‘Shameful’: Pentagon accused of cover-up over US military casualties in Iran war | US military

The Pentagon is taking a “shameful approach” to releasing information on US casualties in the Iran war. Leon PanettaA former defense secretary and CIA director told the Guardian.

There is a ministry of defense no press conference was held two and a half months. Officials have faced accusations that they attempted a cover-up designed to hide the true cost of Donald Trump’s preferred war in Iran because they feared a public backlash ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Panetta, who held weekly Pentagon briefings during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, criticized the ministry for not disclosing how many people were injured in Iran’s bomb attacks on US bases.

“There’s a deliberate effort here to withhold information from the American people, and I think that in many ways represents a shameful approach to sharing the responsibility that we all have when it comes to war.”” he said over the phone.

The fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran collapsed earlier this month, with both sides carrying out daily attacks against each other; This leads to fear of a quagmire and a betrayal of Trump’s campaign promise to avoid “forever wars.”

The number of US soldiers killed in the war against Iran increased to 18 last weekend, while approximately 430 US soldiers were injured. The Pentagon said Monday that 100 soldiers have been injured since July 7, but 96% have returned to duty. The ministry initially could not disclose the figures. A news article from the New York Timeshe only belatedly acknowledged the losses in a social media post.

Officials dismissed the Times article as follows: “baseless and malicious” and argue that it is absolutely not mandatory to publicize injuries if soldiers are expected to return to duty. But the questions intensified when another Times report said the Pentagon’s website had reduced the number of soldier deaths from 18 to 14, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said. “A temporary data outage,” he blamed.

But critics say the information blackout is a calculated political strategy to conceal a failed military intervention.

Ned PriceThe former deputy US representative to the United Nations and former state department spokesman said: “This goes beyond the rank-and-file administration’s distrust and hostility of the press. It’s more about protecting the American people from the real, total cost of this war.”

Pentagon against the press

Since the start of the war five months ago, there has been tension between the government’s desire for operational secrecy and the media’s demand for transparency on behalf of the public. Even during the contentious and unpopular wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the lines of communication were kept more or less open. But since Trump returned to power in January 2025, the Pentagon – Redesignated as Department of War – restricts access.

He almost immediately pushed major outlets like the New York Times, National Public Radio (NPR), and Politico off his desks and replaced them with Trump-friendly media like Breitbart, One America News Network, and the New York Post. Restrictions were introduced in May free movement of journalists In most of the Pentagon building.

In October, most news outlets turned in their access cards and went out Rather than accept new rules that would leave them open to deportation if they tried to report classified or other information not approved for release by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon. organized by the department in December a three day event Pioneering newly accredited media outlets, including pro-Trump podcasters and influencers.

In March of this year, the Pentagon introduced a rule requiring journalists to be escorted on Pentagon grounds by authorized department personnel. press office in June now a secret area it was inaccessible to journalists because it was used by speechwriters who “regularly handled classified material”. The ever-tightening borders have alarmed press freedom watchdogs.

Clayton WeimersThe Washington director of Reporters Without Borders said: “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this Pentagon has been more hostile to the news media than other Pentagons have recently.”

Mark SchoeffThe President of the National Press Club acknowledges that such hostility is a historical aberration, saying: “What goes on in the Pentagon is unique in my 34 years in Washington. We have not seen these kinds of restrictions on the media in the Pentagon. Not even during Desert Storm.” [the Gulf war] and I don’t remember a time when the Pentagon tried to shut down press access in this way because of the war in Afghanistan.”

The current concealment is particularly shocking when compared to the administration’s previous conduct: In the early days of the Iran war, Hegseth was omnipresent; He gave bombastic briefings in which he bellowed about destroying Iran’s military “without mercy” and restoring the United States as a nation of “true warriors.”

Then the Pentagon banned photojournalists When images of Hegseth deemed “degrading” surfaced in the public domain. At a briefing, Hegseth described the media’s coverage of the war in Iran as “an endless stream of garbage,” likening journalists to “Pharisees.”

Now the bravado has been replaced by emptiness. While there have been no briefings since May, Hegseth last week announced a screening program for “testosterone deficiency” among troops and said it was necessary to allow soldiers to work at their “absolute best”. Such diversions increased suspicions that the war was getting out of control.

Joel RubinThe former deputy assistant secretary of state said: “When you can’t clearly communicate what’s actually going on on the ground, it probably means that you’re not sure or comfortable with what’s happening on the ground and how it’s going to impact politically and in the policy world here. It’s pretty clear that there’s a lot of concern right now about casualties in this war.”

cost of war

The war in Iran is already very unpopular in the United States due to rising gas prices and other inflationary effects on people’s daily lives. Price said those who were paying attention knew that 18 U.S. soldiers had died. “But what they don’t know,” he added, “unless they really dig it, is the full extent of the losses our men and women in uniform have suffered as a result of the decision to take our country into war with no clear objectives and certainly no clear way out.

“This isn’t the kind of thing where a dozen or two dozen soldiers get a low-grade concussion. There are hundreds — as many as 500 U.S. service members by one count — who are suffering physically as a result of this war, and the administration is calculating, probably rightly, that if the economic costs are combined with the full toll this is taking on our soldiers, this war, which is already a politically losing proposition, will drag the administration down even further.”

To veterans and national security experts, the Pentagon’s handling of U.S. casualties amounts to a shameful cover-up. “The Pentagon said 96 percent of those affected returned to duty, but it’s another reminder that we know modern warfare, like the effects of an injury, may not be felt or seen until months or years later,” said Janessa Goldbeck, executive director of the Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy organization. “We deserve to know exactly what happened, and it raises questions about why they didn’t report these losses in a timely manner. My assumption is that this is about controlling political discourse ahead of a major national election.”

Although Hegseth has stayed away from the media, he was forced to attend a hearing on Capitol Hill this week to defend a war that has already cost $37.5 billion. At a contentious Senate appropriations committee hearing on Tuesday, politicians on both sides of the aisle expressed deep frustration with the administration’s endless demands for money as well as its refusal to offer direct answers or a coherent strategy.

When Democratic Senator Gary Peters called the administration’s approach a complete “failure,” Hegseth exploded and said: “Shame on you and those who call this a quagmire and a failure.” Peters shot back: “You are the one who has failed, sir. You do not have a strategy. You do not have a long-term plan to actually win this war.”

Steven Cash, a former intelligence officer and Executive Director Steady state An advocacy group of more than 400 former national security officials warns that the Trump administration and its Pentagon leadership view the public or the press as enemies to be defeated, not stakeholders to be informed.

“Pete Hegseth and the president of the United States don’t really see an important role for America or the voters of Congress, so why should we tell them anything? They’ve made it clear that they don’t see a role for you, the media. You are an enemy,” he said.

The Pentagon denies minimizing casualty reports. Sean Parnell“The War Department and U.S. Central Command continually provide the world with comprehensive, real-time updates on U.S. strikes and operations in Iran,” the chief spokesman said in a statement.

“President Trump and Secretary Hegseth “We continually provide updates directly to the media and online to the American people, providing clear, unfiltered insight into our goals and decisive actions.”

Although the briefings have dried up, the news has not, as Pentagon-battered reporters continue to work on their sources and hunt for information. Panetta said officials are “trying to move past the cemetery in the sense that they hope the less they say, the less controversy they’ll be involved in,” but the reality is that the press will work much more aggressively to find out exactly what’s going on.

“What they really do is challenge the press to find out what really happened, and they will do that. They can evade, they can shake and weave, they can hide, but my experience is that no matter how hard you try to hide it, eventually the truth comes out.”