You have to give BushCo credit - they're creative! They've managed to come up with new ways to obscure and even cover their tracks on just about everything:

The Bush administration's novel approach to budgeting for and financing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has made it very difficult to discern the true costs of the conflicts, a new report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments concludes.

Historically, the United States has covered the costs of war through the annual appropriations process. Supplemental appropriations were used to cover only initial, unanticipated phases of major conflicts. But the Bush administration relied exclusively on supplemental appropriations to cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until 2008 -- seven years after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan and five years after they entered Iraq.

The reliance on supplemental funding creates a misleading picture of overall requirements, said Steven Kosiak, vice president of budget studies at CSBA and author of the report, during a briefing on Monday. "A sound budgeting process forces policymakers to recognize the true costs of their policy choices," he said.

I think it's only a matter of time before we discover they've not only mislead us about the number of civilian deaths, but also lied about the number of wounded and dead American troops.

I expect we'll start to hear a lot about those and other coverups, once the new Obama administration is sworn in.