U.S. Doubles Its Count of 2003 Terrorism Casualties

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5487284

U.S. Doubles Its Count of 2003 Terrorism Casualties
Tue Jun 22, 2004 07:33 PM ET

By Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration on Tuesday more than 
doubled its count of people killed and injured by international 
terrorism in 2003 as it revised a faulty report used to argue it was 
winning the war on terror.

The administration said international terrorism killed 625 people last 
year, up from the 307 it reported on April 29 but below 2002's 725 
fatalities. It found 3,646 were wounded last year, above the 1,593 
initially cited and the 2,013 in 2002.

The errors in the State Department's "Patterns of Global Terrorism" 
report embarrassed the administration and dented its claim to be 
prevailing in the war on terrorism, a key part of President Bush's 
re-election strategy.

Secretary of State Colin Powell blamed "computational and accounting 
errors."

Other officials said they failed to count many terrorist attacks in 
November and December, double-counted others and misclassified still 
others as they were fed into an antiquated, 10-year old database system 
that then miscounted the totals.

The original tally omitted a Nov. 9 car bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 
that killed at least 17 people and bombings in Istanbul that killed at 
least 61 people on Nov. 15 and Nov. 20.

The number of international terrorist attacks last year was revised up 
to 208 from the 190 the State Department initially reported, and the 
number of 2002 attacks was also revised up to 205 from the 198 
originally reported. Officials said they were reviewing the 2002 death 
and injury figures, which might rise.

U.S. officials said the number of "significant" terrorist attacks -- 
those that kill or seriously injure someone, cause more than $10,000 in 
damage or attempt to do either of those things -- rose to 175 last year, 
the most since 1982.

The primary source of the errors was the Terrorist Threat Integration 
Center (TTIC), an independent interagency group set up last year to 
address U.S. intelligence agencies' failure to prevent the Sept. 11, 
2001, attacks.

"I assume personal responsibility for any shortcomings in TTIC's 
performance," said the center's director John Brennan. "I regret any 
embarrassment this issue has caused," he said.

TTIC inherited the job of compiling the terrorism numbers from the CIA 
last year and Brennan said the departure of a CIA official who oversaw 
contractors who tally the data contributed to the errors.

U.S. officials deny skewing the numbers for political gain amid this 
year's presidential election campaign, in which Bush has cast himself as 
a "war president" who has made the country safer.

When the report was released in April, Deputy Secretary of State Richard 
Armitage said it provided "clear evidence that we are prevailing in the 
fight."

Bush appears to be losing ground on the terrorism issue amid growing 
public disenchantment with the Iraq war, according to an ABC 
News/Washington Post poll released on Monday.

The poll found 48 percent of Americans said they trusted Democratic 
presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry to do a better job of fighting 
terrorism, compared with 47 percent who favored Bush on the issue.

"They just don't know how to add," Kerry spokesman Mark Kitchens said of 
the flawed report. "It's further evidence why this president is 
exhausting his credibility with the American people."

Powell carefully avoided saying Washington was winning the terror war.

"We recognize that terrorism is a danger that is not going away soon," 
Powell said. "I'm aware of what Mr. Armitage said ... his 
characterization obviously was based on a report that had errors in it. 
I don't know how I can go beyond that."

Officials acknowledged the CIA and State Department failed to catch the 
errors in the flawed report.


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