Playing Politics with Terror, Again

In April, the Bush administration reported good news: terrorist attacks around the globe were at their lowest in 34 years, and gave itself an "A" grade, attributing this to "unprecedented U.S. collaboration with foreign partners."

Great news! We're winning the War on Terror™!

Except for the fact that it's a lie!

Actually, they omitted a great deal of data that was pretty glaring--like all terrorist attacks in the last 50 days of the year (leaving out a major attack in Turkey and bombings at a bank and two synagogues), and all terrorist attacks in Russia carried out by the Chechens (13 attacks killing 244 people).

When asked why they failed to include any data after November 11, 2003 in the report--which was labeled as for the whole year of 2003--they claimed there was no time, as they had to submit the report by April 29, 2004. Essentially, that means that it takes them 170 days to get around to reading the damned newspaper.

The fact of the matter is, instead of terrorism falling to record lows, terrorism instead had risen more than 35% in the highest levels of terror activity in 20 years.

This is not just a "clerical error," as the administration is so laughably trying to sell to the public, but an outright, deliberate lie to avoid admitting abject failure during an election year. Bush is not winning the War on Terror™, he is losing it badly. He ignited terrorist activity in the Middle East with his Iraq invasion and sent floods of eager volunteers to the doors of al Qaeda, while at home he devastated our freedoms while at the same time underfunded local security, improving not at all our ability to stop terrorism within our borders.