We're losing the war on terr'r and the US is lying. What a shock.

US 'conceals high terror figures' Henry Waxman, citing official briefings given to congressional aides, said the number of "significant" [terror] attacks had risen more than three-fold in a year. He accused the state department of concealing the increase in terror attacks. "There were about 650 such attacks last year, the congressman said - up from 175 in 2003, a record number at the time."

Now this Reuters article says that the increase in terrorism was due to increased violence in Kashmir. And the article says that they had more full time employees counting terror attacks for 2004 than they had for 2003 so we can't compare the numbers because they were handled differently.

... it would be unfair of Democrats to claim terrorism was getting worse under the Bush administration, stressing that the 2004 and 2003 numbers were not counted in the same way and hence were not comparable.

It's a good thing I don't know who gave this lame excuse. Do they mean to tell me that all the time our country was pissing money and lives away on this war on terror that no one in government was capable of counting the damn terror attacks world wide? So now we're gonna start over and the state department doesn't want the responsibility of counting?

The State Department stirred a debate last week by saying it would no longer release the numbers in its annual terrorism report but that the newly created National Counterterrorism Center, which compiles the data, would do so.

They had to create a new agency to count and compile data. You could hire a college kid to do this! The Guardian reports that Condoleezza Rice ordered the report to be withdrawn and a new one issued minus the statistics. Waxman got angry.

Henry Waxman, has written an angry letter about the change to Cameron Hume, the state department's inspector general ... "There appears to be a pattern in the administration's approach to terrorism data: favourable facts are revealed while unfavourable facts are suppressed."

Ms Rice's spokesman, Richard Boucher, denied the change was politically inspired and said Ms Rice had decided the statistics would be better handled by the national counter-terrorism centre. However, intelligence officials said there were no immediate plans to publish the figures.

How they can even use the word, intelligence, in a sentence about the workings of our government makes my head explode.

This AP story reports:

Waxman said Russ Travers, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told congressional aides during a briefing Monday that more than 100 attacks in Iraq were not counted because they were not considered to be international attacks.
In Iraq... there were nine times as many terror attacks in 2004 as there were in 2003.

Do you get this? Can you believe this? No one can count. No one wants to take responsibility. Now just watch Waxman take all the heat for bringing this up in the first place.