STATE DEPARTMENT REPORT STILL UNRELIABLE

In 2003, the State Department issued a report which said "terrorist attacks and related deaths had dropped to the lowest levels in three decades, and top Bush administration officials immediately cited it as proof of their success in the global war on terrorism." Five months ago, "embarrassed State Department officials acknowledged widespread mistakes in the government’s influential annual report." According to an interim report released in June, the data actually showed terrorist attacks had reached a 21-year high. Now, "internal investigators have found new and unrelated errors ? as well as broader underlying problems that they say essentially have destroyed the credibility of the statistics the report is based on." Problems include: "sloppy data collection, inexperienced employees, personnel shortages and lax oversight." Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) said that "either through indifference or incompetence ? these errors have damaged the credibility of this important assessment, undermining our ability to determine what policies and programs are effective in fighting terrorism."