UPDATE: More on this over at Powerline here and here.  Here is a suggestion from Powerline I found humorous:

I’ve got a suggestion for the editors of the Times: next time, why don’t they undertake a research project to identify all murders and other forms of homicide committed (or allegedly committed–no finding of guilt necessary!) by people who are, or recently have been, employed by newspaper companies? They could write a long article in which selected crimes allegedly committed by reporters, editors and typesetters are recounted in detail, accompanied by speculation about whether newspaper employment was a contributing factor in each case. No need to wonder whether reporters, editors and typesetters commit homicide at a rate any different from the rest of the population–a single murder is too many!

Here’s another idea: the Times’ story on veterans’ crimes repeatedly focused on the role of alcoholism, which the paper associated with the stresses of military service. How about a survey that compares alcoholism rates among reporters and soldiers? Just on a hunch, I’ll wager a dollar that the alcoholism rate for reporters is higher.

It’s bad enough that the New York Times smears our military personnel when they are serving overseas. Can’t they at least leave them alone once they return home?

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Original Posting: 

Since the success of the new strategy in Iraq began to show signs of success, the New York Times has worked hard on creating a narrative that, yes the new strategy is working but it is not worth the cost on our soldiers. They started to create this narrative by first making claims that service members were raping women which proved to be untrue. Then they moved on to claiming that service members were committing suicide at disproportional rates after returning from war which turned out not to be true.

The new narrative the New York Times is now trying to create is that service members returning from Iraq are increasingly a threat to become murderers:

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction. [...]

To compile and analyze its list, The Times conducted a search of local news reports, examined police, court and military records and interviewed the defendants, their lawyers and families, the victims’ families and military and law enforcement officials. [...]

The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower. [New York Times]

The rest of the article just goes on to explain some of the cases and how the Pentagon is failing to do anything to treat PTSD and releasing all these killers on American society. The left has long tried to label soldiers as war criminals and murderers and this report is just a way to legitimize these attempts.

Just from the New York Times methodology it easy to find the first weakness in their claims. The New York Times is using newspaper articles to base their numbers on. Newspapers today are much more likely to publish an article if someone who commits a crime is a military veteran compared to before 2001 just because of the increased scrutiny from the war and the fact every time a soldier gets in trouble now they use PTSD as an excuse in order to get preferential treatment from the courts. A defense attorney would not being doing their job if they didn’t try to play up the PTSD claims with the courts and media in order to aid their clients. So the New York Times methodology from the get go is quite suspect.

Then some of the cases the New York Times included in their statistics of 121 cases are extremely weak. Take this case of Kenneth Baginski:

Kenneth Michael Baginski, a soldier who was wounded in Iraq, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to seven to eight years in prison. He had been in Tacoma, Wash., recovering from combat injuries, in 2005 when a bullet from his gun went through the wall of a neighboring house, killing Monique Danielle Stanton, 21. According to his lawyer, Daryl L. Graves, “the fact that he had served in Iraq and had injured either a leg or a foot and did have some combat stress” played a role in the plea negotiations. Mr. Baginski claimed that the gun went off accidentally.

The guy is in his home and had an accidental discharge of a weapon, this happens all the time in America and has nothing to do with if someone is a veteran or not. Here is another case that has nothing to do if the person is a veteran or not:

Jimmy A. Donald, a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter. Mr. Donald, a former Central Michigan University student, was part of a group that beat 26-year-old DeMarcus Graham, 26, to death during a fight outside a bar in Mount Pleasant, Mich., in July 2004. Mr. Donald, who had no prior record, was given a reduced sentence of 2 to 15 years partly because of his combat trauma, said his lawyer, Andrew Marks. He had been on a waiting list for treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder when the kiling occurred, Mr. Marks said.

This guy participated in a drunken brawl that beat some guy to death. This had nothing to do with him being a veteran yet the New York Times claims it does. Even drag racing deaths are blamed on soldiers being PTSD ticking time bombs:

Brian Epting, a Hunter Army Airfield soldier who served in Iraq in 2003, pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide and was sentenced to six years. In 2005, he was drag racing in Savannah, Ga., when he lost control of his car, killing Robert Duffy, 82, a lawyer who had been a World War II veteran and prisoner of war.

According to the New York Times if only this soldier hadn’t done a tour in Iraq he would have never been involved in drag racing.

The Times included people that had mental problems that had nothing to do with service in war:

Robert G. Jackson, a former marine, is accused of killing his grandmother, Patricia A. Lunsford, in 2005. After serving in Iraq, schizophrenia was diagnosed in the veteran. He has been found incompetent to stand trial and is confined in a psychiatric hospital. His mother said Mr. Jackson’s mental health declined considerably after he entered the Marine Corps. During his four-year enlistment, he was administratively punished and demoted a number of times, his mother said. His mother said his mental illness worsened after he left the Marines. The charges against him are pending.

I was stationed at Ft. Lewis when this incident happened and this had nothing to do with the Iraq War as well:

Michael Antonio Jordan, an Iraq war veteran, was convicted in the kidnapping that led to the death of his former Army roommate. Mr. Jordan, 21, who was based at Fort Lewis in Washington and had a juvenile criminal record, had post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosed after the killing. He was originally charged with murder. Mr. Jordan had enlisted former gang buddies to help him recover a debt from Christopher Jerry, with whom he had served in Iraq. One of the gang members shot and killed Mr. Jerry. Mr. Jordan was sentenced to 19 years in federal prison.

The person that was killed got out of the army and owed his former roommate, a gang member money and could not repay him. The proceeded to kidnap the former soldier and take him to some back woods on Ft. Lewis and kill him. This had nothing to do with serving in war yet it is counted by the NY Times.

The New York Times even counted a guy that was acquitted of homicide as part of their tally:

Marc Hampton, a soldier who served in Iraq, was acquitted of reckless homicide. He was the driver in an accident that killed two other soldiers, both his passengers, in Elizabethtown, Ky., in 2005. The jury concluded that Mr. Hampton was under the legal blood alcohol limit, and took into account that the stretch of road had been the scene of many accidents.

This guy was found not guilty due to self defense yet the Times counts him as a murderer:

Spc. Christian Mariano, who served in Afghanistan, was acquitted of first-degree murder charges stemming from a 2005 stabbing death of Khyle Dittrich, 19, in Hamilton, Tex. Specialist Mariano successfully claimed self-defense.

The Times also uses cases of veterans driving drunk and killing people as another way to inflate their number that troops are murderers. Imagine that soldiers returning from a year overseas and driving drunk? Who would of thought that would happen. This logic to compile their 121 deaths numbers is obviously deceptive which isn’t surprising coming from the New York Times. Read through the cases yourself because this 121 deaths number is highly dubious.

Also the New York Times provides no context of what a deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan means. Believe it or not most people who deploy to Iraq do not see combat. They are logistics people who stay on base and keep the big Army machine running. So if a guy that sorted mail for a year in Iraq returns to America and gets out of the military and then two years later gets involved in a homicide, according to the New York Times it is because of his deployment to Iraq, which is absurd.

Additionally, the New York Times provides no context of what these numbers mean. How do these numbers compare to the civilian rate? Remember this statistic would need to adjusted for age and gender because the military is mostly young and male which is the category most likely to cause crime. Winds of Change has done an excellent job putting together some preliminary statistics that show that soldiers are less likely to commit murder than their civilian counterparts:

From the October 1, 2001 start of the Afghanistan war, that’s about 26,000 troops/month. To date (Jan 2008) that would give about 1.99 million.

That means that the NY Times 121 murders represent about a 7.08/100,000 rate.

Now the numbers on deployed troops are probably high - fewer troops from 2001 - 2003; I’d love a better number if someone has it.

But for initial purposes, let’s call the rate 10/100,000, about 40% higher than the calculated one.

Now, how does that compare with the population as a whole?

Turning to the DoJ statistics, we see that the US offender rate for homicide in the 18 - 24 yo range is 26.5/100,000.For 25 - 34, it’s 13.5/100,000.

See the problem?

Damn, is it that hard for reporters and their editors to provide a little bit of context so we can make sense of the anecdotes?

Why doesn’t the New York Times compile statistics like this to give context to their article? Much like with the claims that the military members are committing suicide at increased rates they did not provide statistics for that either that demonstrated that the military’s suicide rate is lower than their civilian counterparts. The New York Times does not want to report these numbers because unfortunately it goes against the narrative they are trying to create.

In the mind of the New York Times all of us veterans are ticking time bombs created by the Bushitlerhaliburton war. We are supposed to go duck under tables every time we hear a loud bang. We are supposed to stare off into space all the time and cannot sleep at night because of the nightmares of our war crimes. When someone makes us mad were supposed to go into a fit of rage and attack them and god forbid if we have a weapon handy we would then kill them. That is what the New York Times and like minded liberals believe because it is the narrative they created of Vietnam veterans. For those that haven’t already, I highly recommend reading B.G. Burkett’s book Stolen Valor to see exactly how the current perceptions of Vietnam veterans was created. It is really shocking and the same perceptions created about Vietnam veterans are now trying to be attributed to current war veterans as well.

Also I question the timing of this article’s release. Notice how the New York Times published the article right after the sensational journalism around the Maria Frances Lauterbach murder. Is this a coincidence? I think not and the NY Times has been probably sitting on this article waiting to release it to create the maximum impact on the conventional wisdom.

The New York Times is not interested in finding out what the real ground truth is because even if there is a slight up tick in veteran incidents looking at actual statistics would show that veterans fare better than their civilian counterparts. Plus the numbers are so statistically small you are more likely to get hit by lightning than be killed by a veteran. None of this matters, it is all about the narrative and not the truth. Perception is reality and it is pretty clear what perception the New York Times is trying to create.

Finally I just want to say that PTSD is a problem that the military initially did not diagnose very well in the first two years of the war, but with experience the military has gotten much better at diagnosing and providing treatment for it. People do suffer from it and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a slight up tick in violent incidents in veterans because it. However, I find it disgraceful the attempts by the New York Times, the left, and Hollywood to sensationalize PTSD in order to create perceptions of today’s veterans much like they did with Vietnam veterans in order to further political agendas.

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