So says Larry Johnson, former counterterrorism official at the State Department, of the statistics compiled but not released in this year's State Department report to Congress on international terrorist incidents.
What's an order of magnitude between friends?
According to today's Washington Post, the number of significant attacks worldwide grew from a record 175 in 2003 to about 655 in 2004. The number of significant attacks in Iraq grew from 22 to 198 over the same time period.
The post article continues
After a week of complaints from Congress, top aides from the State Department and the NCTC were dispatched to the Hill on Monday for a private briefing. There they acknowledged for the first time the increase in terrorist incidents, calling it a "dramatic uptick," according to participants and a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).
but nobody's buying the explanation that it's just a change in counting methods and that they don't have good reason to report the statistics.
Both Republican and Democratic aides at the meeting criticized what a GOP attendee called the "absurd" explanation offered by the State Department's acting counterterrorism chief, Karen Aguilar, that the statistics are not relevant to the required report on trends in global terrorism. "It's absurd to issue a report without statistics," said the aide, who is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. "This is a self-inflicted wound by the State Department."