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<div>Another leap down the path of smoke and mirrors.</div>
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<div>Mark Solomon</div>
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<div><font face="Arial" size="+1"><b>Bush administration eliminating
19-year-old international terrorism report</b></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">Posted on Fri, Apr. 15, 2005</font> <a
href="http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11407689.htm"><font
face="Arial"
size="+1">http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11407689.htm</font
></a><font face="Arial" size="+1"><br>
<b>By Jonathan S. Landay</b><br>
<br>
<b>Knight Ridder Newspapers</b></font><br>
<font face="Arial" size="+1"></font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">Last year, the number of incidents
in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report,
"Patterns of Global Terrorism."</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">"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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was
among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to
the decision.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">"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."</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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."</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">That compared with 175 such
incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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."</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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."</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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."</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1">To read past "Patterns of
Global Terrorism" reports online, go to</font> <a
href="http://www.mipt.org/Patterns-of-Global-Terrorism.asp"><font
face="Arial"
size="+1"><u>www.mipt.org/Patterns-of-Global-Terrorism.asp</u></font></a
></div>
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