame on you.

Some troops have said they fear seeking mental health treatment because it could mar their military careers. To address that, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced earlier this month that troops would no longer be penalized when applying for security clearances if they received mental health treatment for combat stress or other work-related stresses.

"We have no higher priority in the Department of Defense, apart from the war itself, than taking care of our men and women in uniform who have been wounded — who have both visible and unseen wounds," Gates said.

But the military's health care system has struggled to keep up with the new demand on its mental health systems.

Note - it was going to be a walk in the park, a piece of cake, welcome us with open arms you know, so we didn't worry about little things like health care for vets.

During a recent American Psychiatric Association annual meeting in Washington, Col. Elspeth C. Ritchie, a psychiatry consultant to the Army's surgeon general, pleaded with mental health care providers to consider joining the military.

"We're having a hard time trying to recruit psychiatrists," Ritchie told the meeting.

U.S. troops began serving 15-month deployments in Iraq to support the surge strategy, which called for roughly 30,000 more troops. Last year, 902 troops were killed in Iraq, making it the deadliest year of the war. There now are about 154,000 troops in Iraq.

The report found that combat stress was a factor, concluding that 20 percent of those who committed suicide had some kind of anxiety disorder, including post-traumatic stress. Nearly two-thirds had served in either Iraq of Afghanistan.

Troops seeking care have often served multiple deployments in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Besides the stress of combat, multiple tours put stress on families. Indeed, the report found that half of those who committed suicide were having family or relationship problems.

Note - Multipile tours, lack of rest between tours, intensify battlefield stress. This is what the Bush Administration has done for the fighting men and women of the US military. You want to defend them, go ahead. It's not a surprise to most of us.

Of those who committed suicide, six were female, the report found. Fifty-three percent were under the age of 25, while 57 percent were married.

Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle, the deputy chief of staff for personnel, said earlier this year that 580 soldiers had committed suicide since October 2001, when U.S. troops first entered Afghanistan.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/257/story/38915.html
 

Sandhusker

Well-known member
kolanuraven said:
This is NOT about Hillary, McCain, Liberals or the media......this is a DAMN SHAME all around.

Unfortunately, it is one of the by-products of war and is to be expected. This isn't something new, and nobody should be presenting it as such. I've never been to war, but it is extremely traumatic, whether it is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Germany, etc... and suicides are part of the deal along with dead and disabled. It's another of those considerations that should not be taken lightly before our leaders decide to send our troops to war.

You damn liberals need to understand what war is about and quit whining and moaning when the expected things happen - and then want to get out. If libs. didn't want people to die, get legs blown off, innocents killed, friendly fire incidents, etc.... they never should of voted for war in the first place, because - hellloooo, that's what happens in war.
 

fff

Well-known member
Sandhusker said:
kolanuraven said:
This is NOT about Hillary, McCain, Liberals or the media......this is a DAMN SHAME all around.

Unfortunately, it is one of the by-products of war and is to be expected. This isn't something new, and nobody should be presenting it as such. I've never been to war, but it is extremely traumatic, whether it is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Germany, etc... and suicides are part of the deal along with dead and disabled. It's another of those considerations that should not be taken lightly before our leaders decide to send our troops to war.

You damn liberals need to understand what war is about and quit whining and moaning when the expected things happen - and then want to get out. If libs. didn't want people to die, get legs blown off, innocents killed, friendly fire incidents, etc.... they never should of voted for war in the first place, because - hellloooo, that's what happens in war.

Where's your disdain for an Administration that lied, hid facts, twisted the truth as an excuse to go to war with a country that was no threat? Obviously, more Senators should have stood up to Bush. But they weren't told the entire truth. They based their vote on information they received from what had always been a reliable source, the White House. Who would have thought the President of the United States would work so hard to get so many Americans killed, drive us into debt, lower our standing in the world, damage our economy? But Bush has been a surprise to almost everyone.

* The Bush administration was gunning for Iraq within days of the 9/11 attacks, dispatching a former CIA director, on a flight authorized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, to find evidence for a bizarre theory that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. (Note: See also Richard Clarke and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on this point).

* Bush decided by February 2002, at the latest, that he was going to remove Saddam by hook or by crook. (Yes, we reported that at the time).

* White House officials, led by Dick Cheney, began making the case for war in August 2002, in speeches and reports that not only were wrong, but also went well beyond what the available intelligence said at that time, and contained outright fantasies and falsehoods. Indeed, some of that material was never vetted with the intelligence agencies before it was peddled to the public.

* Dissenters, or even those who voiced worry about where the policy was going, were ignored, excluded or punished. (Note: See Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill, Joseph Wilson and all of the State Department 's Arab specialists and much of its intelligence bureau).

* The Bush administration didn't even want to produce the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs that's justly received so much criticism since. The White House thought it was unneeded. It actually was demanded by Congress and slapped together in a matter of weeks before the congressional votes to authorize war on Iraq.

* The October 2002 NIE was flawed, no doubt. But it contained dissents questioning the extent of Saddam's WMD programs, dissents that were buried in the report. Doubts and dissents were then stripped from the publicly released, unclassified version of the NIE.

* The core of the administration's case for war was not just that Saddam was developing WMDs, but also that, unchecked, he might give them to terrorists to attack the United States. Remember smoking guns and mushroom clouds? Inconveniently, the CIA had determined just the opposite: Saddam would attack the United States only if he concluded a U.S. attack on him was unavoidable. He'd give WMD to Islamist terrorists only "as a last chance to exact revenge."

* The Bush administration relied heavily on an Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who had been found to be untrustworthy by the State Department and the CIA. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were given millions, and produced "defectors" whose tales of WMD sites and terrorist training were false, fanciful and bogus. But the information was fed directly to senior officials and included in official White House documents.

* The same INC-supplied "intelligence" used in the White House propaganda effort (you got that bit right, Scott) also was fed to dozens of U.S. and foreign news organizations.

* It all culminated in a speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 making the case against Saddam. Virtually every major allegation Powell made turned out later to be wrong. It would have been even worse had not Powell and his team thrown out even more shaky "intelligence" that Cheney's office repeatedly tried to stuff into the speech.

* The Bush administration tried to link Saddam to al Qaida and, by implication, to the 9/11 attacks. Officials repeatedly pushed the CIA for information on such links, and a seperate intel shop was set up under Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith to find "proof" of such ties. Neither the CIA nor anyone else ever found anything resembling an operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* An exhaustive review of Saddam Hussein's regime's own documents, released in March 2008, found no operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaida.

* The Bush administration failed to plan for the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, as we were perhaps the first to report. The White House ignored stacks of intelligence reports, some now available in partially unclassified form, warning before the war about the possibilities for insurgency, ethnic warfare, social chaos and the like.

http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/nationalsecurity/2008/05/what-happened.html
 

aplusmnt

Well-known member
You are missing the bigger picture here! More 20 to 34 year old men kill themselves every year in America per capita than soldiers do.

How hard is it for you to understand that the suicide rate is less within the Military and in Iraq than it is back home in the U.S.?

A story and Heading very well could have read!

"Military Serving in Iraq have a lesser Suicide rate than civilians back home"

You want to talk about spin, spinning the figures of suicide to make it look like the Iraq war is causing an suicide epidemic while all along the average soldier is safer from Suicide fatality in Iraq than if he was back home working at the local McDonald's :mad:
 

hopalong

Well-known member
aplusmnt said:
You are missing the bigger picture here! More 20 to 34 year old men kill themselves every year in America per capita than soldiers do.

How hard is it for you to understand that the suicide rate is less within the Military and in Iraq than it is back home in the U.S.?

A story and Heading very well could have read!

"Military Serving in Iraq have a lesser Suicide rate than civilians back home"

You want to talk about spin, spinning the figures of suicide to make it look like the Iraq war is causing an suicide epidemic while all along the average soldier is safer from Suicide fatality in Iraq than if he was back home working at the local McDonald's :mad:

What are you suggesting that fff would ever skew the facts to make herself look like she was partial Only reporting the true facts? Or to intentionally mislead anyone by supplying disinformation?
The articles that she posts 99% of the time are from very liberal sources and like all such sources only present the facts that they wany you to believe or she deletes anything that she doesn't want anyone to see that might hurt her agenda :roll: :roll:
 

don

Well-known member
actually i do. maybe you should and you'd realize that that is one of the most ignorant things you could say. the way you addressed the sacrifices of others in such a blase manner shows a lack of understanding. the death of any young person is only a waste.
 

Sandhusker

Well-known member
don said:
actually i do. maybe you should and you'd realize that that is one of the most ignorant things you could say. the way you addressed the sacrifices of others in such a blase manner shows a lack of understanding. the death of any young person is only a waste.

You've got the understanding problem. My post wasn't about the sacrifices being made. I was simply explaining that it is a given that terrible things happen in war, and if you don't want those terrible things to happen, don't go to war. When the libs voted for war, they should of known this would happen, as it has in every war there's ever been. It's rediculous to authorize war and then be aghast when people actually die. Guess they had no idea what the hell they were getting into ..... again.
What visionarys.
 

kolanuraven

Well-known member
Sandhusker said:
don said:
actually i do. maybe you should and you'd realize that that is one of the most ignorant things you could say. the way you addressed the sacrifices of others in such a blase manner shows a lack of understanding. the death of any young person is only a waste.

You've got the understanding problem. My post wasn't about the sacrifices being made. I was simply explaining that it is a given that terrible things happen in war, and if you don't want those terrible things to happen, don't go to war. When the libs voted for war, they should of known this would happen, as it has in every war there's ever been. Guess they had no idea what the hell they were getting into ..... again.
What visionarys.


Guess you don't proof read either do ya????
 

aplusmnt

Well-known member
Due to fff keeping quiet we can assume she googled her butt off and could not discredit the fact that Soldiers commit suicide at a lesser rate than the average 20 to 34 year old American male. Because we know if she could have proved me wrong she sure would have.

Let this be a lesson to all of us on how the Liberals like to sensationalize facts to turn them into news that supports their agenda's. Just sad that they use the deaths of our Soldiers in their propaganda. :mad:
 

fff

Well-known member
aplusmnt said:
Due to fff keeping quiet we can assume she googled her butt off and could not discredit the fact that Soldiers commit suicide at a lesser rate than the average 20 to 34 year old American male. Because we know if she could have proved me wrong she sure would have.

Let this be a lesson to all of us on how the Liberals like to sensationalize facts to turn them into news that supports their agenda's. Just sad that they use the deaths of our Soldiers in their propaganda. :mad:

Tell me why if soldiers commit suicide at a lesser rate than other American males of the same age, that has anything to do with the fact that the number of suicides has been increasing every year among American military members as mentioned in the article?

Your "lesson" is spin, nothing else. The figures are there.
 
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