Terrorism reports 'had errors'

2005-04-19 14:50

Washington - The United States state department said on Monday it will stop publishing annual statistics on terrorism activities after discrepancies were found last year in figures for the number of attacks and casualties.

Department spokesperson Richard Boucher said "the government has decided that the National Counterterrorism Centre should compile and publish the statistical data on terrorism that has previously been included by the state department in our report."

But he dismissed news reports that the department would do away with its annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report, which is mandated by law.

"That report is due to Congress by April 30, and we will do that this year," Boucher said, adding that the publication would contain, as it had in the past, the country reports on terrorism.

"That's what the law asks of the state department, that's what we'll be reporting to Congress," he said.

The state department report last year on terrorism statistics in 2003 was riddled with errors and then Secretary of State Colin Powell called it "a big mistake". The report had to be corrected and re-released.

The 2004 report had claimed that the number of terrorist incidents has been on the decline over the past three years and that 190 cases reported in 2003, represented the lowest reported total since 1969.

US officials at the time trumpeted the report as evidence that the United States was winning the war on terrorism.

However, after academics accused the department of mischaracterising information in the report, it acknowledged that it had underreported the number of terrorist incidents and released an updated version of the terrorism report.

The revised report showed a sharp increase in the number of "significant attacks" and more than double the initial count of those killed.

According to the new report, there were 208 terrorist attacks in 2003, with 625 dead. The initial report counted 307 deaths in a total of 190 terror attacks.

The number of people killed in terrorist attacks worldwide still declined in 2003 when compared with 2002, when 725 people were killed.

But the decline was much less steep than originally reported, and the number of "significant attacks" - those involving large numbers of casualties or property damage --increased from 138 in 2002 to 175 in 2003, a 21-year-high.

Boucher rejected suggestions that the change in the annual report's format of gauging terrorism smacked of politics.

"There's no politics in this. There's an attempt to get the best possible information to the Congress and to the American people on what's going on in the world with regard to terrorism," he said.

"The people of the United States will get all the facts. The world will get all the facts. We're going to do very thorough reports we do on countries that support terrorism, on countries where terrorism occurs and on foreign terrorist organisations, as we always have in the past.

- AFP