We learned two weeks ago that the Bush administration, true to form, was troubled by data in the latest report on “Patterns of Global Terrorism” — so they decided to no longer publish the report.
“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.”
Today, we get a better sense of why the report had to be buried.
The number of serious international terrorist incidents more than tripled last year, according to U.S. government figures, a sharp upswing in deadly attacks that the State Department has decided not to make public in its annual report on terrorism due to Congress this week.
Overall, the number of what the U.S. government considers “significant” attacks grew to about 655 last year, up from the record of around 175 in 2003, according to congressional aides who were briefed on statistics covering incidents including the bloody school seizure in Russia and violence related to the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir.
Terrorist incidents in Iraq also dramatically increased, from 22 attacks to 198, or nine times the previous year’s total — a sensitive subset of the tally, given the Bush administration’s assertion that the situation there had stabilized significantly after the U.S. handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government last summer.
Refresh my memory — didn’t we recently have a presidential campaign in which Bush and Cheney said we had to vote for them or risk facing an increase in terrorist attacks? Just checking.