Cooking the books on terrorism

[avram]

Last month:

Terrorism dropped 45% since 2001
Last year's total lowest internationally in 35 years

The number of terrorist acts internationally has dropped 45 percent from the level in 2001, according to an annual report by the State Department.

This month:

U.S. Will Revise Data on Terror

WASHINGTON — 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. [...]

Several U.S. officials and terrorism experts familiar with that revision effort said the new report will show that the number of significant terrorist incidents increased last year, perhaps to its highest level in 20 years.

Via Washington Monthly.

And I’m sure that State Department report doesn’t include things like kidnapping of innocent Iraqi civilians by US forces, that would be considered terrorist acts if the someone else were doing them to us.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I doubt that the State Department counts actions against residents of occupied countries as terrorism regardless of where they occur, or they'd have a lot of inconvenient things to count which would embarrass our close friends in China.