Statistics Don't Lie!

When Statistics Mislead; and Liars Lie…

Les Aaron


When the government tosses numbers around as if they are gospel and the facts prove that they are worthless, how should you feel? Used? Abused?
We have just faced up to numbers that have no relation to what we have been told for years..
For political reasons and in order to keep a lid on things, our government has told us that upwards of 60,000 Iraqis have been killed in the aftermath of the invasion.. Now, we discover that that number is not off by a small measure that would allow for error but by a factor of ten or more!....

How could the government be that far off?....

Or that willing to submit figures as gospel when they are so inaccurate. Should that be a warning signal to us that maybe all of the others figures they tout are fabricated as well?
Is the inflation figure inaccurate too? What about the employment figures?

The Bottom Line:
We are a nation that depends upon figures.
The stock market goes up and down based upon assessments that employ government numbers. If the numbers are no good, what does that tell us about how our decisions are being made?

That’s why serious people are not going to say, “oh, well, only off by a 1000%!” Even if this astronomical number didn’t knock your socks off, it is sure meaningful who keep track of such things and even humanists who must now say, ‘enough is enough.”

That’s why I am particularly concerned about what the government is saying regarding government figures regarding wounded American troops. As the Veteran Adviser for Southern Delaware, and one who was interested in getting the truth out, I wrote to various sources at the Pentagon and elsewhere and by the time I was finished, I was less sure of the answers than I was starting out. Here’s why: It turns out that the military services all calculate their wounded separately. On top of that, there are various categories of what is referred to as “wounded.” There are wounded in the line of battle; and there are other wounded that fit into categories such as “accidentally wounded.” So, how do you get the totals?. I understand that you have to go to each division of the military and dig it out of them.

To me, this sounds more and more like another cover-up. Why would they cover up these numbers? Because they are much greater than the government is willing to own up to. I did some calculations based upon the average losses in various military units and using various other criteria and I came up with my own conservative estimates that are anywhere up to five or more times what the government is touting. The government has been telling us that there are about 17,000 to 19,000 wounded; according to my rough estimates, I calculate that the real number of wounded is closer to between 80,000 and 100,000 . This is based on figures derived from the wounded, the number of troops on the line, rotation rates, etc.

The sad part is that not only may there be more dead and wounded than we anticipated, the entire misadventure has been pushed whether we like it or not into the sphere of politics. What we are doing in Iraq has nothing to do with the dead and wounded statistics pouring in but to prove one unprovable point: that we are better off by being there than leaving!

Another way to look at the entire picture is that if we went there on false premises and our actions have only served to exacerbate the situation—which it has calculating the growing numbers aligned against us—then we have to examine what any extension in this God forsaken land would have to offer except a startling increase in dead and wounded. I think it’s time to come to our senses; to admit that we started off with a false premise and that the terrorist threat in the US had nothing to do with what has happened in Iraq until as a result of our actions, it became a training field for terrorist tactics.

It is time to bite the bullet and admit that we were “wrong;” that there was no WMD; nor was there any collusion between the terrorists and Saddam Hussein. To do any less is to perpetuate an argument based on a lie.

Les Aaron

The Committee for Positive Change