Comment: UPDATE January 31
We're losing track of how many times the number has been revised. It seems American troops keep getting injured by that Iranian attack.
What were the Iranians using, time bombs?
Here's the latest revision:
The U.S. military has once again raised the number of U.S. service members who suffered traumatic brain injuries in Iran's missile strike on an Iraqi base earlier this month.This is the FIFTH time the Pentagon has revised its casualty estimate upwards since the airstrikes on January 8th...
Pentagon spokesman Thomas Campbell said that as of January 30, "a total of 64 U.S. service members have been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury, or TBI."
In remarks that have angered many U.S. veterans groups, President Donald Trump initially claimed that no Americans were harmed in Iran's January 8 attack on the Ain al-Asad air base in western Iraq.
The military later said that 11 troops had suffered injuries, then raised it to 34 before saying on January 28 that 50 personnel had been injured.
Trump has downplayed the injuries, saying he "heard that they had headaches and a couple of other things."
© AP
Donald Trump and other top officials initially said Iran's 8 January attack had not killed or injured any US service members.
"As of today, 50 US service members have been diagnosed" with traumatic brain injury, the Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Campbell said in a statement about injuries in the attack on the Ain al-Asad airbase in western Iraq.
Symptoms of concussive injuries include headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light and nausea.
Comment: "As of today..."
Who knows what tomorrow will bring? The situation is always... fluid. Dynamic narratives are always... shifting.
The inability of the top authorities in the NATO sphere to speak plainly about even the smallest things is why conspiracy theories, paranoia, hysteria and chaos in general are proliferating across the West.
Comment: At this point we can no longer rely on the Pentagon's claim of zero US deaths. We have their claim versus the Iranian claim (of 80 or so US deaths). So that remains unknown, for now.
The dodgy PR campaign over this also makes us wonder just how far off is the official death toll for US soldiers in the Iraq War 2003-2011. Officially, it's 3,836, but given how drastically they under-reported Iraqi deaths in that war, and how readily and craftily they lie about the small things, and how sensitive they are about the optics of Americans coming home in coffins...