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Opinion - Letters To The Editor section

'Gross exaggeration'

Published online on Friday, Oct. 30, 2009

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I read Stephan Sacks’ Oct. 23 letter about Dahr Jamail with some dismay. I had never heard of Mr. Jamail and a quick search of the Internet linked him with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Naomi Klein. These are individuals not normally associated with objective news.

I then began penciling out Mr. Jamail’s statistics. If you extend the timeline for suicides from per day to per year, then 38,880 military personnel have committed suicide since 2003. Surely this gross exaggeration that calls into question other “statistical facts” presented in Mr. Sacks’ letter.

And for the backhanded shot at the Veterans Administration, I would remind Mr. Sacks’ that the VA is a government-run health care system.

Ken Whitaker

Fresno


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