-By Warner Todd Huston
On the CBS “Early Show” on Nov. 13th, co-host Julie Chen claimed that there was “an alarming suicide rate among veterans” of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts. CBS then aired a report that went on to claim that the suicide rate for our troops had wildly climbed. Our friend at Newsbusters, Kyle Drennen, had his doubts about the report when the show originally aired and now comes an editorial by oftentime military reporter Michael Fumento further casting large amounts of skepticism on the CBS report.
The CBS show specifically wanted to make it seem like Iraq war vets are the ones that have seen these outrageously rising suicide rates. Reporter Armen Keteyian included in his report this opener:
Staff Sergeant Justin Reyes spent a violent year serving in Iraq…Medical records show Justin suffered severe psychological trauma after witnessing “multiple dead” and having to “sort through badly mutilated bodies.” Earlier this year, one month after separating from the Army, Justin hanged himself with a cord in his apartment, at just 26…families recently sat down to talk about losing loved ones, all veterans of Iraq, to suicide…Mia Sagahon’s boyfriend, Walter, shot himself at age 27 about a year and a half after he came back from Iraq.
Clearly CBS is pinning these so-called high numbers on the war on terror.
But, Fumento comes out now to throw some cold water on CBS’s inflamed claims and give us some much needed facts to ponder. Initially remarking that the statistics that CBS arrived at were had by their own reckoning, not that of any third party agency that might be less biased than CBS, Fumento wonders how those numbers were arrived at?
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