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antiwar, New York Times, Support our troops, War on Terror

New York Times’ smear certainly wasn’t an accident: Ralph Peters

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Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters’ column in the New York Post this morning The New ‘Lepers’ tells of what motivated the New York Times to smear our troops this past Sunday. While “crazed” killers and criminals within the ranks of veterans and current military are few compared to America’s civilian populace, the Times morphed beyond the political as it willfully failed to acknowledge that fact for all this War on Terror:

I’VE had a huge response to Tuesday’s column about The New York Times’ obscene bid to smear veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan as mad killers. Countless readers seem to be wondering: Why did the paper do it?

Well, in the Middle Ages, lepers had to carry bells on pain of death to warn the uninfected they were coming. One suspects that the Times would like our military veterans to do the same.

The purpose of Sunday’s instantly notorious feature “alerting” the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as “unclean” — as the new lepers who can’t be trusted amid uninfected Americans.

In the more than six years since 9/11, the Times has never run a feature story half as long on any of the hundreds of heroes who’ve served our country — those who’ve won medals of honor, distinguished service crosses, Navy crosses, silver stars or bronze stars with a V device (for valor) [Editor — Actually, more than 4,000 of our nation’s top six medals for the heroism of our troops have been awarded since 9/11, as I detailed on this web site on October 20, 2007].

But the Times put a major investigative effort into the “sensational” story that 121 returning vets had committed capital offenses (of course, 20 percent of the cases cited involved manslaughter charges stemming from drunken driving, not first- or second-degree murder … ).
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The Times is trying to make you fear our veterans (Good Lord, if your daughter marries one, she’s bound to be beaten to death!). And to convince you that our military would be a dreadful place for your sons and daughters, a death-machine that would turn them into incurable psychopaths.

To a darkly humorous degree, all this reflects the Freudian terrors leftists feel when confronted with men who don’t have concave chests. But it goes far beyond that.

Pretending to pity tormented veterans (vets don’t want our pity — they want our respect), the Times’ feature was an artful example of hate-speech disguised as a public service.

The image we all were supposed to take away from that story was of hopelessly damaged, victimized, infected human beings who’ve become outcasts from civilized society. The Times cast our vets as freaks from a slasher flick.

The hard left’s hatred of our military has deteriorated from a political stance into a pathology: The only good soldier is a dead soldier who can be wielded as a statistic (out of context again). Or a deserter who complains bitterly that he didn’t join the Army to fight … READ THE REST.

Without boring you with my full resume, I am also U.S. Army retired and served as a Military Policeman during much of the same period as LTC Peters goes on to describe. Yes, there was crime yet the rates were but a fraction of that of the civilian world. Nearly all served with honor and today’s troops are no different.

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New York Times, Support our troops

New York Times smears our troops across America, again

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Our troops may not make our newspapers or TV shows for all they have done in this War on Terror yet they are making history and us proud.

Yet the New York Times hates America’s troops, has used the names of our honored dead, tossed the heroism of both the living and the dead aside for six years, and smeared their character at every opportunity. Sunday, they did it again.

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Not once in their 6,300 word article Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles did they place into context the 121 murders, alleged murders, and suicides they sited. Instead, the Times insinuated our troops are nothing but a bunch of crazed killers.

John Hinderacker at Power Line exposed the Times’ sorry excuse for journalism yesterday when he wrote:

Now put yourself in the place of a newspaper editor. Suppose you are asked to evaluate whether your paper should run a long article on a nationwide epidemic of murders committed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan–a crime wave that, your reporter suggests, constitutes a “cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.” Suppose that the reporter who proposes to write the article says it will be a searing indictment of the U.S. military’s inadequate attention to post-traumatic stress disorder. Suppose further that you are not a complete idiot.

Given that last assumption, I’m pretty sure your first question will be: “How does the murder rate among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan compare to the murder rate for young American men generally?” Remarkably, this is a question the New York Times did not think to ask. Or, if the Times asked the question and figured out the answer, the paper preferred not to report it.

As of 2005, the homicide rate for Americans aged 18-24, the cohort into which most soldiers fall, was around 27 per 100,000. (The rate for men in that age range would be much higher, of course, since men commit around 88% of homicides. But since most soldiers are also men, I gave civilians the benefit of the doubt and considered gender a wash.)

Next we need to know how many servicemen have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan. A definitive number is no doubt available, but the only hard figure I’ve seen is that as of last October, moe than 500,000 U.S. Army personnel had served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Other sources peg the total number of personnel from all branches of the military who have served in the two theaters much higher, e.g. 750,000, 650,000 as of February 2007, or 1,280,000. For the sake of argument, let’s say that 700,000 soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors have returned to the U.S. from service in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Do the math: the 121 alleged instances of homicide identified by the Times, out of a population of 700,000, works out to a rate of 17 per 100,000–quite a bit lower than the overall national rate of around 27.

But wait! The national rate of 27 homicides per 100,000 is an annual rate, whereas the Times’ 121 alleged crimes were committed over a period of six years. Which means that, as far as the Times’ research shows, the rate of homicides committed by military personnel who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan is only a fraction of the homicide rate for other Americans aged 18 to 24. Somehow, the Times managed to publish nine pages of anecdotes about the violence wreaked by returning servicemen without ever mentioning this salient fact.

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters put it this way, this morning in the New York Post:

Aren’t editors supposed to ask tough questions on feature stories? Are the Times’ editors so determined to undermine the public’s support for our troops that they’ll violate the most-basic rules of journalism, such as putting numbers in context? Answer that one for yourself.

Of course, all of this is part of the disgraceful left-wing campaign to pretend sympathy with soldiers — the Times column gushes crocodile tears — while portraying our troops as clichéd maniacs from the Oliver Stone fantasies that got lefties so self-righteously excited 20 years ago (See? We were right to dodge the draft …). And it’s not going to stop. Given the stakes in an election year, the duplicity will only intensify.

That’s correct. The New York Times does not give a tinker’s damn about America’s soldiers. All it cares about is using them to influence the outcome of elections.

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