Eliminating Bad News

They say statistics can be made to prove anything. But what if the government cannot make the statistics say that terrorism is on the decline, as the administration has long claimed? Well, stop publishing the statistics. Knight Ridder reports

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Not only were there more attacks in 2004, there were significantly more. According to the stats the administration doesn't want us to see, the number of "significant" attacks rose from 175 in 2003, that itself the highest in two decades, to 625 in 2004. For those keeping score, that's a 250% increase in one year.

Some might think the statistics are biased by attacks in Iraq. Those attacks are not included, so actually the number is much higher. Of course, it would also be higher in 2003, assuming Iraq attacks were excluded for that year as well.

Now, there is no legal requirement that the report be published. The administration is required to submit a global assessment of terrorism annually to the House and Senate Foreign relations committees. Since 1986, a declassified version has been made available to the public. It is this version that the administration is stopping. Secretary of State Rice has tried to get the counterterrorism center to use an "alternative methodology" for counting attacks that "would have reported fewer significant attacks." (If you can't really lower the number, then change how you count.) When she was unsuccessful in getting the numbers reduced, the public publication was stopped.