Friday, April 15, 2005

Have we really learned to live with this kind of absurdity?

Knight-Ridder story: Bush administration eliminating 19-year-old international terrorism report by Jonathan Landay 04/15/05.

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.

Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.

Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism."

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.

And even those record 2004 figures don't include some terrorist attacks: "The statistics didn't include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called 'a central front in the war on terror.'"

Oh, that report sounds embarassing.  Let's just eliminate it.

This is the Southern company-town approach.  The local paper criticized us?  Cut off all advertising with them.  Cancel all the company subscriptions.  It's amazing.  Just amazing.

Can this get any more ham-handed?  No, wait, don't answer that!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is just S.O.P. for the Bush administration.  They stopped doing ten-year budget forecasts when the deficit started getting out of control, and stopped publishing corporate layoff reports when employment didn't improve after a few rounds of tax cuts.  I'm sure there are other examples out there.  These I came up with after only a few seconds of thought.