US U-turn on upbeat terror report

[mrbowler]

This is a good example of information distortion. Honest Mistake

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[pandybat]

It's too hard to believe anything is an honest mistake anymore.

[mrbowler]

Originally Posted by pandybat

It's too hard to believe anything is an honest mistake anymore.

Yes-Maybe our country is becoming more cynical-or that we are less willing to accept mistakes.
When these mistakes happen over & over-it's only natural<imo> that they begin to question whether the information that they are supplied is hogwash.

[mrbowler]

Colin Powell Apologizes:

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell found himself regretting and backpedaling Sunday for the second time in a month as he acknowledged that an erroneous terror report was a mistake and insisted politics did not lead to the report's omissions.

Released in April, the State Department's annual report on global terrorism incorrectly declared that terrorist attacks declined in 2003. But figures from a corrected report "will be up sharply," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher has said.

The inaccurate report said 190 acts of international terrorism occurred in 2003 -- a slight drop from 198 attacks the previous year and the lowest total since 1969.

The report found that 169 of those were "significant" attacks, which involved death, serious injury or major property damage. However, researchers Alan B. Krueger of Princeton University and David Laitin of Stanford University reported in May that the number of significant attacks represented a 36 percent increase over the 124 events in 2001.

Sunday, Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the report "doesn't downplay terrorism in the slightest. But unfortunately, the data that is within the report -- the actual number of incidents -- is wrong."

Powell said the information was compiled by the CIA and the Terrorist Threat Information Center, which includes officials from the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA. He said State Department officials were working during the weekend to find out how the mistakes occurred, and he said he would meet Monday with officials from those agencies to discuss the errors

"All sorts of alarm bells should have gone off" when the data were being compiled, Powell said, but he denied that the figures were skewed for political purposes.

"I am not a happy camper over this," he said. "We were wrong."

California Rep. Henry Waxman, the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee, said the 2003 report did not include attacks that happened after the report's November 11 printing deadline.

That deadline prevented the inclusion of the bombings of two synagogues, the British consulate and a bank in Istanbul later that month, among other attacks, the researchers reported.

In a letter to Powell, Waxman accused the Bush administration of manipulating figures to show a decline in terrorist attacks ahead of the elections in November.

After the report's release, top Bush administration officials pointed to it as a sign that the war on terrorism was succeeding.

"This manipulation may serve the administration's political interests, but it calls into serious doubt the integrity of the report," Waxman wrote in May.

Powell denied any duplicity was behind the mistakes.

"There's nothing political about it," Powell said. "It's a data collection and reporting error. We'll get to the bottom of it, issue a corrected report and talk to Congressman Waxman."

The report marks the second time in a month that Powell disavowed information initially presented as accurate.

In May, he said much of the sourcing for his February 2003 presentation to the U.N. Security Council -- in which he outlined the U.S. arguments in favor of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein from Iraq -- was "inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading."

About the latest incident, "I am regretful that this has happened," he said Sunday. "We are going to get it fixed. We are going to get it corrected."

[mrbowler]

Update:

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. government restated its 2003 accounting of terrorist attacks Tuesday, reporting a sharp increase in the number of significant attacks and more than doubling its initial count of those killed.

The State Department's annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report now counts 208 terrorist attacks as having occurred in 2003, with 625 dead. When the report was released in April, it counted 307 deaths in a total of 190 terror attacks.

The number of people killed in terrorist attacks worldwide still declined in 2003 when compared with 2002, when 725 people were killed. But the decline was much less steep than originally reported, and the number of "significant attacks" -- those involving large numbers of casualties or property damage -- increased from 138 in 2002 to 175 in 2003, a 21-year-high.

"We have 18 more total events, five more significant events and 13 more nonsignificant events than originally reported," said Cofer Black, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator. "These new figures are accompanied by a dramatic increase in the numbers of casualties originally calculated."

The number of attacks originally reported was the lowest total since 1969, but Secretary of State Colin Powell said earlier this month that the reported decline was incorrect.

Researchers Alan B. Krueger of Princeton University and David Laitin of Stanford University reported in May that the number of significant attacks represented a 36 percent increase over 2001, up from 124 that year.

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California has suggested the numbers were being "manipulated" to serve the Bush administration's political interests.

The State Department eventually conceded that the original report failed to include a number of deadly attacks in the latter part of 2003, including a car bomb that exploded in a housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and a series of attacks in Istanbul, Turkey, all of which took place in November.

"For the past two weeks now, we have had a major effort under way within the State Department to get to the bottom of the data error and determine what corrections were appropriate and to make those corrections so we could show those corrections to the American people," Powell said Tuesday.

Powell previously blamed the erroneous conclusions on mistakes, not political pressure.

Black said the report was "marred by significant errors" when it was originally released. But he said those errors were the result of "honest mistakes, and certainly not deliberate deceptions."

The information was compiled by the CIA and the Terrorist Threat Information Center, which includes officials from the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the CIA.

John Brennan, director of the federal Terrorist Threat Integration Center, said a database error caused his agency to provide incomplete statistics to the CIA. The CIA then passed those incomplete numbers along to the State Department.

Brennan said he took responsibility for the error, but "Anyone who might assert that our numbers were intentionally skewed is mistaken."

[prism68]

Okay...

1. Do you really think your average American on the street even looks at these numbers? Or has a clue to begin with?
2. Also, with all the intense media scrutiny on Bush and the whole administration (read= hounding to the detriment of national security)...do you honestly think he'd be trying to just 'trick' folks? geez

[mrbowler]

Originally Posted by prism68

Okay...

1. Do you really think your average American on the street even looks at these numbers? Or has a clue to begin with?
2. Also, with all the intense media scrutiny on Bush and the whole administration (read= hounding to the detriment of national security)...do you honestly think he'd be trying to just 'trick' folks? geez

1. Average American just hears a sound bit-either up,down,unchanged. IMO

2. Wouldn't be the first time that a politician wanted to manipulate data in order for personal gain.

[prism68]

Originally Posted by mrbowler

...2. Wouldn't be the first time that a politician wanted to manipulate data in order for personal gain.

No doubt! I just doubt Bush would be able to get away with it. There is an unprecedented amount of scrutiny on him.

[mrbowler]

Originally Posted by prism68

No doubt! I just doubt Bush would be able to get away with it. There is an unprecedented amount of scrutiny on him.

As a good person I want to believe someone-until proven otherwise. It's just that when you read numerous time's about similiar action(s) you begin to question. Especially when you get the information from different sources.

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[prism68]

Originally Posted by mrbowler

... It's just that when you read numerous time's about similiar action(s) you begin to question. Especially when you get the information from different sources.

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Looking back at that past thread (which dealt with environmental issues- which any scientist knows you can take the same data and fall on an opposite side of the fence)... I have to ask:

What does that have to do with the price of eggs?

[mrbowler]

Originally Posted by prism68

Looking back at that past thread (which dealt with environmental issues- which any scientist knows you can take the same data and fall on an opposite side of the fence)... I have to ask:

What does that have to do with the price of eggs?

I guess it depends on what scientist's are being considered

I wanted to quote someone who had worked under a republican administration.

"Notably, the incident drew the ire of Russell Train, who served as EPA administrator under Presidents Nixon and Ford. In a letter to the New York Times, Train stated that the Bush administration’s actions undermined the independence of the EPA and were virtually unprecedented for the degree of their political manipulation of the agency’s research. As Train put it, the “interest of the American people lies in having full disclosures of the facts.”19 Train also noted that, “In all my time at the EPA, I don’t recall any regulatory decision that was driven by political considerations. More to the present point, never once, to my best recollection, did either the Nixon or Ford White House ever try to tell me how to make a decision.” 20

Were the case an isolated incident, it could perhaps be dismissed as an anomaly. On the contrary, the Bush administration has repeatedly intervened to distort or suppress climate change research findings despite promises by the president that, “my Administration’s climate change policy will be science-based.”21

Despite the widespread agreement in the scientific community that human activity is contributing to global climate change, as demonstrated by the consensus of international experts on the IPCC, the Bush administration has sought to exaggerate uncertainty by relying on disreputable and fringe science reports and preventing informed discussion on the issue. As one current EPA scientist puts it, the Bush administration often “does not even invite the EPA into the discussion” on climate change issues."