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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (190287)	6/11/2004 11:39:27 AM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 1578023

The US state department today retracted a report that claimed terrorist attacks were on the decline, after it turned out they had actually increased. guardian.co.uk The Bush administration hailed the initial annual assessment as proof of the success of the war on terror when it was published in April, but officials have now been forced to concede the revised figures for 2003 will show a sharp upturn in the number of attacks. Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, denied the errors were part of deliberate effort to make the administration look good. "Nobody has suggested that the war on terrorism has been won," he told reporters. "The president has made it clear that it is a war that continues and that we have to redouble our efforts. "I am very disturbed that there were errors in the report. We're going to correct it." The Patterns of Global Terrorism report said terrorist attacks fell to 190 last year, the lowest figure since 1969, from 198 in 2002. It also said the number of people killed dropped to 307, including 35 US citizens, from 725 in 2002, a total which included 27 Americans. State department spokesman Richard Boucher said the 2003 figures were likely to be higher than the report suggested, though the number of deaths may not exceed the 2002 figures. He explained that the writers of the report appeared to have made a series of mistakes including failing to count attacks for the full year and possibly misinterpreting the definition of such attacks. One US official, who asked not to be named, told the Reuters news agency that the report failed to count "international terrorist attacks" after November 11, 2003. "The data in the report is incomplete and in some cases incorrect," Mr Boucher said, admitting his department failed to catch the mistakes. "We got the wrong data and we didn't check it enough ... That's the simplest explanation for what happened." When the report was released, Mr Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, said it provided "clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" while the state department's counterterrorism coordinator, Cofer Black, hailed its "good news". Mr Boucher said the department learned of the report's errors in the first week of May and began an investigation. voanews.com

To: i-node who wrote (190287)	6/11/2004 12:26:04 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578023

re: Nobody who is knowledgeable and unbiased on this subject believes Al Qaeda is as strong today as it was 3 years ago. Nobody. Report: Al-Qaeda has more than 18,000 potential fighters at large LONDON (AP) — Far from being crippled by the U.S.-led war on terror, al-Qaeda has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks, a report said Tuesday. usatoday.com re: What, precisely, could the United States have done differently that would have yielded better results in fighting Al Qaeda. We should have taken the 138,000+ troops and gone into Afghanistan and chased the SOB's through the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan until we got every last one. Yes, we would have taken tons of casualties, maybe more than we are taking in Iraq. And yes there would have been some left in cells around the world, but we would have taken most of them. That was two years ago in the shadow of 9/11, nobody would have blamed us, the free world would have applauded. Instead we're in Iraq, bin Laden and al Qaeda is alive and well. That's the guy that did 9/11, remember almost three years ago, alive and well. Perpetrating other terror attacks, after 9/11. They look potent, Bush and the US look impotent. Because we went were the bad guy's were not. John