US axes annual terrorism report

Washington The United States Department of State has decided to stop publishing the Annual Report on International Terrorism.

The decision was taken after the US government's top terrorism centre concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Most attacks were blamed on "Middle East terror groups".

US officials justified the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Centre used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, by including incidents that may not have been terrorism.

The 2003 report was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report titled, 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.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report, said "instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they tried to hide their facts from the American public".

There were also congressional accusations suggesting the Bush administration used the report to forward its own agenda. Congressman Henry Waxman, who was among a leading critic of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.

He said, "The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report".

He added, "It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it or any of the key data from the public."

US intelligence officials familiar with the issue, admitted statistics that the National Counterterrorism Centre 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 did not include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently called "a central front in the war on terror".

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.

Last year's confusion embarrassed 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.

US officials, however, blamed last year's mix-up on bureaucratic mistakes involving the Terrorist Threat Integration Centre, the forerunner of the National Counterterrorism Centre.

But it remains unclear whether any "global terrorism" data would be made available to the public. One US official said, "We will be consulting with Cong-ress what, who and how to publish", such a data.

However, Gulf News has learned that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took the decision because, "she was apprehensive about the methodology the National Counterterrorism Centre used to generate the data for 2004."