[Vision2020] what you don't know can hurt you

[Mark Solomon]

Another leap down the path of smoke and mirrors.

Mark Solomon



Bush administration eliminating 19-year-old international terrorism report
Posted on Fri, Apr. 15, 2005 
<http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11407689.htm>http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11407689.htm
By Jonathan S. Landay

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The State Department decided to stop publishing an 
annual report on international terrorism after the government's top 
terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 
2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication 
covered.
Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the 
methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate 
statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion 
of incidents that may not have been terrorism.
Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing 
a revision of the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism."
But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of 
State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global 
Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics 
raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's 
frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.
"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an 
intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American 
public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State 
Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to 
eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of 
last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.
"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around 
the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to 
withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush 
administration should stop playing politics with this critical 
report."
A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of 
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that the 
publication was being eliminated, but said the allegation that it was 
being done for political reasons was "categorically untrue."
According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with 
the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center 
provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist 
attacks in 2004.
That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in 
two decades.
The statistics didn't include attacks on American troops in Iraq, 
which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front 
in the war on terror."
The intelligence officials requested anonymity because the 
information is classified and because, they said, they feared White 
House retribution. Johnson declined to say how he obtained the 
figures.
Another U.S. official, who also requested anonymity, said analysts 
from the counterterrorism center were especially careful in amassing 
and reviewing the data because of the political turmoil created by 
last year's errors.
Last June, the administration was forced to issue a revised version 
of the report for 2003 that showed a higher number of significant 
terrorist attacks and more than twice the number of fatalities than 
had been presented in the original report two months earlier.
The snafu was embarrassing for the White House, which had used the 
original version to bolster President Bush's election-campaign claim 
that the war in Iraq had advanced the fight against terrorism.
U.S. officials blamed last year's mix-up on bureaucratic mistakes 
involving the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the forerunner of 
the National Counterterrorism Center.
Created last year on the recommendation of the independent commission 
that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the center 
is the government's primary organization for analyzing and 
integrating all U.S. government intelligence on terrorism.
The State Department published "Patterns of Global Terrorism" under a 
law that requires it to submit to the House of Representatives and 
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a country-by-country terrorism 
assessment by April 30 each year.
A declassified version of the report has been made public since 1986 
in the form of a glossy booklet, even though there was no legal 
requirement to produce one.
The senior State Department official said a report on global 
terrorism would be sent this year to lawmakers and made available to 
the public in place of "Patterns of Global Terrorism," but that it 
wouldn't contain statistical data.
He said that decision was taken because the State Department believed 
that the National Counterterrorism Center "is now the authoritative 
government agency for the analysis of global terrorism. We believe 
that the NCTC should compile and publish the relevant data on that 
subject."
He didn't answer questions about whether the data would be made 
available to the public, saying, "We will be consulting (with 
Congress) ... on who should publish and in what form."
Another U.S. official said Rice's office was leery of the methodology 
the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate the data for 
2004, believing that analysts anxious to avoid a repetition of last 
year's undercount included incidents that may not have been terrorist 
attacks.
But the U.S. intelligence officials said Rice's office decided to 
eliminate "Patterns of Global Terrorism" when the counterterrorism 
center declined to use alternative methodology that would have 
reported fewer significant attacks.
The officials said they interpreted Rice's action as an attempt to 
avoid releasing statistics that would contradict the administration's 
claims that it's winning the war against terrorism.
To read past "Patterns of Global Terrorism" reports online, go to 
<http://www.mipt.org/Patterns-of-Global-Terrorism.asp>www.mipt.org/Patterns-of-Global-Terrorism.asp
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