A shocking fact the administration has kept secret? Please. As I noted, information about the number of attacks on American troops -- including this particular statistic of one attack every 15 minutes -- is not secret. Instead, it is very publicly available in the form of a big graph on page 22 of the Iraq Index (published by the Brookings Institution). In fact, that's probably where Woodward himself got the information. Some secret. The Iraq Index has been publishing attack statistics for a long, long time for anyone who is interested. I cannot remember how long the exact graph that Woodward apparently refers to has been there, but graphs just like it have been there for months on end. Therefore, the claim that this is top secret information is simply false (to put it as mildly as possible).[...]
Just like Woodward is doing now, the New York Times chose to focus on a single statistic -- the number of attacks -- while ignoring the much more obvious indicators that they surely would have highlighted had they also shown a strengthening insurgency (the number of troops killed, the number wounded, the number killed by IEDs in particular, etc.). But since these obvious indicators point in the other direction (i.e., to a weakening insurgency), both the New York Times and Bob Woodward pretend that the following information does not exist:
Read the whole thing.
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