you know

whether you shoot someone in the head OR spray bullets all over their body, THEY ARE STILL DEAD. how absurd this is (well that comes well after tragic)
a MANUAL telling us what KIND of dead someone is? NO NO AND NO

What Defines a Killing as Sectarian?
U.S. Military Teams Analyze and Tally Each Civilian Death

By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer
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. .............

please note: the following is from may/june 2006 mother jones......
Dead Reckoning: Counting Iraq's Civilian Dead
News: Meet the men behind the Iraqi casualty numbers.
By Adam Shemper
When Hamit Dardagan leaves his flat in central London, he often feels that the people he sees around him aren’t living in the real world. “It is very strange that we are involved in a war, and things go on as if everything were normal,” he said recently. For Dardagan, a normal day is spent in a tiny home office in front of a computer screen, counting dead Iraqi civilians.
“It’s a bit like the movie Groundhog Day,” he said, his voice weary. “It just keeps repeating over and over and over. There might be new governments, new parliaments, new democracy in Iraq, but the violence just continues.” Three years ago, Dardagan, now 45, quit his job teaching computing and dedicated his nights and weekends to sifting through reports from more than 150 news sources, from Fox News to Al Jazeera, trying to determine how many innocent Iraqis were dying in the American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. By his most current count, more than 37,000 Iraqi civilians have died since March 2003........