Statistics 101: It all depends on the numbers you choose

From today's Washington Post comes the news that the US military's questionable claim about a decrease in sectarian violence is due mainly to the fact that those doing the counting have a specific way of categorizing deaths:

Intelligence analysts computing aggregate levels of violence against civilians for the NIE puzzled over how the military designated attacks as combat, sectarian or criminal, according to one senior intelligence official in Washington. “If a bullet went through the back of the head, it's sectarian,” the official said. “If it went through the front, it's criminal.”

Yeah. That sounds scientific. Read more here.