State Department Issues Revised Terrorism Report

The State Department corrected its annual terrorism report Tuesday, acknowledging that the original version -- which had been hailed by the Bush administration as evidence that it was winning the war on terrorism -- was badly flawed, underreporting the number of attacks and casualties in 2003.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that the flawed report was the result of “computational and accounting errors” by the recently created Terrorism Threat Integration Center and that neither the CIA nor the State Department caught the mistakes. But the inaccuracies were not politically motivated as Democrats have charged, Powell argued.

“The report is not designed to make our efforts look better or worse, or terrorism look better or worse, but to provide the facts to the American people,” a grim-faced Powell said at a special briefing for reporters.

Powell defended his longtime friend Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage for telling reporters in April, when Armitage issued the original report, that “you will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight” against global terrorism.

“I’m sure that if all of us had been aware of these errors and had the corrected copy of the report at that time, the statements that were made at that time would have reflected the corrected report,” Powell said.

But Democrats said that the revisions proved that the original report resulted either from gross incompetence or political manipulation, and raised new questions about the competency of U.S. intelligence agencies.

“This is the report that our government agencies rely on,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman of Los Angeles, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee. “For us to put out a report that was so flawed and useless -- it was just another piece that added to the loss of credibility of our country in the war on terrorism.”

Powell credited Waxman on Tuesday with having pointed out the errors in the original report to the State Department.

In an interview, Waxman said that the new figures showed a 20-year high in significant attacks, defined as those that cause or attempt to cause deaths, significant injuries or major property damage.

Waxman said that in his telephone conversations with Powell, the secretary was “outraged” that errors had found their way into the published report.

“I have high regard for him, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that they were just incompetent,” Waxman said.

In an interview Tuesday, Powell confirmed that he was angry about the errors, but said he had no plans to fire anyone.

“Yeah, I don’t like being picked off first base like that,” he said. “But so far I haven’t found malfeasance or any willingness to do wrong on the part of anyone. But we’ll tighten up our procedures, but I haven’t found anything here that I would say is deserving of firing, if that’s the question.”

In some cases, the errors were small. A total of 208 attacks were carried out in 2003, not the 190 originally reported, according to the State Department. Of those attacks, 175 now are classified as significant, up from 170 in April’s report.

The number of people killed in attacks last year, however, was 625 -- more than twice the 307 listed in April’s report. And the number of injured was revised upward from 1,593 in April’s report to the 3,646 now considered the correct number.

A spokesman for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the likely Democratic presidential candidate, said the revised report is an example of a White House that plays “fast and loose with the truth when it comes to the war on terror.”

The State Department explained that the problem stemmed from a new agency that used old methodologies, old software and an ill-trained staff to put together data that other agencies did not properly review.

Powell said this year was the first time the Terrorism Threat Integration Center compiled the data for the State Department’s annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report. The threat center, created by President Bush last year to close intelligence gaps, brings together analysts from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies. It reports directly to the director of the CIA.

But the center’s director, John Brennan, a CIA officer, said that it had performed poorly on the terrorism report. Brennan said the agency struggled with “antiquated software,” personnel shortages and a lack of managerial oversight.

“TTIC provided incomplete statistics to CIA, which incorporated those statistics into material passed to the Department of State,” Brennan said.

But he insisted that “anyone who might assert that the numbers were intentionally skewed is mistaken.”