Doubts Fly on Terror Report's Reliability
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.
Those errors were fixed in a second version of the terrorism report, released June 22. But six Democratic senators, suggesting that the administration was manipulating terrorism statistics for election-year political gain, asked Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to find out what had gone wrong, prompting the investigation by the inspector general. A copy of the inspector general's conclusions, marked "sensitive but unclassified", was obtained by The Times.
The annual report has been mandated by Congress since 1987 as the government's primary reference tool on worldwide terrorist activity, trends and groups and the U.S. response to them.
The document is relied on by Congress and U.S. counter-terrorism agencies in deciding how to fight terrorism, and is translated into at least four languages so the public, academics and foreign governments can use it to assess global trends.
