Earlier this year, we ran a brief contribution/subscription drive to raise funds to beef up our DC muckraking capacity. So for those of you who contributed here's one example of your dollars at work.

We've been having a national conversation over the last several weeks about Gen. Petraeus's report and whether his claims were an accurate picture of what's happening on the ground in Iraq. (In some ways, that's what the on-going Moveon/'Betray Us' ridiculousness is all about.) Particularly, are civilian deaths up or down? And just how was Gen. Petraeus's command counting since his numbers of civilian deaths seemed so different from those media organizations were coming up with.

Gen. Petraeus himself wouldn't really discuss his command's methodology when he testified before Congress last week. But TPMmuckraker's Spencer Ackerman kept digging, as you've likely seen in his on-going reports. Two weeks ago Spencer filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the DOD and Gen. Petraeus's command in Baghdad. And today he got the information we were looking for.

Here's Spencer's report and here are the documents we received detailing how Petraeus came up with his numbers.