I wonder if the first flawed report was deemed "clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, does the heavily revised and corrected report and it's grimmer figures mean that we are actually losing ground?
Perhaps the some of the actions commited in the "name" of the War on terror (mainly the Iraq invasion) have backfired and caused even more terrorism.
Or maybe it is a case of thing are going to get worst before they get better.
I'm going to stick to my assessment made before the Iraq war, that it has caused more terrorism, both in Iraq and abroad. Sadly, it may cause even more terrorism, not only in the near future, but for years, maybe even generations to come. I hope I am wrong on this last point.
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Link
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration on Tuesday more than doubled its count of people killed and injured by international terrorism in 2003 as it revised a faulty report used to argue it was winning the war on terror.
The administration said international terrorism killed 625 people last year, up from the 307 it reported on April 29 but below 2002's 725 fatalities. It found 3,646 were wounded last year, above the 1,593 initially cited and the 2,013 in 2002.
The errors in the State Department's "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report embarrassed the administration and dented its claim to be prevailing in the war on terrorism, a key part of President Bush's re-election strategy.
Secretary of State Colin Powell blamed "computational and accounting errors."
Other officials said they failed to count many terrorist attacks in November and December, double-counted others and misclassified still others as they were fed into an antiquated, 10-year old database system that then miscounted the totals.
The original tally omitted a Nov. 9 car bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that killed at least 17 people and bombings in Istanbul that killed at least 61 people on Nov. 15 and Nov. 20.
The number of international terrorist attacks last year was revised up to 208 from the 190 the State Department initially reported, and the number of 2002 attacks was also revised up to 205 from the 198 originally reported. Officials said they were reviewing the 2002 death and injury figures, which might rise.
U.S. officials said the number of "significant" terrorist attacks -- those that kill or seriously injure someone, cause more than $10,000 in damage or attempt to do either of those things -- rose to 175 last year, the most since 1982.
The primary source of the errors was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), an independent interagency group set up last year to address U.S. intelligence agencies' failure to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"I assume personal responsibility for any shortcomings in TTIC's performance," said the center's director John Brennan. "I regret any embarrassment this issue has caused," he said.
TTIC inherited the job of compiling the terrorism numbers from the CIA last year and Brennan said the departure of a CIA official who oversaw contractors who tally the data contributed to the errors.
U.S. officials deny skewing the numbers for political gain amid this year's presidential election campaign, in which Bush has cast himself as a "war president" who has made the country safer.
When the report was released in April, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said it provided "clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight."
Bush appears to be losing ground on the terrorism issue amid growing public disenchantment with the Iraq war, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Monday.
The poll found 48 percent of Americans said they trusted Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry to do a better job of fighting terrorism, compared with 47 percent who favored Bush on the issue.
"They just don't know how to add," Kerry spokesman Mark Kitchens said of the flawed report. "It's further evidence why this president is exhausting his credibility with the American people."
Powell carefully avoided saying Washington was winning the terror war.
"We recognize that terrorism is a danger that is not going away soon," Powell said. "I'm aware of what Mr. Armitage said ... his characterization obviously was based on a report that had errors in it. I don't know how I can go beyond that."
Officials acknowledged the CIA and State Department failed to catch the errors in the flawed report.