This explains why the official US tally of dead Iraqi citizens is so much lower than all the others:

[Contrary1]

What defines a killing in Iraq as sectarian?

"On Sept. 1, the bullet-riddled bodies of four Iraqi men were found on a Baghdad street. Two days later, a single dead man, with one bullet in his head, was found on a different street. According to the U.S. military in Iraq, the solitary man was a victim of sectarian violence. The first four were not.

Such determinations are the building blocks for what the Bush administration has declared a downward trend in sectarian deaths and a sign that its war strategy is working. They are made by a specialized team of soldiers who spend their nights at computer terminals, sifting through data on the day's civilian victims for clues to the motivations of killers.

The soldiers have a manual telling them what to look for. Signs of torture or a single shot to the head, corpses left in a "known body dump" -- as the body of the Sunni man found on Sept. 3 was -- spell sectarian violence, said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Dan Macomber, the team leader. Macomber, who has been at his job in Baghdad since February, rarely has to look it up anymore.

"If you were just a criminal and you just wanted to take somebody's money, just wanted to discipline them, you're not going to take the time to bind them up, burn their bodies, cut their arms off, cut their head off," he explained. "You're just going to shoot them in the body and get it over with." That, the team judged, is what happened to the four Shiite men, sprayed with gunfire and left where they dropped...."

Huh?

More: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20966123/

[Kagemusha]

1. On the one hand, journalists have understood these telltale signs for years

On the other hand, basing official statistics on them for cherry picking and presenting to Congress, when the Pentagon has frequently denied maintaining these kinds of statistics, seems mendacious, and besides that, it's applying a general rule to create what seems to be an absolute scientific fact, when it's more like an educated guess.