I’m Lauren Harper, the first Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), and welcome to The Classifieds. Pentagon deflates Iran war casualtiesIn what appears to be its latest effort to obfuscate the human costs of the ongoing Iran war, the Pentagon has stopped adding casualties that occurred on or after July 7, 2026, to its “Operation Epic Fury” casualty database — adding them instead to a new database ambiguously titled “Overseas Operations.” Despite initially attributing the removal to “site errors,” the Pentagon didn’t revise the total. This cynical numbers game has nothing to do with the war being over. As I told The Hill, the middle of a war is the worst time for the Pentagon to lower its standards for accountability.