GuvWurld
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Knight Ridder has published a story picked up by lots of papers (multiple links in GuvWurld News Archive) announcing the discontinuation of an annual report on international terrorism published each of the past 19 years. This by decree of C. Rice who was not directly quoted in the article. However, there were anonymous State Department sources quoted. Interesting excerpts:

[Since 1986] The State Department published "Patterns of Global Terrorism" under a law that requires it to submit to the House of Representatives and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a country-by-country terrorism assessment by April 30 each year.
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A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that the publication was being eliminated, but said the allegation that it was being done for political reasons was "categorically untrue."
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The intelligence officials requested anonymity because the information is classified and because, they said, they feared White House retribution.

The report cites 625 "significant" terrorist incidents in 2004, up from 175 in 2003, and these figures don't include Iraq, which Mr. Bush called "a central front in the war on terror" as recently as this past Tuesday.

The senior State Department official said a report on global terrorism would be sent this year to lawmakers and made available to the public in place of "Patterns of Global Terrorism," but that it wouldn't contain statistical data.
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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.
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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."
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To read past "Patterns of Global Terrorism" reports online, go to www.mipt.org/Patterns-of-Global-Terrorism.asp

You'll find this story filed in the Revised Truth section of the GuvWurld News Archive. As is too often the case, I am reminded of George Orwell:

"He who controls the past, controls the future; he who controls the present, controls the past"

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