This is why you need to fact check data BS

E-mail on military deaths is shaky on facts


By Chuck Vinch - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Mar 27, 2008 6:30:06 EDT



A spam e-mail making the rounds in the military community serves as a reminder that facts can be flexible when they are launched anonymously into the vast void of cyberspace.The e-mail, entitled, “Some very interesting statistics: Military losses, 1980 through 2006,” states that more U.S. service members died on active duty during the eight years of the Clinton administration, when there were no major U.S. military conflicts, than in the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, during which the military was fighting two large-scale wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The e-mail offers year-by-year U.S. military death totals from all causes — operations, illness, accidents, suicides, etc. — from 1980 through 2006.The data supposedly were taken from a periodically updated Congressional Research Service report on the subject, which in turn is based on statistics compiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Manpower and Data Center.There’s just one problem:

The figures listed in the email are wrong. They vary markedly from the figures published in the cited CRS source document.According to the e-mail, slightly more than 14,000 U.S. active-duty military deaths occurred from 1993 to 2000 during the eight years of the Clinton administration, compared to 7,932 deaths from 2001 through 2006 under President Bush.“


The loss from the two latest conflicts in the Middle East are LESS than the loss of military personnel during Bill Clinton’s presidency, when America wasn't even involved in a war,” states the e-mail, whose original author is, of course, forever lost to the electrons.But some simple math using the figures listed on page 7 of the CRS report reveals that the figures for several of the years under Clinton are inflated, while figures for some of the years under Bush are downplayed.

In reality, according to the CRS report, 7,500 service members died on active duty in the eight years from 1993 through 2000, compared to 8,792 in the six years from 2001 through 2006.The Pentagon has not yet released data on total active-duty deaths for 2007, but 1,014 service members died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that year, and more than 100 have died in the wars so far in 2008, pushing the known total under Bush to more than 9,900.

The report does not address the ratio of active-duty deaths to force size; the active-duty force shrank significantly during the drawdown of the 1990s, from more than 1.7 million in 1993 to about 1.3 million by the early years of this decade.The claims of this particular e-mail are easily disproved. But the online proliferation of such anonymous documents highlights a serious concern for researchers and scholars about how to separate fact from fiction within the vast quantities of raw material online — and being consumed by users who often have no easy way to gauge the reliability of the information they see.

The Web site of The Sheridan Libraries, the main research facility at Johns Hopkins University, includes a lengthy “how to” guide for evaluating Internet information that underscores the difficulty.“When you use a research or academic library, the books, journals and other resources have already been evaluated by scholars, publishers and librarians,” the Web site states. “Every resource you find has been evaluated in one way or another before you ever see it.”Online, however, “none of this applies — there are no filters,” the library Web site states.“

Because anyone can write a Web page, documents of the widest range of quality, written by authors of the widest range of authority, are available on an even playing field. Excellent resources reside along side the most dubious.”“You have to look at the source,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a massive online storehouse of information about every aspect of the security world, including defense, space, intelligence, weapons of mass destruction and homeland security.

Pike said he relies primarily on information from the dot-gov and dot-mil Internet domains — the official sites of the U.S. government and the Defense Department — for his Web site, “on the theory that any material from those sources has had some sort of fact-checking.”If he ventures into the dot-com realm, Pike said he generally sticks to contractor Web sites, since “presumably they know what they’re talking about when it comes to their toys.”“But sometimes we still find mistakes from those sources,” he added.

With its bottomless pool of instantaneous information, the Internet had made many people comfortable about jettisoning their critical-thinking skills, Pike said.“These days, there is a tendency to believe anything you see online that’s reasonably well-spelled,” he said. “But you have to check your sources. You have to have a good BS detector.”A good tool for dubious readers who want to confirm their suspicions is Snopes.com, which contains a database of debunked Internet myths — many related to the military.

A check of the CRS source document cited in the e-mail on U.S. military deaths shows that the e-mail’s author got it right for only three of the eight years of the Clinton administration.Figures for the other five years are off by a wide margin. For example, the e-mail cites 2,465 active-duty deaths in 1995; the figure in the CRS report is 1,040. For 1998, the e-mail cites 2,252 deaths; the CRS figure is 827.For the six years of the Bush administration, the e-mail gets none of the figures correct.

Some are off only slightly — in 2001, for example, the e-mail figure is 890 deaths, the CRS figure, 891 — but other years are far off the mark.In 2005, the e-mail lists a figure of 919 deaths; the figure in the CRS report is 1,942. Similarly, the figures for 2006 are 920 in the e-mail, 1,858 in the CRS report.“Whatever your politics, however you lean, however you feel about the current administration, this report should open some eyes,” the e-mail declares.
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