Ain’t gonna study war no more

Or terrorism, anyway.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has quietly scuttled the State Department’s annual terrorism survey, whichreportedly indicates that 2004 was the worst year ever in terms of terrorism incidents. And the count excludes Iraq.

Federal law requires that the report be submitted annually to Congress; the Staties say they’ll submit the report but that “it wouldn’t contain statistical data.”

Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public,” charged Larry 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 condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that the publication was eliminated, but said the allegation that it was done for political reasons was “categorically untrue.”

According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials, statistics that the National Counterterrorism 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.

Stronger safer bigger badder better, we are. I have only two words for any remaining honest State Department officials: LEAK IT!

If Rice were a consumer product she’d be recalled for defects, if the Consumer Product Safety Commission was not defective in its own right.