It sounded, at the time, like good news. In late April, the State Department released a report insisting that international terrorist attacks had dropped in 2003 to historic lows, which Republicans and Bush’s conservative allies pointed to as proof that the president’s war on terror was working wonders.
There was just one problem with the report: it was completely wrong.
The State Department is scrambling to revise its annual report on global terrorism to acknowledge that it understated the number of deadly attacks in 2003, amid charges that the document is inaccurate and was politically manipulated by the Bush administration.
When the most recent “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report was issued April 29, senior Bush administration officials immediately hailed it as objective proof that they were winning the war on terrorism. The report is considered the authoritative yardstick of the prevalence of terrorist activity around the world.
“Indeed, you will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight” against global terrorism, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said during a celebratory rollout of the report.
But on Tuesday, State Department officials said they underreported the number of terrorist attacks in the tally for 2003, and added that they expected to release an updated version soon.
Instead of having the best results in a generation in 2003, the new — and revised to be accurate — account will likely show that last year was among the worst in a generation for terrorist attacks around the world.
I can’t help but wonder, though, how the administration got this wrong in the first place and what political motivations were behind this “mistake.”
On Tuesday, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) applauded the State Department for deciding to reissue the report, a step he requested in a letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell three weeks ago. But Waxman said the Bush administration so far had refused to address his allegation that it manipulated the terrorism data to claim victory in the U.S.-declared war on terrorism.
“This manipulation may serve the Administration’s political interests,” Waxman wrote in his May 17 letter to Powell, “but it calls into serious doubt the integrity of the report.”
Several State Department officials vehemently denied their report was swayed by politics. “That’s not the way we do things here,” said one senior official.
Perhaps not, but how, then, did this happen? We’re not talking about a few rounding errors here. This is a key government report, translated into several languages and published around the world, which showed the opposite of the truth and coincidentally made the administration look more successful.
So, who’s responsible? A few “bad apples”?
[T]he State Department report listed 190 terrorist attacks in 2003, including 169 “significant” ones. But Waxman said a review showed the report stopped counting terrorist incidents on Nov. 11, leaving out several major attacks, including bombings of two synagogues, a bank and the British Consulate in Turkey that killed 62 and injured more than 700.
Waxman said a State Department official blamed the Nov. 11 cutoff on a printing deadline.
Are we to believe the State Department relies on a printer with a four-month lead time? None of this adds up.
The non-partisan Congressional Research Service has just concluded, by the way, that the mistakes in the report are part of a pattern in which the State Department was unduly influenced by political and economic considerations.
Dems on the Hill might be talking about this one for a while.