Move"Betray Us".Org

MoveOn.org got quite a bit of publicity for their "General Betray Us" ad in the New York Times. What is not so well known are the lies in the ad.

Oxblog has this from the NYT's public editor:

On the morning that Petraeus testified, The Times published that MoveOn.org ad with the ''General Betray Us'' headline. Without distinguishing between an opinion piece and a news report, the ad said that, ''according to The New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, car bombs don't count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you're shot in the back of the head -- not the front.

''After a week of looking into these conflicting reports, interviewing government officials, policy experts and keepers of independent databases on Iraq, here is what I have found:

Back-of-the-head, front-of-the-head is not a distinction the military uses to count victims of sectarian violence. The military's manual for measuring sectarian violence, declassified the day after Krugman's column ran, says that civilians ''shot anywhere in the head'' are counted. On Sept. 25, in a detailed account of how the military counts victims of sectarian violence, The Post quoted an Army chief warrant officer as saying that ''a single shot to the head'' is a sign of sectarian violence.

Car bombings do count. The unclassified manual, ''MNF-I Ethno-Sectarian Violence Methodology,'' says car bombings at such places as mosques or markets are to be counted. Civilians killed in car bombings not deemed sectarian, like an attack on a U.S. convoy, are still counted in the overall casualty numbers.

via Instapundit