First Casualty

Via Daily Kos, here’s how we’re reducing violence in Baghdad:

U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren’t counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country’s sectarian violence.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

It is said that when war comes, the first casualty is truth.

In the Bush Administration, it’s death by torture. Then the body is mutilated and dragged through the street as a warning to the other virtues.