When the New York Times first reported last week that four recent US deaths in the Iran war had suddenly disappeared from the Defense Department’s casualty-reporting website, the Pentagon was adamant that this was a mere “temporary data disruption.”
But it’s become increasingly clear that wasn’t the full story. And it’s merely the latest episode in President Donald Trump’s chaotic and often callous handling of military deaths.
The deaths have not only now been reclassified in a more convenient and politically expedient manner for the administration — namely, it makes the total number of deaths due to Trump’s Iran war look lower and plays into his claims about his war authority — but it also turns out the deaths have actually been classified three separate ways on the Pentagon’s website in the last week alone.
The four deaths had suddenly returned to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System over the weekend. But rather than being re-added under Operation Epic Fury (the Iran war mission) — which one would expect if this were indeed just a data glitch — they were instead added to a whole new category on the site: the broadly named “Overseas Operations.”
The Pentagon also recorded more than 140 additional wounded service members in the system as part of that update.
