...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Monday, April 18, 2005
      ( 9:40 PM )
 
Making us Safer!

For almost 20 years, the State Department has published an annual report on global terrorism. It lists terrorist groups that are on its watchlist and counts how many terrorist attacks occur throughout the year around the world. In its recently released analysis for 2004, it reported that more terrorist attacks occurred last year than in any year of the previous 19 reported on.

The Bush administration's response to this disturbing news? To cancel publication of the report, of course!

But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.

Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.

"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report."

Of course, the State Department says that no such thing is happening. They just think the methodology is flawed and the report shouldn't be released anymore. Funny how it worked for them when they liked the results but when the report was corrected for 2003 to show that there were indeed more terrorist attacks than previously counted, it made Bush look really bad. And now 2004 is even worse. What do you do with evidence that you're screwing the world and making everyone less secure? Get rid of the evidence!

Wow, another brilliant tactic in our president's ongoing fight for freedom. I feel more secure already. Of course, he had me at pre-emptive war...

| -- permanent link