"Petraeus's spokesman, Colonel Steven A. Boylan, acknowledges the "host nation" data used by MNF-I statisticians is frequently "unverified" and "possibly inflated." In an email, he raised a particular red flag about the "host nation" data for December 2006, the base line for Petraeus's claim of an "over 45-percent drop" in Iraqi civilian deaths. He said that the December 2006 data contained "a large number of unverified host nation reports of dead civilians.""