Need Another Bush Lie? War on Terror Statistics

subgenius

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The State Department acknowledged Thursday it was wrong in reporting terrorism declined worldwide last year, a finding used to boost one of President Bush's chief foreign policy claims -- success in countering terror.

Instead, both the number of incidents and the toll in victims increased sharply, the department said.

Statements by senior administration officials claiming success were based "on the facts as we had them at the time. The facts that we had were wrong," department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

The April report said attacks had declined last year to 190, the lowest level in 34 years, and dropped 45 percent since 2001, Bush's first year as president. The department is now working to determine the correct figures.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, who had challenged the findings, said he was pleased that officials "have now recognized that they have a report that has been inaccurate, and based on the inaccurate information they tried to take self-serving political credit for the results that were wrong."

Among the mistakes, Boucher said, was that only part of 2003 was taken into account.
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Oh yeah he's the better War on Terror Fighter (sorry that thread's long since dead)
 
I came across this in a statistics book (In All Likelihood: Statistical Modelling and Inference Using Likelihood) I had for a stat 600 level class on generalized linear models, that I was reading again:

(from page 82)

"Jenkins and Johnson (1975) reported 76 incidents of international terrorism in the USA between January 1968 and April 1974. The data are categorized as follows:

Number of incidents k, Number of months, nk
0, 38
1, 26
2, 8
3, 2
4, 1
12,1
"

Thought people might find some (old) terrorism data interesting.
 
Methinks they doth protest a liittle too loudly...

quote
Terrorism up, not down: US

Secretary of State Colin Powell has acknowledged that poor data in a terrorism report allowed an erroneous conclusion that terrorist acts had decreased worldwide, but insisted the foul-up was unintentional.

"We didn't look deeply enough into the data to realise there were inconsistencies in reporting from the way we reported in previous years," Mr Powell said.
Mr Powell said a corrected version of the Patterns of Global Terrorism report has been released, which should have concluded that terrorism strikes were up.

"There was no attempt to mislead or cook the books in any way," he said.

The data had shown acts of terrorism and related deaths easing, positive political news for US President George W Bush who on the re-election campaign trail has touted his accomplishments in the war against terrorism.

Department spokesman Richard Boucher insisted:

"as the secretary said... there was no attempt at manipulation or political distortion but we did walk down a road that was the wrong one."

Boucher said a revised report and analysis was forthcoming.
--AFP

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200406/s1130314.htm
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"We didn't look deeply enough into the data to realise there were inconsistencies in reporting from the way we reported in previous years,"

Oh dear Colin, sounds like a line straight out of your recent apologetics concerning your game of charades at the UN over WMD.
There were certainly "inconsistencies" there too compared to the way you reported that in previous years:
"He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."
(February 24, 2001, Cairo)
 
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