Spencer Ackerman for Muckraker.com, Sept. 10:

Will We See How Petraeus Defines "Sectarian Violence"?
One thing to watch for during General Petraeus' testimony today and tomorrow: Will he continue to insist on keeping classified his command's methodology for determining which civilian attacks count as sectarian violence?

Petraeus has made numerous assertions that sectarian violence has fallen dramatically, but so far, he hasn't explained how he's derived the basis for the claim. But on Friday, the head of the Government Accountability Office, David Walker, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Petraeus' methodology isn't something agencies throughout the government have confidence in.

Much to the chagrin of the Pentagon, the report released by Walker's GAO last week found that average daily attacks against civilians had remained flat during the lifetime of the surge. Which of those attacks qualified as sectarian violence? GAO found it wasn't clear that, contra Petraeus, sectarian attacks were on the decline, since it -- and other agencies within the government -- found the methodology for such a calculation dubious. According to the Washington Post, shooting someone in the back of the head is a sign of sectarian violence to Petraeus, but a frontal shot isn't...

[H]ere's what Walker told Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) (the classified annex of the GAO report contains much more about Petraeus' methodology):

First, [Petraeus'] data will show that sectarian violence is going down in recent months. He will show that. Secondly...we cannot get comfortable with the methodology that's used to determine of total violence, which is sectarian and which is nonsectarian-related. It's extremely difficult to do that. I mean, you know, people don't necessarily leave calling cards... We're not comfortable with the methodology. And please read the classified report, because it's not just our view.

The GAO report, in draft form, said that entire agencies of the U.S. government disagreed with Petraeus' methodology on sectarian violence. Evidently, the Pentagon, and perhaps MNF-I [Multinational Force-Iraq], leaned on the GAO to shunt that statement into a classified annex. But that's exactly what Walker confirmed on Friday...

Keep an eye on this. If Petraeus' command's methodology is sound, why not explain it, and lay the controversy to rest?

A very prescient opinion piece by Marshall Windmiller, from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 11-17, 2005:

From Saigon to Baghdad
Everybody knows history never repeats itself exactly. For a country like the United States, which is not enamored with the study of history, it may be futile to draw historical analogies, especially those relating to Vietnam.

But there is one so significant and so timely that our government might avoid critical errors by studying it. It relates to the extraordinary intelligence failure prior to the Vietcong's Tet offensive, and the confusion and politicization in the intelligence community in Washington, D.C., today.

In January 1966 the official U.S. intelligence estimate of the Vietcong order of battle was that there were 270,000 Vietcong guerrillas in South Vietnam. At the same time there had been approximately 50,000 to 150,000 Vietcong deserters, as well as 150,000 casualties each year. If these figures were correct, there were more deserters and casualties than the total number of enemy troops. Yet the war continued. Who was still fighting? Something was wrong.

In the Central Intelligence Agency, a young analyst named Sam Adams was assigned to study the Vietcong full time. After careful examination of numerous after-action reports and reports of enemy interrogations, Adams concluded that there were at least 200,000 more Vietcong fighters than were acknowledged in the U.S. assumptions. If Adams was right, the enemy force was at least twice as large as the U.S. assumed.

But Adams was virtually ignored. He continued to study the evidence, and by December 1966 he had concluded that there were 600,000 enemy soldiers.

There were conferences at which Adams presented his evidence, and at least one Pentagon analyst agreed with his conclusions. But the CIA and the military resisted changing the numbers, and so the official U.S. intelligence position was that our 350,000 soldiers were fighting only 270,000 Vietcong.

Gen. William Westmoreland was the commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam. He returned to Washington in November 1967 and said, "The enemy is running out of men." Two months later, in January 1968, the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive with simultaneous attacks on numerous provincial capitals. U.S. troops repelled the attacks, but more than 10,000 of them died doing it. It was the greatest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.

The war continued and became increasingly costly and unpopular with the U.S. public. On April 30, 1975, the last remaining U.S. personnel escaped by helicopter from the roof of the U.S. embassy.

Seven years later, using Adams as a consultant, CBS News produced a documentary titled The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception. It was broadcast nationwide on Jan. 23, 1982. It charged that there was "a conspiracy at the highest levels of American military intelligence to suppress and alter critical intelligence on the enemy in the year leading up to the Tet offensive."

Westmoreland filed a $120 million libel suit against CBS. After a trial lasting four and a half months, which produced volumes of testimony about how the records were distorted, Westmoreland negotiated a face-saving statement from CBS and dropped his suit.

This should force the U.S. press and the public to ask a lot of questions today. What is the Iraqi enemy order of battle? In Vietnam, Adams found there were categories of Vietcong fighters that weren't being counted at all. One group the Vietcong called "assault youths," weren't even on the order of battle. Are we making similar omissions today? Does the Pentagon really know whom we are fighting and what their numbers are? Is there a Sam Adams somewhere in the intelligence community who is trying to do an honest job of figuring this out?

Adams, a direct descendant of the great Adams family of colonial Massachusetts, died of a heart attack in October 1988 at the age of 55. George Tenet, the director of the CIA, told President George W. Bush that the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was an intelligence "slam dunk." He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

If you follow the talking heads you'll see that left wing extremists like Joe Biden are basically echoing the line that is in, for instance, your other post RE: Democracy Now on the bombed sheik and the arming of the Sunni Civil war. If Code Pink is not referring to his cooking numbers for the Senate committee then their argument stands, but your question was whether those actions and the MoveOn ad were counter productive.

I, and probably the majority of your readers, would agree with the above definition of betrayal and the 'history doesn't repeat but it does rhyme' similarities to the Vietnam war. However, as proven time and again, most recently in 2004, this country can be governed with the consent of a loud right wing minority if the center can be obfuscated. My question: Would avoiding grandstanding grade C copy writing in the pages of the New York Times and instead spelling the arguments and facts out in a more, shall we say, adult manner be more productive in reaching the wavering center right? It would allow more discussion of what is going on and less rhetoric about the far left, and the New York Times, stabbing our troops in the back - which we will certainly be hearing enough about after Dien Bien Phu.

Accurate, yes. Productive, no.