What About Casualties of Non-Military U.S. Contractor Forces in Iraq?

The U.S. armed forces are not organized as they used to be. It has been estimated that 10% or more of combatant forces and support personnel of U.S. actions in Iraq are non-military contractors working as independent contractors for the U.S. government or for paramilitary or security contractors to the U.S. government as part of the war in Iraq. If members of those teams are killed or wounded while engaged in actions against Iraqis, or by attacks by Iraqi freedom fighters, those casualties will not be part of official U.S. military casualty reports.

How many Americans have died in Iraq that we have never heard counted amongst the tallies of "official" U.S. soldiers? How many ex-Green Berets or ex-Navy Seals or ex-Delta Force commandos have been killed, but not counted? How many CIA agents are fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq, but not as part of the official U.S. military?

How many support personnel who maintain U.S. aircraft have been killed by mortar rounds lobbed into U.S. bases, but who are invisible under deceptive U.S. reporting systems?

We know that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney thrive in darkness and deceit. Rumsfeld is transforming the U.S. military into tactical organizations that are increasingly unaccountable to the U.S. Congress or the U.S. citizenry. Rumsfeld wants to project force worldwide with freedom from scrutiny and freedom from accountability. This is true in financial terms, and also true in accountability for American lives. Rumsfeld knows that Americans are sensitive to loss of American lives in warfare, and one way to appear maximally successful in war is to disguise causality rates by failing to account for non-military personnel who are doing work that would have been done ONLY by military personnel ten years ago.

The American public appears clueless as to these developments, and the U.S. media is so embedded with the military and the government "program" that it fails to ask necessary questions or question tactics and procedures and protocols as an alert press would do if it was really seeking to serve the public interest.

How many Americans are in Iraq that we have not been told about in the official troop deployment counts? How many unofficial deaths and casualties have been covered up?

Rumsfeld knows, but he is not talking.