A shame that the Washington Post ran this piece on A16, but Karen DeYoung does yeoman work in pointing out how the measurements don't add up for the Bush administration's repeated claim that violence is down in Iraq, something that we've reported on here and here. I've been stonewalled on how the military defines a "sectarian" attack, but DeYoung gets a frustrated U.S. intelligence official to explain:

Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. "If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian," the official said. "If it went through the front, it's criminal."

"Depending on which numbers you pick," he said, "you get a different outcome." Analysts found "trend lines . . . going in different directions" compared with previous years, when numbers in different categories varied widely but trended in the same direction. "It began to look like spaghetti."

The cherry-picking has resumed, and apparently by design. There isn't one central clearinghouse for storing data on enemy attacks, which helps explain why the leaked draft of the GAO report on Iraqi benchmarks found entire "agencies" disagreeing about whether violence was down.

In an e-mailed response to questions last weekend, an MNF-I spokesman said that while trends were favorable, "exact monthly figures cannot be provided" for attacks against civilians or other categories of violence in 2006 or 2007, either in Baghdad or for the country overall. "MNF-I makes every attempt to ensure it captures the most comprehensive, accurate, and valid data on civilian and sectarian deaths," the spokesman wrote. "However, there is not one central place for data or information. . . . This means there can be variations when different organizations examine this information."

Nor is General Petraeus, the widely respected commander in Iraq, immune from futzing with the assessments. An intelligence official tells DeYoung about an effort by Petraeus to get last month's National Intelligence Estimate in line with the story he wants to present to Congress next week:

When a member of the National Intelligence Council visited Baghdad this summer to review a draft of the intelligence estimate on Iraq, Petraeus argued that its negative judgments did not reflect recent improvements. At least one new sentence was added to the final version, noting that "overall attack levels across Iraq have fallen during seven of the last nine weeks."

A senior military intelligence official in Baghdad deemed it "odd" that "marginal" security improvements were reflected in an estimate assessing the previous seven months and projecting the next six to 12 months. He attributed the change to a desire to provide Petraeus with ammunition for his congressional testimony.

The intelligence official in Washington, however, described the Baghdad consultation as standard in the NIE drafting process and said that the "new information" did not change the estimate's conclusions. The overall assessment was that the security situation in Iraq since January "was still getting worse," he said, "but not as fast."

Worse, but not as fast: the new success. Cherry-picking just ain't what it used to be.