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<H2>Flawed report on terrorism gets even worse </H2>
<H4 class=deck>No politics detected, but credibility takes hit</H4>
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<P class=byline><SPAN class=name><A
href="http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news/bylines.asp?bylinename=Josh Meyer">Josh
Meyer</A></SPAN><BR>Los Angeles Times<BR>November 21, 2004</P><!---------Code for Big Ads-------------------><!---------End Code for Big Ads------------------->
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<P>WASHINGTON – Five months after embarrassed State Department officials
admitted to widespread mistakes in the government's influential annual report on
global terrorism, internal investigators have found new and unrelated errors –
as well as broader underlying problems that they say essentially have destroyed
the credibility of the statistics it is based on.</P>
<P>In a 28-page report, the State Department's Office of Inspector General
blamed the problems on sloppy data collection, inexperienced employees,
personnel shortages and lax oversight. Investigators also concluded that the
procedures used by the State Department, CIA and other agencies to define
terrorism and terrorist attacks are so inconsistent that they can't be relied
upon.</P>
<P>The department's independent investigative unit concluded, however, that
politics played no role in allowing so many mistakes to be published in the
original version of the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report for 2003.</P>
<P>The 2003 report said that terrorist attacks and related deaths had dropped to
the lowest levels in three decades, and top Bush administration officials
immediately touted it as proof of their success in the global war on
terrorism.</P>
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<TD></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>But the underlying data actually showed a sharp
increase to a 21-year high. The 199-page report, made public on April 29, also
omitted any significant terrorist attacks occurring after an early November
cut-off date, including bombings in Turkey that killed at least 62 people, and
left out some activity in Chechnya, Iraq and other locations.</P>
<P><SPAN class=bold>Those errors were fixed </SPAN>in a second version of the
terrorism report, released on June 22. But six Democratic senators, suggesting
the Bush administration was manipulating terror statistics for election-year
political gain, asked Secretary of State Colin Powell to find out what had gone
wrong, prompting the investigation by the inspector general. A copy of the
inspector general's conclusions, marked "sensitive but unclassified," was
obtained by the Los Angeles Times.</P>
<P>The annual report has been mandated by Congress since 1987 as the
government's authoritative reference tool on worldwide terrorist activity,
trends and groups and the U.S. response to it.</P>
<P>The document is relied on by Congress and U.S. counterterrorism agencies in
deciding how to wage the ongoing war on terror, and is translated into at least
four languages so the public, academics and foreign governments can use it to
assess trends in terrorism.</P>
<P>The investigators, overseen by the State Department's acting inspector
general, Cameron R. Hume, stopped short of calling for a second revision of the
widely circulated report. But they concluded that the report, even in its
revised form, "cannot be viewed as reliable" because of the questionable
statistics on terrorist attacks, casualties and other issues. The report urged
better oversight and management of the annual terrorism report card "in order to
produce a world-class product."</P>
<P>A State Department spokesman declined to comment publicly on the internal
report, but said the department has no plans to review or reissue the 2003
"Patterns" document a second time. </P>
<P>"We think it's best to just move on, and make sure we fix what needs to be
fixed," said the official.</P>
<P><SPAN class=bold>On Friday, Sen. Patrick Leahy</SPAN>, D-Vt., one of the
lawmakers who requested the investigation, said the lack of objective benchmarks
to measure terrorist activity jeopardizes the campaign against terror. "Either
through indifference or incompetence … these errors have damaged the credibility
of this important assessment, undermining our ability to determine what policies
and programs are effective in fighting terrorism," Leahy said.</P>
<P>A senior congressional official said the inspector general's findings confirm
what experts have been saying for years – that the annual "Patterns" report is
seriously flawed as a tool to measure progress in the war on terrorism, or
analyze the rapidly changing nature of terrorism.</P>
<P>"We become the laughingstock if we redo it. But (not doing it) poses a
serious credibility problem," said the official, a terrorism analyst on Capitol
Hill. "This determines where we put our resources, what we tell other countries,
what we think the trends are. And this just ruins our credibility. People just
don't trust us anymore."</P>
<P>Michael Kraft, a senior counterterrorism official in the State Department
until earlier this year, defended the annual "Patterns" report as immensely
valuable, and said it is almost impossible to be entirely accurate given all of
the variables that go into analyzing terrorism.</P>
<P>"It's not always easy. The numbers themselves don't always mean a great deal.
They have to be put in context," Kraft said. "Even with the best of efforts –
and a lot of time and work goes into it – there is always going to be a certain
amount of fuzziness."</P>
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<P>But investigators identified more systemic shortcomings, particularly a
long-standing failure by the State Department, CIA and other agencies to use
consistent standards to identify and classify terrorism-related events.</P>
<P>For example, some multiple bombings in the same city – such as bomb attacks
on March 25, 2003, on four U.N. police stations in Pristina, Serbia, and attacks
on two embassies in Caracas, Venezuela, on Feb. 25 – were counted as single
terror incidents. But grenade attacks on two targets in Kashmir on April 12, and
bomb attacks on two synagogues in Istanbul on Nov. 15, were each listed as two
terror incidents.</P>
<P>Additionally, some items were included or dropped without apparent reason.
The discovery of an explosive device at an IBM facility in Italy on March 31 was
deleted without explanation from the second version of the 2003 report. But a
parcel bomb hidden in a book that was sent to the Greek consulate in Madrid on
Sept. 8 was added to the revised version.</P>
<P>Investigators said no records or minutes are kept to explain how these
decisions are made. Thus officials "could only speculate on why some events were
included or not included," according to the report.</P>
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<P><SPAN class=bold>Meanwhile, there appear </SPAN>to be obvious inconsistencies
within the revised 2003 report, said another congressional staff member. Among
them: The corrected report lists 2,738 people as casualties of international
terrorist attacks in 2002 in one section, but 3,072 casualties, or 334 more, in
a separate statistical review.</P>
<P>Long-standing guidelines have not kept pace with changes in terrorism.</P>
<P>The report considers international terrorism to be violence against
noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents and which
involves citizens of two or more countries.</P>
<P>This effectively omitted countless incidents in Chechnya and
Iraq.</P></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>