First the Bush administration boasted in a government report that global terrorist attacks had fallen to the lowest level in three decades. Then the Bush administration said it had counted wrong and that the attacks had actually increased and reached a 21-year high.
Now, however, administration officials are saying their definitive analysis on global terrorism, which is published and distributed around the world, is so flawed, they have no idea whether terrorist attacks are going up or down.
Five months after embarrassed State Department officials acknowledged widespread mistakes in the government’s influential annual report on global terrorism, internal investigators have found new and unrelated errors — as well as broader underlying problems that they say essentially have destroyed the credibility of the statistics the report is based on.
In a 28-page report, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General blamed the problems on sloppy data collection, inexperienced employees, personnel shortages and lax oversight. Investigators also concluded that the procedures used by the State Department, CIA and other agencies to define terrorism and terrorist attacks were so inconsistent that they couldn’t be relied upon.
I don’t mean to sound picky, but this seems like the kind of thing the administration should have a firmer grasp on.
This isn’t just another low-level document that sits on some bureaucrat’s shelf collecting dust.
The document is relied on by Congress and U.S. counter-terrorism agencies in deciding how to fight terrorism, and is translated into at least four languages so the public, academics and foreign governments can use it to assess global trends.
A terrorism analyst on Capitol Hill added that this document “determines where we put our resources, what we tell other countries, what we think the trends are.” Yet, as of now, the report and its methodology are so flawed, it’s rendered meaningless. How reassuring.
Can’t anyone here play this game?