Saturday, January 13, 2007

TPMmuckraker January 11, 2007 01:26 PM:

Nearly a month ago, we reported that the Defense Department was refusing a routine request from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to declassify statistics on enemy attacks in Iraq. As long as GAO has produced periodic reports on the war for members of Congress -- GAO's boss -- the Pentagon had provided those numbers. But despite repeated requests, DoD wouldn't budge on making public the figures for September, October and November 2006.

They still won't. 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.

2:55 PM