GAO Report Disputed

Perhaps you've heard about the leaking of the GAO report, which states that only 3 of the 18 Congressional mandated benchmarks for progress in Iraq have been met thus far. The Pentagon begs to disagree with the findings:

The Pentagon has disputed parts of a progress report on Iraq drafted by the Government Accountability Office, and asked that some of the assessment's failing grades on key political and security benchmarks be changed before the final report is made public next week, a Defense spokesman said yesterday.

"We have provided the GAO with information which we believe will lead them to conclude that a few of the benchmark grades should be upgraded from 'not met' to 'met,' " spokesman Geoff Morrell said. He declined to specify which grades he was citing.

Of course, we can expect the Pentagon to act in complete good faith as far as measuring progress in Iraq is concerned:

There were significant revisions to the way the Pentagon's reports measure sectarian violence between its March 2007 report and its June 2007 report. The original data for the five months before the surge began (September 2006 through January 2007) indicated approximately 5,500 sectarian killings. In the revised data in the June 2007 report, those numbers had been adjusted to roughly 7,400 killings — a 25% increase. These discrepancies have the impact of making the sectarian violence appear significantly worse during the fall and winter of 2006 before the President's "surge" began.

Or not.