Monkeying With The Death Toll

The MoveOn discussion at Rolling Stone continues (See my earlier Posts):

"Jed Clampett", a regular, opines:

"yea, we’ve seen so much good come out of iraq that those of us that can still think for ourselves don’t want to see anything good come out of Iraq. Why is it we can’t see that the surge reduced murders in bagdad of 80% compared to last years same month instead of the fact that most of baghdad has already been ethnically cleanse and the murders are no longer necessary.

While I understand the frustration at the administration and all it’s lackeys at their lies, misrepresentations, falsehoods, dissembling and obfuscation, I find it a bit disingenous to pre-villify the general. At least let him speak and try to sugarcoat the progress before he’s called out on his BS. Why put the cart in front of the horse? isn’t it counterproductive?"

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Sad, even the liberals buy into the Big Lie. My response, Posted at RS:

“the surge reduced murders”??? Only in an alternative parallel universe…

Paul Krugman, as usual, nailed it:

Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq - as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.

Apparently, the Pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told The Washington Post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.” So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people.

Full article at Truthout:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/090707C.shtml

TLC
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