Scrubbing

Last year, you'll remember, the State Department was embarrassed when a report on terrorist activity throughout the world had to be changed. You see, they were touting that terrorism had decreased to all-time lows, when in fact they were at their highest level since record-keeping began. The problem must have been that the State Department report only looked at part of the year in determining its figures.

This was deeply embarrassing for the Administration. The incoming Rice State Department had to figure out a way to get this right.

Rice did (at least for the Bush Administration's purposes). She simply won't put out the report:

WASHINGTON - 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.

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.

"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report."

The Bush Administration innocently says that the National Counterterrorism Center is where information like this should be generated. It remains to be seen whether they'll actually put out a report similar in substance to "Patterns of Global Terrorism."

But more importantly, this fits into a pattern where the Bushies simply scrub information that they don't like. As David Sirota notes, the President has acted in exactly the same way when it came to statistics on mass layoffs, state budget outlays, discrimnation against women, and health information on government websites. If the information was damaging to the Administration, it was deep-sixed.

This is the most secretive government in US history, worse than Nixon, and attempts to conceal the truth are deeply disturbing for those of us who would rather our government acted out in the open. They don't want you to know that terrorist attacks have INCREASED, not decreased, since the "war or terror" has begun. They don't want you to know the content of secret energy meetings between the Vice President's office and oil & gas interests. They don't want you to know, really, anything. That doesn't work here in America. At least it shouldn't.