On last night’s edition of Fox Special Report with Brit Hume, the Washington Post’s Ceci Connolly, a FSR roundtable regular, made a rather serious charge in the midst of a recitation of various abuse scandals in military prisons:
Connolly: I do think though that one of the problems for the United States is that there have been instances of prisoner abuse. And there have been instances that are our own Pentagon and our own FBI have documented in their investigations and reports. At Abu Ghraib. In Afghanistan. There have been many homicides of prisoners.
Brit Hume: How many?
Connolly: I believe close to 100.
Hume: A hundred murders?
Connolly: Homicides around the world. In Afghanistan. In Iraq. That have come through Pentagon investigations.
I listened to the exchange while surfing last night and, to be honest, heard it as “Abu Ghraib, blah, blah, blah.”
Michelle Malkin paid more attention and actually contacted Connolly this morning. The exchange was courteous but not particularly illuminating beyond the fact that Connolly has no clue what she’s talking about.
Malkin does some excellent follow-up and finds that, while nearly 100 prisoners have died in U.S. custody,
29 were attributed to natural causes or accidents; 18 were deemed “justified homicide” or “suspected justified homicide;†only 23 were being “investigated as involving criminal homicide or abuse by U.S. personnel.” Among those 23, just 3 were explicitly attributed to murder, with the rest still under investigation or involving lesser charges such as derilection of duty, maltreatment, and involuntary manslaughter.
Three murders is still, obviously, three too many. But it’s off by a factor of 33 from “nearly 100.”
