So, how's that War on Terror coming along?

[theknife]

not very well, apparently - 2004 was the biggest year for terror attacks since they started keeping track. naturally the administration sees this as a pr problem, not a terror problem.

their response? cancel publication of the report that tracks the progress of the "War on Terror" this will then allow the prez to continue to claim success without having having any of that pesky documentation popping up to contradict him.

Elimination of terror report coincides with substantial increase

By JONATHAN S. LANDAY

Knight Ridder Newspapers


WASHINGTON — The State Department stopped publishing a terrorism report after the terrorism center concluded there were more attacks in 2004 than in any year since the report began in 1985.

Several U.S. officials defended the decision, saying the methodology the National Counter-Terrorism Center used for the report may have been faulty and may have included incidents that were not terrorism.

But other officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered the report 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,” said 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.

A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the allegation that it was being done for political reasons was “categorically untrue.”

According to Johnson, statistics that the National Counter-Terrorism 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.

Last June, the administration issued a revised version of the 2003 report 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.

That 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 attributed last year's mix-up to bureaucratic mistakes involving the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the forerunner of the National Counter-Terrorism Center.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...s/11407270.htm