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21
Apr

2005 a banner year for terrorists: who knew?

BTC News White House correspondent Eric Brewer knew, and reported in January on the surge in terrorist attacks from 2004-2005. Four months later, relying on “counterterrorism officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers,” Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau has rebroken the story.

Maybe Ron Hutcheson, KR’s own White House correspondent, will have the opportunity to bring the question up again before Scott McClellan bows out for good, and we can compare the response he gets to the one Brewer got when he braced McClellan, also in January.

What McClellan said, more or less, was that the increase reflects the administration’s success in fighting global terrorism. Because if terrorists weren’t blowing up things and people, we’d have no way of knowing we’re winning. Or something like that.

Brewer used publicly available data from the department of Homeland Security’s Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB), which is managed by the Rand Corporation, to document a 51% increase in terrorist attacks from 2004-2005. Knight Ridder says the administration’s report will show more than 10,000 incidents in 2005 — a nearly 300% increase over 2004, and about 6,000 more than the Terrorism Knowledge Base documents — with more than half of those occurring in Iraq.

We’ll have to wait for the actual report to see why there’s such a discrepancy between the administration’s figures and those provided by the TKB, but the story does suggest what the administration’s response to questions about the increase will be: “[A] counterterrorism official said that one reason for the larger number of attacks documented in 2005 is that more analysts have been assigned to count and track terrorist incidents.”

We’ll also have to wait to find out why the same counterterrorism official said that “there wasn’t a large change in the number of high-fatality attacks, in which 10 or more people were killed, compared with 2004.” According to the TKB, which generated the chart below, that’s not exactly accurate: incidents in which 6-15 victims died more than doubled; incidents in which 16-30 victims died nearly doubled; and incidents in which 31-100 victims died increased slightly. We don’t know what the official’s definition of “large” is, but anything in the vicinity of a 100% increase satisfies ours.

Terrorism deaths by incident

We’re sending the information unearthed by Brewer to Knight Ridder’s reporter — the excellent Warren Strobel, who together with Jonathan Landay produced the most consistently aggressive and skeptical reporting on Bush administration claims during the months before the Iraq invasion — along with the numbers on the deaths per incident. We’ll let you know if we hear anything back.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 12:53 am and is filed under Bush Administration, Commentary, Eat the Press, General, Weldon's Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “2005 a banner year for terrorists: who knew?”

  1. 1
    Eddie Says:

    “[A] counterterrorism official said that one reason for the larger number of attacks documented in 2005 is that more analysts have been assigned to count and track terrorist incidents.”

    The Administration also tried this argument last year.

    Additionally, in the AP’s reporting of this issue, we get another quote recycled from last year:

    When asked about the reported increase in attacks generally, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday that the methodology had changed so there was no common baseline. “Technically, you could say that there might be a larger number of incidents from one year to another, but it’s comparing apples and oranges,” he said.

    Compare with the following, from July 6, 2005:

    The National Counterterrorism Center’s interim director, John Brennan, called a new database that was to go online today “the most comprehensive U.S. effort to date to track terrorist incidents worldwide.” But he cautioned that comparing the new tally to previous ones was comparing apples to oranges.

    Hmmmm…just noticed that both last year’s and this year’s pieces were written by Katherine Shrader. I may have to track her down and see what’s up.

    April 25th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
  2. 2
    Weldon Berger Says:

    Hi, Eddie. Thanks for dropping by. Yeah, it’s just the same old crap. Eric brought it up at a briefing last year as well. If you do reach Shrader, let us know.

    April 25th, 2006 at 11:57 pm

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