COMING UP: ANNUAL STATE DEPARTMENT TERRORISM REPORT

By Michael Kraft

The State Department will release at mid-day Friday its annual report on global terrorism. The reports have touched off more than their share of controversy in past years but they provide a unique and useful portrait of the international terrorism situation during the previous year.

The “numbers game” – the tally of whether the number of terrorist attacks went up or down tends to dominate the press coverage and interest among those in the counterterrorism field. Advance leaks to the press indicate that the U.S Government terrorism analysts tallied more than 10,000 attacks in 2005, triple the number in 2004.

But to focus on numbers, which actually are contained in a separate companion report expected to be released at the same time, overlooks the more important aspects of the report.

The State Department report, previously called "Patterns of International Terrorism" but last year renamed "Country Reports on Terrorism," will provide an overview of the world-wide terrorist scene in 2005, including region-by-region descriptions and discussion of the activities of Iran and other terrorist-supporting states. This meets the original intent of the 1998 law that mandated the report, to serve as a handy reference document for members of Congress and staff. As one Congressional staffer involved in drafting the report requirement said, members wanted a report they could pull off the shelf for quick background for meetings and hearings. In preparation for the release of this year’s report, the State Department published a background paper.

Points to look for in the report for 2005 include the characterization of the al-Qaeda movement, the reporting of the terrorist attacks in Iraq against non-combatants (attacks on soldiers in combat are not counted) and the depiction of Iran, which in past years has been labeled as the leading state supporter of terrorism. Also, the efforts by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries to curb terrorism financing.

Do not expect to see Libya removed from the terrorism list at this time. Henry Crumpton, the State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, has been reported as saying there would be no change in the current list, which includes Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea. Removal of a country, however, need not be pegged to the annual report.

(It requires a Presidential determination that a country has not supported acts of international terrorism for the past six months, and has given assurances it will not support terrorism in the future. The determination can be made at any time in the year but the recession has to lie before Congress for 45 days before it can take effect. This gives Congress to react if it so chooses, by passing legislation to oppose the move.)

THE NUMBERS

A separate report by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) will provide the statistics. Even though the numbers are reported, originally by the Knight Ridder Newspaper chain, to have gone up sharply, they do not tell the whole story.

For years, the incidents included in the State Department’s report statistics and chronology were those classified as international terrorism, defined as attacks that affect nationals and property of more than one nation. This left out attacks that may have taken many lives of citizens of one country and had a major impact on that nation’s economy or perhaps negotiations with other parties. But these attacks were not counted because no nationals other than of the country in which the attack was conducted were killed or wounded. One explanation given by several years ago by CIA officials involved in the US Government’s data bank was the difficulty in verify reports and casualty figures from attacks in some countries, such as the killings by terrorists in rural areas of Algeria and Egypt.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told a press briefing last week” if you look back over the past three years, the methodology that the NCTC has used to make these counts has changed. So there is -- you don't have a baseline… technically you could say that there might be a larger number of incidents from one year to another, but it's comparing apples and oranges. You don't have a common baseline. “

The criteria for tabulating terrorist attacks were broadened to include domestic incidents that did not involve foreigners after a brouhaha broke out in May, 2004 following the release of the report for 2003. The State Department’s Patterns report for 2003 asserted that the number of attacks had fallen sharply, and this was highlighted by senior State Department officials as evidence of progress in the war against terrorism. Two university professors took a closer look and charged in a Washington Post op-ed piece that the number of attacks had not gone down. One Congressman, Henry Waxman (D-CA) then charged that the numbers were distorted for political reasons in an election year. The State Department and intelligence agencies re-examined the statistics and issued a correction. It turned out that the overall figures were understated because the data for the last two and a half months of 2003 was dropped somewhere along the line when the data base was transferred from the long-time custodians in the CIA to the new interagency Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC).

Apparently nobody noticed the embarrassing problem when the draft report was being prepared and cleared through the bureaucracy. Cofer Black, then the State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism, said the errors were the result of “inattention, personnel shortages and a data base that is awkward and is antiquated.” My own impression from the sidelines, (I was retiring from the counterterrorism office at the time and not involved in the report) was that the primary officer working on the report was stretched too thin, also juggling other chores at the time. In addition, the clearance process within the Department was so compartmentalized in an effort to avoid advance leaks that other officers said they saw only the sections that affected their regions and not the overall report or chronologies. Thus limited the additional sets of eyes looking at the complete report in the draft stage.

In the ensuing controversy that followed the State Department, which never had the responsibility for tallying the statistics in the first place, worked out an agreement under which the stats would be released in a separate report by the intelligence agencies.

The controversies did not end there, however. Last April, Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism office official and alumni of this blog, wrote several items on problems with the upcoming 2004 report. He followed up several times, including a few days before the 2004 report was issued.

An excellent description of the history and controversies surrounded by the report was written recently by Dennis Pluchinsky, a retired State Department terrorism analyst who had been involved in the annual Government report since its first incarnation in 1977 as an unclassified CIA product and provided some of the background for this blog item. Dennis wrote a detailed history and summary of the controversy in “The Evolution of the U.S. Government’s Annual Report on Terrorism: A Personal Commentary,” in January-February studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

Congressional sources say that this year, in an effort to explain the new format of the State Department report and minimize possible controversies, Ambassador Crumpton has been making the rounds on the Hill. Ambassador Crumpton, a former CIA official, was sworn in last August and this will be the first report on his watch.

TrackBack