Another Broken Record

via Think Progress

Another record was broken this year - the number of serious international terrorist attacks in a single year more than tripled, from a record of 175 in 2003 to 655 last year, according to recently released U.S. government figures.

This data, however, will no longer be in the annual report on international terrorism submitted to Congress by the State Department. Just over ten days ago the State Department decided to eliminate the report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” entirely.

All this comes not even a year after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had to publicly apologize for the first edition of the 2003 report - which severely undercounted the number of terrorist attacks. “The numbers were off,” Powell said, and “we have identified how we have to do this in the future.”

Apparently Condoleezza Rice doesn’t agree - her office had suggested an alternative method for counting attacks, and when the National Counterterrorism Center decided not to use this new method, the State Department eliminated the terrorism statistics in the congressionally mandated report altogether.