What the F#@K?!

Sometimes I almost can’t believe what I’m reading:

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.

This is bloody outrageous! Such claims are patently specious; Bush’s foreign policy has made us less safe, not more so; there was no al-Qaida in Iraq before the war, only after we got there; terrorism is on the rise, not on the run; Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11 is still on the loose, no doubt planning his sequel. Eliminating a report that tracks the potential danger to our country and our allies does not erase these facts.

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.

"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report."

And any news organization, any newspaper, any news show, any magazine, worth its salt should be covering this story, alarming the American people that this administration cares more about its ability to say they’re winning the war on terror (without any pesky reports proving otherwise getting in their way) than actually developing smart foreign and domestic policies that will keep Americans safe. The emperor has no fucking clothes, and every rag in the nation ought to show his shriveled little dick swinging in the breeze until every last person gets the goddamned picture.

According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004.

That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.

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."

Of course attacks on American troops in Iraq wouldn’t be counted, because it wouldn’t help their little report if they were. An odd decision, though, considering the administration’s insistence that the insurgency is comprised entirely of foreign Islamic extremists (that is, terrorists), despite the fact that even the Iraqi people aren’t totally sure from whence the attacks come, and whether they are possibly a combination of terror and resistance.

The officials said they interpreted Rice's action as an attempt to avoid releasing statistics that would contradict the administration's claims that it's winning the war against terrorism.

Yeah, well, that’s a pretty fair interpretation, I think.