Count down.

• Author: Koster, Patricia M.
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

The "Know Not, Ask Not" item from Charles Peters's column "Tilting At Windmills" (October) mentions a story by Vernon Loeb of The Washington Post concerning Americans wounded in Iraq. He states that as of Sept. 2, the number was 1,124. Back in August, I wrote to my representative and senators requesting these numbers.

One senator sent me a printout of a Web page prepared by Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports which gave the number 1,148 as of Sept. 12. Seems that Loeb is using this same source, but I sure wouldn't depend on those numbers.

Bill Berkowitz had an article (originally appeared at workingforchange.com) in the Oct. 15 issue of The Progressive Populist which covered this same thing. He quoted Lt. Col. Allen DeLane, the man in charge of airlifting the wounded into Andrews Air Force Base, as saying during an NPR interview, "Since the war started, I can't give you an exact number because that's classified information, but I can say to you over 4,000 have stayed here at Andrews. And that number doubles when you count the people that come here to Andrews, and then we send them to other places like Walter Reed and Bethesda ... " That's more than 8,000 without considering those still in hospitals at our overseas bases, such as Germany, and at a time when the government-published figures were 827. That...