GAO’s director of international affairs and trade concedes the GAO’s figures do “not tak[e] into consideration the fact that there might be fewer attacks [on civilians] because you have ethnically cleansed neighborhoods.”
November 5, 2007 6:14 am IraqA November 2 New York Times article on recent American and Iraqi casualties in Iraq reported that “[a]lthough violence persisted outside Baghdad, civilian casualties in the capital appeared to decline sharply recently, with 317 civilians killed in October,” adding that this number represented “a drop of more than 50 percent from August, when 656 civilians were killed, according to statistics gathered by the Interior Ministry.” Yet the article did not mention that ethnic cleansing may account for the decrease in civilian casualties, as noted by a number of other media outlets — including McClatchy Newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post — and the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) director of international affairs and trade, Joseph A. Christoff. During an October 30 House Appropriations Committee hearing regarding a recent GAO study that found that overall attacks in Iraq have declined, Christoff told the committee that the GAO’s figures do “not tak[e] into consideration the fact that there might be fewer attacks [on civilians] because you have ethnically cleansed neighborhoods.”