Doubts Fly on Terror Report's Reliability

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-terror21nov21.story
THE NATION
Doubts Fly on Terror Report's Reliability
The State Department finds that flaws in what is supposed to be a definitive analysis of the global threat go much deeper than suspected.
By Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writer

November 21, 2004

WASHINGTON — Five months after embarrassed State Department officials acknowledged widespread mistakes in the government's influential annual report on global terrorism, internal investigators have found new and unrelated errors — as well as broader underlying problems that they say essentially have destroyed the credibility of the statistics the report is based on.

In a 28-page report, the State Department's Office of Inspector General blamed the problems on sloppy data collection, inexperienced employees, personnel shortages and lax oversight. Investigators also concluded that the procedures used by the State Department, CIA and other agencies to define terrorism and terrorist attacks were so inconsistent that they couldn't be relied upon.

The department's independent investigative unit concluded, however, that politics played no role in allowing so many mistakes to be published in the original version of the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report for 2003.

The 2003 report said that terrorist attacks and related deaths had dropped to the lowest levels in three decades, and top Bush administration officials immediately cited it as proof of their success in the global war on terrorism.

But the underlying data actually showed a sharp increase, to a 21-year high. The 199-page report, made public April 29, also omitted any significant terrorist attacks occurring after an early November cutoff date, including bombings in Turkey that killed at least 62 people, and left out some terrorist activity in Chechnya, Iraq and other locations.<snip>