With success taking shape in Iraq,  liberal journalists don’t have much to talk about. Unable to impugn the reputation of the military on the battlefield, the New York Times has again resorted to the character assassination of our armed forces here at home.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan have seen Americans awarded the Medal of Honor. There have been stories of selfless sacrifice; of Navy SEaLs exposing themselves to direct enemy fire to radio help for their team or Marines who instinctively hurl themselves on enemy grenades without hesitation. There have been missions where US Army soldiers were compromised by civilians, their missions ending with dead teammates because rather than neutralizing these threats, which would  both assure mission secrecy and be well within their rules of engagement, these gallant US soldiers chose to let them live.

But if you believe The New York Times’ Deborah Sontag and Lizette Alvarez,  the US military is nothing more than a ragtag collection of drunkards, wife beaters, drug abusers, criminals and murderers.

In the first of their 2-part series entitled “War Torn: Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles”, Sontag and Alvarez use healthy doses of sensationalism,  junk science and purple prose to try and smear an entire generation of veterans by suggesting that as they return from the battlefield, they’re leaving behind a “cross-country trail of death and heartbreak”,  that these cases are all related, and that they collectively constitute some sort of “wrenching postscript to the war”.

Take the following excerpt, which could have come from any cheesy, murder mystery novel:

“This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”

This is what passes for journalism?

I’m quite sure there are thousands of Marines who were veterans of Fallujah that take exception with that characterization of the Las Vegas strip.

If you look very closely at the work of global warming fanatics, 9/11 conspiracy theorists and liberals who write about military matters, they have one thing in common. They tend to concentrate on the most superficial aspects of the various sciences they reference when formulating their half-baked theories. But they can’t ignore reality.

Very simply put, the authors of this claptrap suggest two things;

1. That 121 murder charges among returning Iraq and Afghan vets in the 6 1/2 years since the war on terror began means no one is safe from these bloodthirsty, government-sanctioned killing machines. 

2. That the problem isn’t confined to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans; that among all active duty forces, there’s been an an 89% increase in the number of murders committed by military personnel and that this reflects some sort of emerging psychosis caused by recent military service.

Statistics can be hashed any which way one sees fit to match their arguments. Just as the Times is attempting to use bias in statistics to prove there is something inherently defective with our veterans, objective statistical analysis can also be used to disprove the same point.

The figures cited by the Times were compiled from local news reports, police, court and military records. The  authors suggested that their research only uncovered the minimum number of cases. Perhaps that’s because a large deficiency exists in their data collection methods to begin with.

For comparison, my figures were compiled using the F.B.I.s Uniform Crime Reporting database, which has been used for decades and is a far more comprehensive indicator of crime patterns than the Times’ statistical hatchet-job. My figures encompass only the full years from Jan. 2002 - Dec. 2006. In that 5-year period the following murders were reported in various cities across the US:

Birmingham, AL - 417 murders. During that period the population fluctuated between 244,972 and 233,577.

Austin, TX - 125 murders. During that period, the population fluctuated between 685,784 and 709,813.

Denver, CO - 311 murders. During that period, the population fluctuated between 581,105 and 568,465.

Kansas City, MO - 492 murders. During that period, the population fluctuated between 447,650 and 448,218.

Newark, NJ - 522 murders. During that period, the population fluctuated between 279,269 and 280,877.

San Francisco, CA - 417 murders. During that period, the population fluctuated between 805,269 and 746,085.

While Sontag and Alvarez try to paint some sort of psychological crisis in the military, the reality shows otherwise. Of the 6 cities examined, they all ranged in size from roughly twice the size of our forces actually deployed in both theaters to a little over three quarters of a million people. We have approximately 1.5 million active duty members in our combined armed forces. Yet the civilian murder rates in all 6 cities were statistically higher than that of Iraq and Afghan veterans for a smaller period of time. The rate for Newark, N.J. was over three times higher than that of deployed veterans, despite having a population only twice the size of our deployed forces and one fifth the size of our combined strength. In 4 of these cities, despite populations of less than 1 million people, there were nearly double the number of murders than those committed by our entire active duty military force since September of 2001.

When sensationalism is removed from the equation and the numbers of murders committed by military personnel are looked at and compared objectively with those of the general population, it is clear that no matter what theory Sontag and Alvarez advance, military members –whether combat veterans or not– are far less likely to murder another than the average citizen. Anything that suggests otherwise is clearly junk science and concocted to paint the worst possible picture of those who defend our country.

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