West Coast Connection Forum
Lifestyle => Train of Thought => Topic started by: Ant on April 16, 2005, 12:09:24 AM
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Bush administration eliminating 19-year-old international terrorism report
WASHINGTON - The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.
Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, "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.
"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 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.
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This is just craziness. Sure the die-hards hate cuz I actually post what happens in the world, but this is just absurd. We've all at least heard the repeated claims that the Bush Administration tries to whitewash reality by paying off journalists, manipulating intelligence data, and err outright lying... but now they are going so far as to completely eliminate the definitive report on the state of international terrorism.
So let me see... the party of the business class is saying we don't need reports to verify progress. How convenient it would be if every organization could just declare progress and need no evidence that such a thing has occured. Fuck income statements and balance sheets if the CEO says we're doing good we must be doing good. And fuck actually generating reports on how we are doing in the war on terror... we will just shoot from the hip and assume we're winning cuz bush likes to tell us we are all the time even when our own govt. reports say the opposite. If you followed the news last year you prolly heard the Bush Administration tried to whitewash the numbers for this very report pre-election. They released a bogus set of numbers that they cited to argue we are winning the war on terror, they got called on their BS and they had to revise the numbers and sweep the story under the rug. The real numbers showed terrorism was on the rise, not on the decline... so now rather than trying to imporve the numbers for next year they are eliminating the entire report? And we are supposed to believe this BS when they say they are helpin us win the war on terror? Bullshit.
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The blogosphere reminds us that this isn't the first time something of this nature has happened:
http://www.davidsirota.com/2005/04/bush-bad-data-means-stop-publishing.html
President Bush has said that "in a society that is a free society, there will be transparency." That means that in America, we have a government where the public gets to see as much information as possible about its government.
But as the record shows, Bush is anything but pro-transparency. A careful look shows the Bush White House has systematically tried to stop publishing government information that it finds embarrassing or disagrees with - the opposite of "transparent." See the record for yourself:
- Knight-Ridder reports today that the Bush administration announced yesterday that it has "decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered."
- When unemployment was peaking in Bush's first term, the White House tried to stop publishing the Labor Department's regular report on mass layoffs.
- In 2003, when the nation's governors came to Washington to complain about inadequate federal funding for the states, the Bush administration decided to stop publishing the budget report that states use to see what money they are, or aren't, getting.
- In 2003, the National Council for Research on Women found that information about discrimination against women has gone missing from government Web sites, including 25 reports from the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau.
- In 2002, Democrats uncovered evidence that the Bush administration was removing health information from government websites. Specifically, the administration deleted data showing that abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer. That scientific data was seen by the White House as a direct affront to the pro-life movement.
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You really don't understand the basic methodology behind this reoprt do you?
Last year when this report was released, people were complaing that this report wasn't counting incidents in the Kashmir region or in the Phillipines. Around Three hundred of the six hundred plus incidents in this years report were in the Kashmir region. Do you know why they weren't being counted? Because neither group was considered a terrorist organization. If you aren't too blind, take a look and you'll find that violence is WAY down from previous years in that region.
Basically, Ant's saying: "Last year there were 300 coins, but we didn't count pennies. Now we have 600+ so we've gotta be rich!"
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lol your partisanship is astounding...
if their are flaws in the report fix them... don't chuck the report...
ya really let's run around all day saying "things are getting better" with no numbers to prove that is the case... how nice it would be if all you had to do is say "things are improving" for that to become reality.
and this isn't even an isolated incident...
this administration in the past few months alone has gotten caught trying to misinform the american public more than a few times... but apparently you enjoy lies and misinformation as long as they help confirm ur worldview.
if you don't know what i'm referring to do some research, but i imagine you do...
this is far from an isolated incident.. its a pattern of manipulation and deception.