Condi Crushes Counters
Jesse Walker | April 19, 2005, 12:27pm
Government statistics in the news:
The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism....
But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.
According to Knight-Ridder, the suppressed report counted 625 significant terrorist incidents in 2004, a figure that does not include attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. The total for 2003 was 175.
I don't know if the methodology is genuinely screwy -- though I doubt it -- but I do suspect there might be better ways to deal with an allegedly dubious count than to stop the counting altogether. Either way, I assume the same hawks who spent the last three and a half years seeing an Islamist hand behind everything from the D.C. sniper shootings to the big blackout of ought-three will be outraged that the government is ignoring incidents that "may not have been terrorism."
Update: The L.A. Times has a more detailed story on the change. The good news is that the government hasn't stopped the count altogether -- the numbers will now be computed by a different agency. The bad news is the possibility that the new agency, like Doug Feith's stovepiping operation, isn't more accurate so much as it's more pliable.
thoreau | April 20, 2005, 12:49am | #
I don't know that there is a good definition of terrorism. I mean, we could write one down and make it all rigorous and air-tight, but I don't know whether it would be very compatible with common usage. The term is thrown around quite a bit. Some of the uses are careless, and other uses are more excusable.
A lot of people try to restrict the definition of terrorism to acts against civilians. The thing is, there are people who target civilians in some of their attacks but also sometimes target soldiers. We could draw an artificial line between those 2 types of attacks by the same group, but in the minds of the attackers they are part and parcel of the same cause.
The best definition I can think of is acts of indiscriminate violence with the goal of sowing fear rather than a concrete military objective.
So, for instance, attacking the Pentagon to show how much you hate America is terrorism. Firing at soldiers in an attempt to drive them away is warfare. Setting off a bomb on a base to sow fear is an act of terrorism. Bombing the base's radar station to blind the soldiers in preparation for an attack is warfare.
Of course, even then, there's a continuum of acts. What about attacks that have a terror objective as well as a more concrete objective?
In the end, terrorism is probably destined to be a somewhat amorphous term. There are things that are clearly terrorism and things that clearly aren't, but there are acts that will fall in the gray area no matter how you define it, and there will be people whose violent campaigns include different acts at different points on that spectrum.
Part of the ambiguity comes from the fact that terrorism is defined, at least in part, by the attacker's goals. An attacker might only want to kill a single person that he hates, but his attack could send shock waves through a community. Another attacker might hope to sow fear but fail miserably at it.
I know I haven't resolved anything, but I've tried to at least outline the issues as I see them.
