Reply #28: Is this the reason the State Dept has stopped publishing terrorism records

[paineinthearse]

http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=40430

US State Department to stop publishing terrorism statistics after blunder

Published: 4/18/2005

WASHINGTON - The US State Department said Monday it will stop publishing statistics on terrorism activities after discrepancies were found in figures for the number of attacks and casualties in an annual report. Department spokesman Richard Boucher said "the government has decided that the National Counterterrorism Center should compile and publish the statistical data on terrorism that has previously been included by the State Department in our report."

But he dismissed news reports that the department would do away with its annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, which in mandated by law. "That report is due to Congress by April 30, and we will do that this year," Boucher said, adding that the publication would concern, as it had in the past, the country reports on terrorism.

"That's what the law asks of the State Department, that's what we'll be reporting to Congress," he said. The statistical component of the report would be handled by the National Counterterrorism Center, the government's primary organization for analysis of global terrorism. The State Department report last year on terrorism statistics in 2003 was riddled with errors and then Secretary of State Colin Powell called it "a big mistake". The report had to be corrected and re-released.

The 2004 report had claimed that the number of terrorist incidents has been on the decline over the past three years and that 190 cases reported in 2003, represented the lowest reported total since 1969. US officials at the time trumpeted the report as evidence that the United States was winning the war on terrorism. However, after academics accused the department of mischaracterizing information in the report, it acknowledged that it had underreported the number of terrorist incidents and released an updated version of the terrorism report. Boucher rejected suggestions that the change in the annual report's format of gauging terrorism smacked of politics. "There's no politics in this. There's an attempt to get the best possible information to the Congress and to the American people on what's going on in the world with regard to terrorism," he said. "The people of the United States will get all the facts. The world will get all the facts. We're going to do very thorough reports we do on countries that support terrorism, on countries where terrorism occurs and on foreign terrorist organizations, as we always have in the past. They're going to do the numbers, as they can best do. "Each of us will do what we can do best and put it out and explain it."