Karpinski, Salon, Lies, and Pitiful Fact Checking.

There are a couple of posts up here at Scienceblogs about the situation in Iraq. Both Mike the Mad Biologist and Josh Rosenau discuss a recent Salon article that features soldiers who claim that they are being sent back to Iraq despite being medically unfit for duty. Josh also discusses another Salon article that discusses women in the military. Both articles touch on things that I pay attention to. My wife is currently a deployed battalion surgeon, and spent most of the year before deployment in the brigade surgeon job for her unit.

I'll comment on the deployment health article in a separate post. Right now, I'm just going to say a few things about the massive lack of skill demonstrated by Helen Benedict and her editors when they fact checked (or, more likely, didn't fact check) the women's health article.

The article features the following statements from Col. Janis Karpinski:

Last year, Col. Janis Karpinski caused a stir by publicly reporting that in 2003, three female soldiers had died of dehydration in Iraq, which can get up to 126 degrees in the summer, because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being raped by male soldiers if they walked to the latrines after dark. The Army has called her charges unsubstantiated, but Karpinski told me she sticks by them. (Karpinski has been a figure of controversy in the military ever since she was demoted from brigadier general for her role as commander of Abu Ghraib. As the highest-ranking official to lose her job over the torture scandal, she claims she was scapegoated, and has become an outspoken critic of the military's treatment of women. In turn, the Army has accused her of sour grapes.)

"I sat right there when the doctor briefing that information said these women had died in their cots," Karpinski told me. "I also heard the deputy commander tell him not to say anything about it because that would bring attention to the problem." The latrines were far away and unlit, she explained, and male soldiers were jumping women who went to them at night, dragging them into the Port-a-Johns, and raping or abusing them. "In that heat, if you don't hydrate for as many hours as you've been out on duty, day after day, you can die." She said the deaths were reported as non-hostile fatalities, with no further explanation.

This caught by attention mostly because it simply doesn't pass the stink test. Commanders generally don't like it when people under their command die. They especially do not like it when multiple deaths occur at different times from the same cause. They get really upset when the cause is preventable.

Even if you assume that every senior officer in the Army is a total jerk, concerned about nothing more than protecting his or her own ass and getting promoted, and even if you assume that they don't have concern for their troops as human beings, hiding dehydration deaths still runs against basic self-interest. Having unnecessary deaths reflects poorly on a commander. Losing people can make it harder to do the mission - others need to pick up the duties of the fallen. It also has a really bad impact on morale, which can again make it harder to get the job done. A commander who has a hard time getting the job done is likely to find that their next job will not be in the military.

A cover-up, under the circumstances described by Karpinski, would be much more stupid than is commonly seen in the military. It would risk resulting in further deaths from the same cause, which would call attention to the problem even more certainly than addressing the root causes would.

So, I figured that a fact-check would be in order. Fortunately, doing a fact-check on this one is pretty simple. The icasualties.org website tracks all Iraq-war fatalities. They keep statistics for a number of different things, one of which is female deaths. It took about 30 seconds to discover that a total of 12 American servicewomen died in Iraq in 2003. Seven of those were classified as due to hostile activity. Of the remaining five, one was the result of a fall, one was the result of cancer diagnosed in the war zone, two were the result of weapons discharges (one accidental, one suicide), and only one was due to unspecified natural causes - a Navy seaman who didn't die at Camp Victory.

Karpinski was suspended from command and sent home from Iraq in January of 2004. However, extending the look at female deaths to include that month doesn't help her - there were three more deaths, but two were hostile and the third the result of a vehicle accident.

The only possible conclusion I can reach is that Karpinski is lying.

I am not the first person to reach this conclusion, by the way. Karpinski first made those accusations in January of 2006, and at that time right-wing bloggers were able to quickly conduct the same checks that I just did, and reach the same conclusions. Discovering that added all of two minutes to my fact-checking efforts.

Salon really should be ashamed of themselves. Karpinski's accusations are easily shown to be untrue - it took me more than five times as long to write this article as it did for me to do the fact-checking necessary to disprove the accusations. Karpinski's lies are bad enough. The lack of any attempt a quality control by the publication makes things worse, and the errors in the post make it easier for people to discredit everything in it.