THE TIMES IS 'MURDER' ON OUR GIS

THE TIMES IS 'MURDER' ON OUR GIS
By ANDY SOLTIS

January 16, 2008 -- Conservative columnists and bloggers are blasting The New York Times for what they call fuzzy math and shoddy research designation to trash the reputation of GIs by saying Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are returning home as murderers.

The Times said in a front-page story on Sunday that it had found 121 cases of Iraq and Afghan war vets committing a homicide in the United States.

But veterans and right-wing critics crunched the numbers and discovered that the murder rate for returning vets is only one-fifth of that of young Americans who did not serve in the war zones.

Post columnist Ralph Peters called the lengthy Times article "part of the disgraceful left-wing campaign" to portray "our troops as clichéd maniacs."

Several hundred blogs have appeared since Sunday that are critical of the article. "I'm a veteran and I haven't killed anybody in years," wrote William Briggs. "But if you read The New York Times, you'd be right to worry that I might."

Efforts to obtain a response from the Times yesterday were unsuccessful.

The pro-troop group Move America Forward called the article "slander."

"It's obvious that The New York Times has an agenda of undermining the missions of our troops in the war on terror, so much so that they are willing to resort to demonstrably false statistics to support their anti-troop bias," said the group's chairman, Melanie Morgan.

The critics said the 121 killings have to be judged in context, by comparing the vets with those Americans who didn't serve in the war zones.

Justice Department statistics show that Americans in the veterans' age group, 18 to 34 years old, commit about 150 murders a year - or 700 to 750 over the period studied by the Times. That's more than five times the number of murders committed by veterans.

"In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent," Peters wrote.


andy.soltis@nypost.com

NY Post

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