As for the civilian toll, no one wants to know the numbers, let alone be held responsible for their consequences. Neither the United States nor the United Kingdom publishes an official report on Iraqi civilian fatalities and casualties. As General Tommy Franks put it: “We don’t do body counts.” Citing concerns about bandwidth scarcity, the U.S. military has further limited the flow of information by blocking troops’ access to YouTube and MySpace.


The discrepancy between the Pentagon’s definition of non-mortal wounds and the VA’s higher count led the VA to revise its figure downward from 50,508 in September 2006 to 21,469 non-mortal wounds in November 2006. The Pentagon apparently does not include injuries and accidents from non-combat operations in its lower WIA count. In a matter of two months, 29,000 veterans, mostly from the Iraq war, vanished, presumably to align the VA’s count with the Defense Department’s tighter definition and classification of the wounded.