4-18-05, 9:31 am

The terrorism card was a political maneuver by the Bush administration to scare just enough people to win reelection in November. Dedication to the permanent war on terror was the mantra of his campaign.

The war in Iraq, which has since been shown to have had nothing to do with international terrorism or WMD, has made the world safer, Bush boasted. Despite evidence to the contrary, Bush has described Iraq as a main front in his war on terror.

Given this rhetorical commitment to fighting international terrorism, the recent decision of the Bush administration to not publish the State Department's annual report called 'Patterns of Global Terrorism' is all the more perplexing.

In its 19 years of being published, State Department report purported to give the definitive international picture on terrorism. It is a report that is mandated by law – Title 22 of the United States Code, Section 2656f(a), which requires the Department of State to provide Congress a full and complete annual report on terrorism – to be specific. The law requires the report be published before April 30th.

But this year, regardless of legal mandate, political squabbling in the administration and fears that continued increases in terrorist activity might undermine Bush's claim to have made the world safer caused the report to be scrapped. Bush officials blamed faulty methodology by the National Counterterrorism Center. Others in the department hinted that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered the report scrapped because 2004 statistics continued to show growth in terrorist activity.

This development follows hard on the heels of the experience with last year’s report on global terrorism. When it was first published, the 2003 report appeared to show a drop in terrorist activity, bolstering Bush's claim that war had reduced terrorist activity.

Bush took the report on the road to boast as part of his campaign stump.

Unfortunately for him, his glee was short-lived. Weeks later the report had to be revised showing that terrorist activity had actually increased dramatically.

Independent analysis of the report and of terrorist activity showed that terrorism had reached a 20-year high, as Rep. Henry Waxman (CA) charged in a letter to then-Secretary Colin Powell.

Revisions were made and the report was buried.

The 2004 report is said to have contained documentation of as many as 675 'significant' terrorist attacks, not including attacks made on US troops in the main front of the war on terrorism (Iraq), says a Knight-Ridder story.

This is about 5 times more than in 2003, which recorded terrorist activity at a 20-year high.

Bush-supporters are blaming faulty numbers for Rice's order to scrap the latest report. They are waiting for better numbers so as not to make the president's claim that the world is safer into the obvious bunk that it is.

Even though the election is long over, and Bush has tried hard to put the terror issue behind him. He’d rather focus on other parts of his agenda that he didn't raise during his campaign – privatizing Social Security and more tax cuts for the rich.

But growing terrorist activity in the world have forced him to deal with the issue, even if it is only to play political football with a legally mandated report that is supposed to inform the public honestly about what is happening in the world.



--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs. Reach him at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.