they are according to the report cited in the article below. what i find much more problemmatic, however, is the fact that the admin has decided to simply stop publishing the report…
So how many of those attacks were against Americans?
to be quite frank, i am not sure. there is no public access to the report.
it had been published for 18 or so years previously and was considered to be a pretty solid source for terror info. “global patterns on terror” is the name of it. reading some excerpts of past reports and as the name suggests, it’s a world wide survey. i also understand that the top priority for counterterrorism policy is to first and foremost end attacks on american interests. a second priority, though, is ending terrorist attacks worldwide, or containing them as much as possible. this report calls into question the success that bush, et. al. has had in its war on terror…
and like i said, i am less concerned about the actual results of the report. i don’t like that they’d simply stop publishing the report when news got negative…
So how many of those attacks were against Americans?"
That doesn’t really matter. The report isn’t a report on acts of terrorism against US citizens, it has been a report on the trends in international terrorism around the world. I don’t know what the motives behind getting rid of the report are, but previous this report has been a widely used tool to look at trends. It was a frequently used resource, and the report generally distinguishes between significant and non-significant events, talks about who committed the various attacks, how many were killed, how the attack was perpetrated, etc, etc. It was a very good tool, and a similar type of publication really is a pretty necessary thing for researchers and people in general to get a good idea about what is happening. Hopefully, some substitue will be produced, or the report will be reinstated.
i am less concerned about the actual results of the report. i don’t like that they’d simply stop publishing the report when news got negative…
Well, cutting down the lines of communication is par for the course for this administration, and I can’t argue with you there.
But the gist of the article is that the report is being held back because it shows a failure of the adminstration in the war on terror. And while the report might in fact lead to such a perception, the perception is probably false. Meaning that if the attacks were mostly directed an non-American targets, it ain’t our problem.
Doesn’t bother me too much nor will it have a significant impact on security as a whole. Those who need to get the information on global terrorism will certainly turn to other sources.
my feeling is, though, that if that were simply the case, they’d publish the report and provide that context(it’s not our problem, we’re protecting our own). methinks it makes the admin look bad and thus, the reaction…
I wouldn’t read too much into the move.
and what sources would those be? i can’t believe anyone would be ok with this. every admin since the inception of this report as issued a sanitized version to the public. bush himself was fine with it until there was an upward trend in attacks culminating in, apparently, a pretty big spike for '04. what happened to transparency?
please. this is just par for the course for an admin known for its info, image control and a tight grip on the flow of news coming from the gov’t. this report raises questions as to the success of one bush’s major policy platforms and they simply make it go away…
Do you honestly think that all sources of intelligence as it relates to terrorist activity around the globe was channeled through this one report? In addition, who’s to say that this report wasn’t being used for counter terrorist activity?
Don’t politicize the issue. Terrorism is an issue no matter what your party affiliation.
Could you provide evidence and sources other than your own expert analysis to back this statement.
it’s a gov’t report. i’d suspect it is pretty much an accumulation. what they release to the public is a version which has been cleansed of classified info, such that it is mostly a general and statistical overview of terrorism all across the globe. there are no security issues involved and none were cited as reasons for not publishing it. it’s classic bush–bury all negative news.
here are a couple excerpts from the story:
Last June, the administration was forced to issue a revised version of the report for 2003 that showed a higher number of significant terrorist attacks and more than twice the number of fatalities than had been presented in the original report two months earlier.
The snafu was embarrassing for the White House, which had used the original version to bolster President Bush’s election-campaign claim that the war in Iraq had advanced the fight against terrorism.
and another on the source of the report:
Created last year on the recommendation of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the center is the government’s primary organization for analyzing and integrating all U.S. government intelligence on terrorism.
this IS a political issue. and it doesn’t speak well at all for the admin.
Thanks…didn’t think you’d come up with anything.
Just for everyone’s info, the report in question “Patterns of Global Terrorism” is generally released as a legal requirement. Here’s a quote from the 2003 report:
“This report is submitted in compliance with Title 22 of the united States Code, Section 2656f(a), which requires the Department of state to provide Congress with a full and complete annual report on terrorism…”
I didn’t read the article too carefully about the report, so I don’t know if the laws requiring this report have changed, or if the administration has simply put a stop to it’s public release, but will still be making the report to Congress in a classified version. I would guess that some sort of report will continue to be published, just minus the exact numbers.
the article mentions that there is no legal requirement for general publication of the report. however, this is the first time a public version won’t be made available. i do believe the classified version has a legal requirement that it be submitted to congress yearly.
but as i said, the refusal to release the public version is typical for the admin.
my feeling is, though, that if that were simply the case, they’d publish the report and provide that context
Nah. Why bother trying to provide context to the stupid public, when you can just suppress the report? Like I said, it appears to be SOP for this admin.
**what i find much more problemmatic, however, is the fact that the admin has decided to simply stop publishing the report… **
Why is this problematic? From what I read the report still goes to congress right? They just will not publish a declassified version for public consumption. It doesn’t take any report from the Bush Admin to figure out there are more attacks now than before.
I also question how much insight this report gives to the Bush admin’s success on the war on terror since there is no other president to compare it to post 9/11 and the fact that post 9/11 the numbers of attack are just up period, regardless of what they have done or not done.
It also seems to have been a questionable source anyway since last year they had to revise it because it was too low and this year there are concerns it may be inflated with non terrorist acts.
From the admin’s standpoint it makes sense to not publish a report that is bound to be second guessed and doesn’t really tell the average person much and I am sure that people like Slowguy and people who work in that community will find other sources for their research.
From the article (bold is mine):
The senior State Department official said a report on global terrorism would be sent this year to lawmakers and made available to the public in place of “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” but that it wouldn’t contain statistical data.
He said that decision was taken because the State Department believed that the National Counterterrorism Center "is now the authoritative government agency for the analysis of global terrorism. We believe that the NCTC should compile and publish the relevant data on that subject."
It’s not all-encompassing in the confines of the definition you use, though there really aren’t too many reports that could/would/should meet that definition. The Intelligence Community (IC) is far too disparate to do that, nor would it likely be able to be released as unclassified.
The bolded part is what is most important, and results in a “wait-and-see” if the NCTC will take up this responsibility in the future. I’m not too sure I’d want them expending time releasing this info to the public when they could be engaged in more important tasks of national security. Would be interesting to see if anyone within the IC would comment on the report somehow being used for counterterroism, not knowing the exact details of the report I can’t venture an educated guess, but would assume it would be minimally useful, but you never know.