I can't quite figure out the revisions of this infamous terrorism report. It's hard to imagine that the errors could be a politically motivated attempt at manipulation: only a complete idiot would attempt a manipulation that was absolutely certain to be discovered. Of course, only a complete idiot would miscalculate figures that a 15 year old with a clipping file and a calculator could work out.
Either way, we are left with complete idiots, and the uncomfortable position of having to choose whether incompetence is better or worse than malice.
Given a choice between conspiracy and fuckup, I'm always inclined to accept fuckup as the default explanation. My guess is that the original error was simply an act of accidental and stupendous incompetence, but that nobody bothered to recheck the figures, because the figures looked good. That goes well beyond stupidity, and reminds me of the willful blindness shown those who accepted intel from questionable sources simply because it was compatible with what certain people wanted to hear. The tendency to uncritically accept items compatible with pre-existing belief is common to all ideologically driven organizations and individuals, regardless of the nature of the ideology, and it is a very dangerous tendency.
The thing I'm really curious about is something that I haven't seen reported: the rate of increase in terrorist incidents specifically involving Islamic militants. Let's face it, the war on terror is not really a war on terror. It's a war on a specific kind of terror employed by a specific type of terrorist. The US doesn't give a hot damn about the IRA, the ETA, or the Tamil Tigers. We're interested in militant Islamic terrorism.
The reason that this is interesting is that for the last decade, a large proportion - sometimes over half - of recorded terrorist incidents involve the constant attacks on Colombia's oil industry, which are not related to militant Islam. In 2003, apparently, the number of such attacks decreased dramatically. If attacks in Colombia, traditionally a major component of the total, decreased, and the total still increased, there must have been a more than proportional increase somewhere else. Where do you suppose that might have been?
Any way you look at it, somebody stepped on his dick in a big way. At least we will no longer have to listen to blathering pundits talk about how "the terrorists are on the run", which provides some small consolation.
If a corporation overstated its earnings by a similar margin, issued self-laudatory press releases based on the faulty data,and claimed, when caught out by outside analysts, that the error was an accident, what do you figure the shareholders would have to say about the CEO? |
