The Bush Clown Show Continues

Matthew Yglesias reports:

Matthew Yglesias: New Depths Discovered:

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.

That's Jonathan Landay reporting for Knight-Ridder. And it really does seem to be as simple as that. According to Landay's sources, the administration only wants reports showing that terrorism is going down, and if the State Department's methods don't produce that result, then their report just won't be done. Lovely.

Comments

[Lee]

Your brief paragraph understates what is going on with this report. As the Knight Ridder story reminds us, last year the State Department issued this report with fanfare that terrorist activity had declined in 2003. They soon had to pull the report back for revisions that showed a record 175 "significant" terrorist attacks. Guess it just wouldn't do to issue a report on 2004 to report 625 such attacks.

[Matt Festa]

How about yourself Brad? I read dozen's of posts about hor horrible the war on terrorism was going. And after the Iraqi and Afghani elections, you have been eerily silent? Why?

Matt Festa

[Matt Festa]

What is even more insulting is the lack of reporting coming from Iraq. It was a mess there and you and the media reported it. But since the election, the insurgency lost major steam, troop deaths were cut in half, the Iraqi's set up a new gov't, etc. Where are your posts on that.

Furthermore, can't it be that the increase in the amount of terrorist attacks can be causally explained by the fact that we are in a WAR, a war with a brutal insurgency that attacked us daily oversees? Come on.

I am not Bush partisan, but neither do I take time out of my day to get my fix bashing the man.

Matt

[semper fubar]

Try reading the article next time, Matt.

"The statistics didn't include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called 'a central front in the war on terror.' "

Want to take another (un)educated guess?

[Otis Driftwood]

can't it be that the increase in the amount of terrorist attacks can be causally explained by the fact that we are in a WAR, a war with a brutal insurgency that attacked us daily oversees?

We might get an answer to that question if we could see the report. Why can't we?

[Kramer]

Matt:

It seems a little unreasonable to hold one (single, solitary) person (on their blog no less) to the same standard as the entire US government. While Brad is limited by hours in the day, his actual job, his desire to (you know) have significant (or even insignificant) relationships with actual people it seems reasonable to say that the US government collectively shares no such limitation. If nothing else I'd like the government to be empirical - if it doesn't actually collect the data (entirely separate question from who in the media does or does not choose to report it)it seems clear this will never happen.

[Matt Festa]

Kramer,

Stand corrected on the terrorist comments, I read the post linked to but not the article. But my broader point still holds, and I don't think it can be wisked away with the "time constraint" excuse.

Why take the time out of your day to post the negatives while ignoring the positives?

Seems a reasonable question to ask if you ask me.

Now, I went back and read the article, I didn't really learn much. Was the methodology flawed? Maybe, maybe not. It seems interesting to me that the statistics were significantly off in 2003.

But even the blog post flat out ignored that bit of evidence.

Besides, I could easily construct an argument that the Clinton presidency was a "clown show" when it comes to foreign policy. I would have Walter Russell Meade to back me up on it as well.

If the Bush presidency was such a clown show when it comes to foreign policy, then who deserves credit for the significant strides that are taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan. If it was such a clown show, what of Libya?

I'm not trying to say that Bush foreign policy has been perfect (the insurgency would falsify that claim, I think). But it has hardly been a clown show.

Apologies for the error.

[MrM]

Matt:

One should be careful with allocating credit and this is why using hard facts helps

- The foundation of the successful resolution of the Libyan situation was laid down by the Clinton administration. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with the successful culmination of Clinton's policy under Bush (http://www.mideasti.org/articles/doc192.html)

- Similarly, unless the Bush administration was linked to Arafat's and Hariri's deaths, it's got little to do with the recent developments in Palestine and Lebanon

- Given the horrendous death toll of Iraqi civilans caused by the US invasion, any arguments about success in Iraq are rather misplaced

[Steve]

"If the Bush presidency was such a clown show when it comes to foreign policy, then who deserves credit for the significant strides that are taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan."

They do, if there are lasting "significant strides", but they're still a sorry collection of thieves, liars and cowards.

Please go to "Today In Iraq" at http://dailywarnews.blogspot.com/ and read the "Rant of the Day". It's not to be missed.

[washerdreyer]

Matt- Haven't the major media sources done a fairly in depth job in reporting progress in Iraq following the Election?

I can't speak for Brad, of course, but it seems to me you've misconceived the role of his blog. Being a primarily economics focused blog, he does cover issues in economics whether they are positive or negative for the President and his Administration. But, since Brad has (correctly) formed a negative opinion of the President, he also has engaged in some advocacy on this blog, pointing out negative aspects of the Presidents work outside of Brad's area of expertise. I don't think this means he is doing something wrong when he doesn't put as much focus on foreign policy when things are going better than they were in the past, and we are no longer in an election campaign where it's so important to point out the President's failings.

[confused]

The Jonathan Landay article states that

"According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, 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."

The article also tells me I can go read previous reports at http://www/mipt.org/Patterns-of-Global-Terrorism.asp

So I do and I see that in the 2003 report (released in 2004) it says:

"There were 190 acts of international terrorism in
2003, a slight decrease from the 198 attacks that
occurred in 2002, and a drop of 45 percent from
the level in 2001 of 346 attacks. The figure in 2003
represents the lowest annual total of international
terrorist attacks since 1969."

Can someone explain that to me?

[TonyV]

Confused? Who are these mipt people anyway? Try going straight to the source. Ha, it even states that there is a law requiring the state dept. to issue this report annually.

http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2003/

The annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, released April 2004 by the Secretary of State and the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, is submitted in compliance with 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 for those countries and groups meeting the criteria of Section (a)(1) and (2) of the Act.

NOTE: Corrected Year in Review, Appendix A, and Appendix G were posted on June 22, 2004. Numbers in the text, specifically numbers of killed and wounded, will be revised to reflect the corrected Appendices.

[Lee A. Arnold]

The United States will continue to present the appearance that it is winning, even when it isn't, because it believes that domestic criticism can grow loud enough to endanger its long-term military strategy, something the North Vietnamese generals came to understand.

But the fact that we are in a major "information operations" phase of spinning Iraq, Afganistan, and the rest of the Middle East for the American public should blind no one to the facts. In both countries the U.S. has an unstable friendship of convenience with a small minority of the populace (while attempting to maneuver them into governance), plus we have promises from our own leaders that our troops may come home in one year or five; that is all. Independent reporting is severely restricted, which helps to give the appearance of reality to those periodic moments when the U.S. national media is inundated by a sunny-day meme, such as the recent wash of stories about democracy blooming like roses.

In Afganistan, opium production is at an all-time high, there was a report that the U.S. is trying to do a deal with the Taliban, and Karzai wants permanent basing of U.S. troops.

In Iraq under half of the eligible population voted, the government is distrusted by most of the people (almost all of whom believe the U.S. is there to stay, for the oil), the major cities remain at the brink of chaos, basic services and children's nutrition are scandalous, the Sunni insurgency has reduced the number of attacks but increased their sophistication, the Shiites might resume their own insurgency if Sistani (or al Sadr) begin to lose patience, and oil production is below Saddam levels.

Seventy to ninety percent of the Iraqis want the U.S. out of the country, and we are coming some day soon to a pressure point where the U.S. refuses to leave despite their wishes--unless they remain disunited and fighting each other.

Israel/Palestine does not look good. Abbas is weak and Sharon is stealing more of the West Bank.

Ghadafi in Libya is playing a game, and gets oil money in the bargain.

About the only bright spot for democracy seems to be Lebanon, which has a politically sophisticated population tired of civil war, and no American presence.

It seems more likely that, barring a sudden flowering of love among the Arabs and Muslims for all things American and Israeli, we are in for a long, long night of standard imperial-looking military policy, which now includes very sophisticated information ops performed on the U.S.'s own populace, who presently appear to believe that "significant strides" are being made toward peace and democracy.

Whether this would be any different, if the U.S. had taken a slower and more multilateral approach, or had not bungled the Iraqi occupation and instituted torture, is moot. But people shouldn't fool themselves. Some real information is still available from the foreign press, on the internet.

I think is rather hard to make the argument that the U.S. deserves much of anything in the way of "credit," except for the extraordinary bravery and dedication of its soldiers. But the civilian leadership very nearly made a total botch of it, and we're not out of the woods yet. History may judge that "clown show" is not inappropriate.

[Andrew Boucher]

Matt: I think the answer to your question is clear: BDL has a bias. OK, fine; if you can't stomach it, then go to another blog.

Still a government which stops issuing statistical reports because it doesn't like the results is a government on the path to ruin. When unemployment rises, will the Administration try to stop issuing unemployment reports? Democracy depends in part on the free transmission of information; if the government decides only to publish good news, then it is not doing its job. It has to be voted out at the earliest opportunity, or else we the electorate take the risk of the slippery slope. (I would also add that democracy also depends on people with biases publishing their views, but that's another story...)

[tante aime]

If you've watched the evolution of "democracy" in Afghanistan, which presages the inevitable script for
Iraq, then you know Karzai has asked for a permanent
US presence. Well, no duhh, the poor man is trapped in
his Kabul hotel behind five concentric layers of special
op's mercenary contractors all on the US taxpayer dole, (and a very expensive dole those contractors live on)
while the opium warlords having boxed Karzai in like the US military is boxed into the Baghdad Green Zone.

As a famous Jordanian quipped, "Karzai's got nothing."

Well then, surprise, surprise, if you search the DoD
contract RFB's, there it is, some $80,000,000 to be
awarded for construction of four military bases along
the proposed UNOCAL pipeline. Unfortunately, Karzai's
scripted request for a permanent US presence came
somewhat *AFTER* the DoD RFB hit the papers, a BushCo
scripting timeline error the US media chose to ignore.

Seems to me people were predicting back in the GWBI
era that the "hardening" of Afghanistan was a fait
accompli, and here is the gristly cold hard proof.
BushCo doesn't even worry about the timeline anymore,
cobbling everything together on the string of lies,
that the media spins into cotton candy, and then
the Republican brown shirts stuff down our throats.

Let's let Great GrandFather Marx have the final say:

"The state/finance-manipulated media becomes one of the most powerful levers of elite accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows an unproductive media with the power of creation and thus turns it into capital, without forcing it to expose itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in entertainment or even in journalism. The state’s politburos actually give nothing away, for the lie lent is transformed into public faith, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard truth would. But furthermore, and quite apart from the class of idle celebrities thus created, the improvised wealth of the financiers who play the role of middlemen between the government and the audience, and the media moguls, studios and private actor guilds, for whom a good part of every nationally syndicated show performs the service of a capital fallen from heaven, apart from all these people, the national media has given rise to vapor-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable charades of all kinds, to loathsome and corrupt political leadership, and to speculation: in a word, it has given rise to tabloid talking-head shock-jock societal gaming through the rise of a
modern media plutocracy."
(adapted from Karl Marx, "Das Kapital", although he was discussing 'public debt', a whole 'nuther scripting)

Now comes Republican spindoctors and history rewriters, pounding down Democratic faithful, casting BushCo insane clown posse unleavened bread on the water, and shouting down anyone who points out the mess they've made of it.

Read
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
Baghdad Burning, from an Iraqi living in Iraq.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (estimates of 300,000 in a population of 25,000,000, the equivalent of a protest march in WADC involving 30,000,000 Americans, e.g. huge) were protesting the new Iraqi government of expatriate collaborators and the new US ambassador, trained by the same CIA that trained Karzai, while during all this the US media was covering gay Prince Charles getting married to his mother-surrogate as a "really big reality show".

And that's the world we're trapped inside, pay-per-view.

To paraphrase Agent K from Men in Black, "1500 years ago, everybody *knew* that the earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody *knew* that the earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you *knew* that America was no longer a democracy. Imagine what you'll "know" tomorrow."

[Admiral Tirpitz]

>> What is even more insulting is the lack of reporting coming from Iraq. It was a mess there and you and the media reported it. But since the election, the insurgency lost major steam, troop deaths were cut in half, the Iraqi's set up a new gov't, etc. Where are your posts on that. <<

Good question. Where is the coverage? I just did a quick search on Google news for both Iraq and Afghanistan and about the only good news I could find in the rankings was a claim that the Taliban was nearing collapse. It surfaced immediately below a headline that predicted a major rise in terrorist attacks.

Beyond that there was the claim that "Afghanistan has agreed to send its troops to Iraq at a time when Afghans have been complaining against worse security situation in their ...." Hard to classify that one.

I guess no news coverage is good news, eh?

[Bruce Webb]

Not to pile on poor Matt, but there have been at least five different lulls in attacks on US troops and each and every one has been presented as "proof" that US policy is working. What part of "Mission Accomplished", "major combat concluded" and "30,000 troops by November 2003" are we supposed to be forgetting here? Let us see three months in a row of solid decreases in American deaths and then maybe we can talk. Treating every blip in casuality rates as confirmation of your pre-conceived views was old when George Will pulled it in Feb 2004.

[Karlsfini]

A tip of the hat to Matt.

Look how much good comment he generated.

Kevin Drum has long been blessed by a small but loyal following of just such chuckle-heads. These comical characters regularly stir things up and, like Matt, draw some brilliant fire.

Although they share one dull style and are pretty much indistinquishable one from another, and although their comments are so predictable, they nonetheless liven up Drum's mild blog. You have to wonder if Kevin himself isn't behind their posts.

Anyway, Matt, if the goal is fewer American casualties in Iraq, then things may seem to be getting slightly better. (This goal could be fully realized if we pulled out right now.)

One reason for the recent decline in casualties seems to be that the U.S. Forces are hunkered down in the compounds and letting the "contractors" pull patrol and escort duties. Contractor casualties aren't reported.

Unfortunately, holding the fort doesn't really do anything useful except for our enemies (who increasingly look like the rest of mankind) since it keeps our military pinned down and bleeds our economy.

The wingnuts never tire of reminding us how wily ol' Reagan broght down the Soviets by forcing them to squander their wealth on military foolishness.

[Ghost of Joe Liebling's Dog]

Confused asked (slightly abridged, and _emphasis_ added),

The Jonathan Landay article states that

"According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, 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."

The article also tells me I can go read previous reports at http://www/mipt.org/Patterns-of-Global-Terrorism.asp

So I do and I see that in the 2003 report (released in 2004) it says:

"The figure in 2003 represents _the lowest_ annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969."

Can someone explain that to me?
--

Be happy to try ...

The Landay article, while doing an apparently-thorough job on the 2004 report, summarized the Keystone Kops production of the 2003 report, giving perhaps too abbreviated an account.

The 2003 report did indeed say, "The figure in 2003 represents the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969." Shortly after it was released, the State Department had to go on record with an apology that itself gave perhaps too abbreviated an account:

"Events were left out. Some were mislabeled and counted in the wrong categories. Some events were counted twice and some portions of the year were omitted entirely." (For "some portions of the year" read "roughly the last two months.") Colin Powell, at the time Secretary of State, denying anything deliberately fraudulent was planned, called it “a big mistake. It’s a numbers error." He denied "intent to cook the books," which was ever so reassuring.

It turned out that where the original report documented a decrease to "the lowest annual total of international terrorist attacks since 1969," the revised report, which included the full year and otherwise corrected honest mistakes which were not driven by intent to cook the books, said that international terrorist attacks had _increased_ to the _highest_ annual total since State had been keeping track.

As an index of progress in bringing Bush administration policies to the world, this year's report's (suppressed) documents a nearly 4X increase over last year in significant terrorist attacks. This is actually even worse than it appears at first, because the statistics for this year exclude terrorist attacks committed against US troops in Iraq. That's what Mr. Landay was getting at. It looks to me as if the link to mipt.org was ill-chosen at best, since mipt.org's downloads don't offer or even so much as hint at a revised 2003 report.

HTH.

-- Dog, etc.

[Bob H]

I haven't read the report, but I assume that it should rightfully include the daily attacks on Iraqis, which probably are running in the several thousand per year range. That is probably why they want to sit on it.

[spencer]

Alos note that since Bush came to office the government has quit publishing data on abortions that has been updated annually over the previous decade.

There is a private report out that added up state data on abortions and found that the number of abortions has risen sharply over the past four years. The report has been attacked by the right wing and some valid questions about its accuracy have been raised. But why does the government refuse to update its annual data and resolve this issue?

[Auros]

Is this really that much of a surprise?
http://slate.msn.com/id/2097268/

[anonymous]

Despite the politicization of the move, it's also being re-assigned, not terminally stopped:

The WP reports:
"The State Department has decided to stop publishing an annual statistical account of terror incidents worldwide, turning the task over to a government center established last year by Congress."

I believe this is in-line with the recommendations of the 9/11 commission.

I think that the TRANSFER of report responsibilities is significantly different than the CANCELLATION of the report.