Petraeus Lies
update: is a perjurer.

This slide from General Petraeus's presentation to congress contains falsehoods.

The clearest is the graph of "ethno sectarian deaths" which shows roughly 600 outside of Baghdad in August 2007. This is very odd since on August 14th truck bombs killed an estimated 572 people (don't trust the Wikipedia here's CNN). Petreaus appears to be claiming that there were only about 30 ethno sectarian killings in August on days other than the 14th. Most of those killed on August 14th were Yazidis members of a small sect with beliefs based partly on Islam and partly on Mazdeanism (the ancient religion of Cyrys, Darius, Xerxes et al).

They are considered devil worshippers by some Moslems and Christians. Clearly this was a massive sectarian killing. We know already that the MNF-I figures exclude deaths in bombings (and perhaps people shot in the front of the head). However, the title of the figure is a clear statement. This statement is clearly false, that is a lie, that is perjury. Fiddling with definitions and using undefined terms is one thing. In this setting, a clear false statement is a felony.

Also the figures of Baghdad present no change since December in areas which are predominately Shi'ite and predominantly Sunni. This is a false assertion.

Finally the figure (not the graph) has the legend "to include car bombs". Clearly this means "not including car bombs at the moment" and is a bit of truth for once.

update: Petreaus made one thing clear yesterday (9/10/07). He is a felon. He made a clear claim about what was counted as a sectarian killing which clearly does not correspond to the graph he displayed. TPMuckraker reports "Gen. Petraeus offered his definition of sectarian violence for his tabulations: "acts taken by individual by one ethno-sectarian grouping against another." He added that "it's not that complicated": if "al-Qaeda bombs a Shiite area," it's sectarian violence."

So blowing up Yazidis if you aren't a Yazidi is ethno-sectarian violence. This explanation makes the claim that there were roughly 600 ethnosectarian killings in Iraq outside of Baghdad clearly false, that is perjury, that is a felony.

Sad so say, it seems no one noticed. The worst act of terrorism since 9/11 seems to have been forgotten.