Sometimes I really do love the Washington Post, and this is one of those times. You see, I'd been wondering why I had written about a body count of over a thousand while the vast majority of reports coming out of US media was putting the number at under 500 still. It seems now I have my answer: Shiite officials are suppressing execution-style death tolls, so the only "official" numbers are coming in the form of explosions and in-the-street violence. The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared for his safety, said a representative of the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, ordered that government hospitals and morgues catalogue deaths caused by bombings or clashes with insurgents, but not by execution-style shootings. Given the numbers from the morgues, this would make sense. And, frankly, it's rather alarming to know that even the government may be withholding information related to this serious issue. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the new government to know that they're going to be hiding things. More than that, you have to remember that it's the Shiites that would be ordering these executions. The widely differing tolls reflect acute political sensitivity at a time when Iraq's three-year-old conflict is undergoing a fundamentalshift: Execution-style killings of the kind frequently blamed on police or Shiite militias allied with the government appear to be killing more Iraqis than bombings of government and civilian targets by Sunni Arab insurgents. Uh-oh. I would think the first thought when seeing something like this would be: are we sure Iraq is better now?