Last year, Bush's State Department lied to the American people by underreporting the number of terrorist incidents in an attempt to pretend Bush had done a better job fighting the bad guys than the numbers indicated. It had to resubmit a new report with adjusted numbers and admit its "naughtiness."
This year, Condi Rice just decided not to report any terrorist incident numbers at all. Too late, the Washington Post reports:
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.
In Iraq, terrorist incidents increased "dramatically" from 22 to 198, which puts the lie to Bush's claim that things have stabilized since the handover to an interim government last summer.
"Last year was bad. This year is worse. They are deliberately trying to withhold data because it shows that as far as the war on terrorism internationally, we're losing," said Larry C. Johnson, a former senior State Department counterterrorism official, who first revealed the decision not to publish the data.
After a week of complaints from Congress, top aides from the State Department and the NCTC were dispatched to the Hill on Monday for a private briefing. There they acknowledged for the first time the increase in terrorist incidents, calling it a "dramatic uptick," according to participants and a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).
Both Republican and Democratic aides at the meeting criticized what a GOP attendee called the "absurd" explanation offered by the State Department's acting counterterrorism chief, Karen Aguilar, that the statistics are not relevant to the required report on trends in global terrorism. "It's absurd to issue a report without statistics," said the aide, who is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "This is a self-inflicted wound by the State Department."
