The New York Times reports that "Statistics on a Pentagon Web site have been reorganized in a way that lowers the published totals of American nonfatal casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan."
On Monday, the bottom line listed a total of 47,657 “nonmortal casualties.” On Tuesday the bottom line is now “total — medical air transported,” and the figure is 31,493.
"Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of force health protection and readiness at the Defense Department, said the previous method of tallying casualties was misleading and might have made injuries and combat wounds seem worse and more numerous than they really were."
Maybe not counting vehicle accidents, sports injuries, and diseases makes some sense. I'm sure troops stationed in the US get injured too. But if you look at this table (pdf) it's clear they are trying to play games. If you wanted to accurately present the info, you would have reordered the lines and put the totals after the details in all cases so it was clear what lines were counted in the total.
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