Saturday, April 16, 2005

The easy way to eliminate reality-based terror!

from the Kansas City Star:

The State Department stopped publishing a terrorism report after the terrorism center concluded there were more attacks in 2004 than in any year since the report began in 1985.


Several U.S. officials defended the decision, saying the methodology the National Counter-Terrorism Center used for the report may have been faulty and may have included incidents that were not terrorism.

But other officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered the report 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.

“Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public,” said 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.

A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the allegation that it was being done for political reasons was “categorically untrue.”

According to Johnson, statistics that the National Counter-Terrorism 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.


Remember Ron Suskind's piece in the NYT Magazine shortly before the 2004 election? He got that immortal quote from a senior Andministration official about how Suskind (and by extension, the reast of us heathens) live in the insignificant "reality-based community?" Well this is how the rubber meets the road with that kind of thinking.

"A report (generated by an agency we control) concludes that what we are doing isn't working? So kill the messenger by spiking the report! Easy. No report, no problem."

"In our world, Osama is on the run (when we admit he exists), we are winning the war on terror, and freedom is on the march. If you can't see that, you must be one of those commie liberal judge types, and we are watching you."

(Note: preceding remarks are not an actual quote from any actual undead Bush official, though the author is confident that parking Condi or Wolfie for a few hours of good old-fashioned torture fraternity hazing in Abu Ghraib would be more than sufficent to obtain such quotes.)

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