As BarbinMD and Kevin Drum (via kidneystones) and Juan Cole, the Los Angeles Times and others have been pointing out, we're getting a spew of very suspicious "statistics" in the run-up to General David Petraeus's congressionally required report on the splurge of blood and bucks that Fred Kagan engineered late last year. Engineered (with others, such as retired General Jack Keane) to give the Cheney-Bush administration cover for ignoring 95% of the Iraq Study Group's suggestions for dealing with the debacle Kagan and others helped to create in the first place.

Anybody who has followed even cursorily the surge of propaganda that has accompanied the Iraq war and occupation since March 2002 or so (when the war drums got their first public pounding) knew full well we weren't going to get the straight skinny when the time came for an assessment of the administration's latest maneuver. Four years ago, these guys were warning the media not to use the term "insurgent" because, they said, there was no such thing in Iraq.

In other words, anybody paying the slightest attention knew, despite General Petraeus's vaunted integrity, that magical September was going to bring us another boatload of lies.

The folks over at the National Security Network have an analysis to help pre-empt some of those lies. An excerpt:

There were significant revisions to the way the Pentagon’s reports measure sectarian violence between its March 2007 report and its June 2007 report. The original data for the five months before the surge began (September 2006 through January 2007) indicated approximately 5,500 sectarian killings. In the revised data in the June 2007 report, those numbers had been adjusted to roughly 7,400 killings – a 25% increase. These discrepancies have the impact of making the sectarian violence appear significantly worse during the fall and winter of 2006 before the President’s "surge" began. [DOD, 11/2006 . 3/2007 . 6/2007 ] According to figures compiled by the Associated Press, Iraq is suffering approximately double the number of war-related deaths throughout the country compared with last year. The average daily toll has risen from 33 in 2006, to 62 so far this year. Nearly 1,000 more people have been killed in violence across Iraq in the first eight months of this year than in all of 2006. The AP tracking includes Iraqi civilians, government officials, police and security forces killed in attacks such as gunfights and bombings, which are frequently blamed on Sunni suicide strikes. It also includes execution-style killings — largely the work of Shi’a death squads. Insurgent deaths are not a part of the Iraqi count. These figures are considered a minimum and only based on AP reporting. The actual numbers are likely higher, as many killings go unreported or uncounted. That said, the AP notes that UN figures for 2006 are higher than the AP’s. [AP, 8/25/07 ] U.S. data on civilian violence is unreliable and excludes most acts affecting sectarian and ethnic cleansing. " No Iraqi data are reliable and US and Coalition data focus far too much on major bombings, major incidents, killed to the exclusion of wounded, and violent acts to the exclusion of most acts affecting sectarian and ethnic cleansing. No data can be fully trusted in terms of accuracy. More importantly, many current metrics are useful largely as measures for counterinsurgency in a nation filled with diverse civil conflicts and where the most violent insurgent acts are only an uncertain indicator of the trends in security and stability." [CSIS, 8/22/07 ]

I hope this whets your appetite and you click the link to read the NSN's entire smackdown. An excerpt just can't do it justice.