About a month ago, we talked about how the Government Accountability Office tracks the number of per-months attacks in Iraq, based on Pentagon data. Unfortunately, the latest GAO reports have been incomplete — leaving out the reported attacks from September, October, and November. The funny part was, the GAO had the numbers, but couldn’t publish them because the Pentagon classified the data.
In other words, the number of attacks from August 2006, and every month prior, are publicly available, but the fall of 2006 has to remain classified, without explanation.
As Justin Rood explained, “They’re still at it.”
On Tuesday the GAO released a new report on Iraq, but its data on attacks is incomplete. Why? The Pentagon has continued to keep the attack numbers an official secret, GAO official Joseph A. Christoff told me. “They did not officially declassify the information,” he said.
Undaunted, Christoff said his staff reviewed testimony of Defense officials before Congress. Lo and behold, at a recent open hearing, a Defense Intelligence Agency official mentioned attack statistics for part of the missing period. The GAO inserted those numbers, covering September and part of October, in the report. November is still missing.
Remember, officials have the numbers, but because they paint an ugly, discouraging picture, which could effect the political debate, they’ve decided to classify them in order to keep the information hidden from public view and scrutiny.
Here’s the graph as it currently exists.
The trend is pretty obvious, but abusing the classification process isn’t the answer; changing the policy is.
On a related note, using my post from December as a starting point, TPM Muckraker has been building a list of all the instances in which the Bush administration has hidden public information that officials found inconvenient. They’ve come up with quite a list — if you include today’s news, there are 31 examples.
Is it me or does it seem as if the administration would rather hide bad news than deal with it?