Annual Terrorism Report Will Show 29% Rise in Attacks
WASHINGTON - A State Department report on terrorism due out next week will show a nearly 30 percent increase in terrorist attacks worldwide in 2006 to more than 14,000, almost all of the boost due to growing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials said Friday.The annual report’s release comes amid a bitter feud between the White House and Congress over funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and a deadline favored by Democrats to begin a U.S. troop withdrawal.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top aides earlier this week had considered postponing or downplaying the release of this year’s edition of the terrorism report, officials in several agencies and on Capitol Hill said.
Ultimately, they decided to issue the report on or near the congressionally mandated deadline of Monday, the officials said.
“We’re proceeding in normal fashion with the final review of this and expect it to be released early next week,” State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said.
A half-dozen U.S. officials with knowledge of the report’s contents or the debate surrounding it agreed to discuss those topics on the condition they not be identified because of the extreme political sensitivities surrounding the war and the report.
Based on data compiled by the U.S. intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center, the report says there were 14,338 terrorist attacks last year, up 29 percent from 11,111 attacks in 2005.
Forty-five percent of the attacks were in Iraq.
Worldwide, there were about 5,800 terrorist attacks that resulted in at least one fatality, also up from 2005.
The figures for Iraq and elsewhere are limited to attacks on noncombatants and don’t include strikes against U.S. troops.
Even after this year’s report was largely completed and approved, Rice and her aides this week called for a further round of review, in part to avoid repeating embarrassing missteps of recent years in the report’s release, officials said. The review process is being led by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, formerly the nation’s intelligence czar.
The U.S. intelligence community is said to be preparing a separate, classified report on terrorist “safe havens” worldwide, and officials have debated whether Iraq meets that definition.
The report can be expected to be used as ammunition for both sides in the domestic battle over the Iraq war.
President Bush and his aides routinely call Iraq the “central front” in Bush’s war on terrorism and likely will say that the preponderance of attacks there and in Afghanistan prove their point.
But critics say the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have worsened the terrorist threat.
The contention by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that al-Qaida terrorists were in Iraq and allied with the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein before the invasion has been disproved on numerous fronts.
In September, a Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Saddam rejected pleas for assistance from al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and tried to capture another terrorist whose presence in Iraq is often cited by Cheney, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
“Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaida to provide material or operational support,” the Senate report said.
Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA officer who also worked in counterterrorism at the State Department, said that while the new report would show major increases in attacks last year in Iraq and Afghanistan, it could chart reductions in mass casualty attacks in the rest of the world.
“The good news is … we’re seeing verifiable and drastic reductions,” he said.
Among the major strikes were bombings in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Dahab on April 24, which killed 23 people and injured more than 60, and aboard trains in Mumbai, India, that left more than 200 dead and in excess of 700 wounded on July 11.
In 2004, the State Department was forced to correct a first version of the report that the administration had used to tout progress in Bush’s war on terror. The original version had undercounted the number of people killed in terrorist attacks in 2003, putting it at less than half of the actual number.
In 2005, the department was again accused of playing politics with the report when it decided not to publish the document after U.S. officials concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985.
The outcry forced Rice to drop that plan and publish the report.
Copyright © 2007 McClatchy Newspapers
Bush War I was in 1991. Babies born then will be 16 now. It is nearly impossible for any of those babies born to be pro-American. They were born into the fear of being bombed by Americans for reasons they can’t explain. That fear has only grown. You can’t blame the terrorists! They are just kids who don’t see an alternative.
Unfortunately, this plays right into the hands of the hawks in the Republican administration who would like to see the American military with preemptive striking ability in the middle east. Now they have 29% more of a reason to do so.
Outside of a complete paradigm shift, the only way many progressive minded people see out of this mess begins with MEDIA REFORM. The PBS show with Bill Moyers is a clear and well documented example of how CNN/FOX and other big media duped the American public.
Yes, MEDIA REFORM is more important than the war on terror. MEDIA REFORM is more important than global warming. Think about it!!
adamwestfakey@yahoo.ca
“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top aides earlier this week had considered postponing or downplaying the release of this year’s edition of the terrorism report”
Jeepers, makes you wonder what other public documents are not being released, or postponed indefinitely.
The Devil is always in the details. I am beginning to think that Hugo Chavez was entirely correct in his charcterization of Shrub as “El Diablo”.
“Based on data compiled by the U.S. intelligence community’s National Counterterrorism Center, the report says there were 14,338 terrorist attacks last year, up 29 percent from 11,111 attacks in 2005.
Forty-five percent of the attacks were in Iraq.”
What are the statistics prior to our invasion of Iraq and prior to the billions we and other nations are spending on intelligence to squelch these activities?
Annual Terrorism Report Will Show 29% Rise in Attacks
Yep- them republicans are doing one helluva good job in the war on terror.
“Postwar findings indicate that Saddam Hussein was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al-Qaida to provide material or operational support,” the Senate report said.
While it’s good to see statements of truth like this, for some of us this is old news. Way old. Before the Iraq war old. I knew this about Hussein v. Al Qaida long before the cowboy diplomacy that brought us this war. And I’m just a schmuck from the Northeast. How come the supposedly “smart” people that ru(i)n our country didn’t know?
The answer, of COURSE, is that they DID know, and simply lied about it.
Every terrorist in the world knows they have to prove themselves in Iraq before they can go any further! GIVE ME A BREAK!
If the U.S. pulled everything out of Iraq NOW, foreign fighters would not be welcome, because, you don’t get something for nothing.
Anyone wanting to unite Iraq would only succeed by winning “hearts and minds”.
The best thing we could do is offer to market to any regime that does not promote violence!
“…. the report says there were 14,338 terrorist attacks last year, up 29 percent from 11,111 attacks in 2005. Sure. And in the “good old days” of Saddam Hussein, before the Bush invasion, there were almost none. I don’t advocate returning to those days even were it possible - - but it makes you think, doesn’t it! We blundered into a situation we knew virtually nothing about, the lid was blown off Pandora’s box, al Qaeda gleefully jumped in, and all hell broke loose. We could stay there for years and the net result would be a continuing increase in terrorist attacks, more Iraqis and Americans killed, more infrastructure destroyed, and ultimately a world revolt against America’s stupid meddling. Impeachment, anyone?
Yes, impeachment! The whole world needs a conversation! People need to promote peace. Violence begets violence. Everyone needs to find peaceful ways to their anger, we need to teach anger management. You do not negotiate with your friends, you do it with the bullies. We cannot rule the world, “they” will not allow it. Which means they will use violence against us, so not to be under “OUR” thumb.
It would be interesting to include in the report, what their criteria of what a terrorist attack consists of and how many other smaller ons are being left out of the report. In brasil, people in the outskirts of the country suffer several “invisible” terrorist” attacks that never get converage or understanding.
Why is anything people do to fight back against the U S bully called “terrorism? The us can bomb and kill hundreds of thousands of unarmed helpless people and it is called “spreading democracy”, [some democracy.] Please don’t refer to it as george bush’s war. That coward has never fought in any war, and on 9/11 George ran like a texas rabbit.
All we get from this band of crooks is MOS; their main strategy is to spread fear among our people. This is the primary weapon they use to try to convince us (US) to keep them in power and to follow their lead. The reality is that they are the very ones who spread terror around the world with their imperialistic ways and their fascistic tactics. We need to throw the whole bunch out: they lie, they make up excuses to go to war, they try to tell us they are trying to “spread democracy” when all they are doing is to spread a new “Pax Romana,” actually “Pax Americana” which is even more diabolical than the old Pax was - - the Caesars could take lessons from Cheney, Rove, the Shrub and all their neo-con, PNAC and GDG cohorts.