Powell: Terror report was 'wrong'
BY ANNE Q. HOY
WASHINGTON BUREAU
June 14, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Denying that the Bush administration was trying "to cook the books," Secretary of State Colin Powell Sunday called a recently released annual State Department report asserting a decline in terrorism last year "a very big mistake" and "very embarrassing."
Powell said officials at the CIA, where a new terrorist threat information center helped compile the data, and other agencies were required to work over the weekend to determine how the faulty data ended up in the report. He said a meeting is set for Monday to get to the bottom of the inaccuracy and that he plans to issue a corrected report as soon as possible.
The admission comes amid a hotly contested presidential election in which President George W. Bush has asserted that his administration's antiterrorist policies have made the United States safer than it was four years ago.
It also comes after Powell earlier this year was forced to acknowledge that his pivotal address before the United Nations last year on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was based on incorrect intelligence.
Powell Sunday denied that there were political motivations behind the errors. An intelligence official who declined to be named said Sunday that "an honest error" had occurred and that some statistics were dropped when the report was being compiled.
"It's a numbers error. It's not a political judgment that said, 'Let's see if we can cook the books.' We can't get away with that now. Nobody was out to cook the books. Errors crept in," Powell said on ABC's "This Week."
On NBC's "Meet the Press," he called the problem "very embarrassing. I am not a happy camper over this. We were wrong."
At issue is the State Department's annual report on global terrorism, issued on April 29. It reported that attacks had declined last year to 190, down from 198 in 2002 and 346 in 2001. The 2003 figure would have represented a 45 percent drop in terrorist acts since 2001 and brought attacks to their lowest level in 34 years.
But Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and leading academics challenged the findings almost immediately and wrote Powell to ask for an explanation.
Two professors from Stanford and Princeton universities said verifiable information in the annual report actually showed that major terrorist attacks had increased from 124 in 2001 to 169 in 2003, a jump of 36 percent, and that incidents actually had risen each year since 2001.
State Department officials acknowledged for the first time last week that the report underrepresented terrorists attacks in 2003.
"The data in our report is incorrect. If you read the narrative of the report, it makes it clear that the war on terror is a difficult one, and that we're pursuing it with all of the means at our disposal," Powell said.
Powell said the report's data were incomplete and that information had been cut off at certain dates in a manner inconsistent with earlier terrorism reports. "It was a data collection and reporting error, and we'll get to the bottom of it and we'll issue a corrected report," Powell said.
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