"As the most astute journalists have observed, there are few sources, if any, for reliable data about Iraqi civilian deaths, whether at the hands of sectarian killers or ordinary criminals (or the police/militia forces that the United States has armed and trained). It requires truly extraordinary gullibility on the part of mainstream reporters to accept any such statistics from the Pentagon, whose leaders have misled us so badly about Iraq from the beginning. Where civilian casualties are concerned, it is worth recalling that the Pentagon and the Bush administration initially did not bother to count them -- or at least refused to release whatever counts they had compiled. Estimating the number of civilian dead and wounded was left to nongovernmental sources such as Iraq Body Count and the Lancet, the renowned British medical journal."

I was watching CSPAN on Wednesday, 9/5/07, when the GAO report was given to Congress, and the Republicans were tromping on the GAO to try to denigrate their work, which historically is exemplary and unbiased, so General Petraeus' news would be so poorly received. I couldn't watch General Jones' report to Congress. A person can only take so much.

Its just lie lie and lie some more.