Terror: NCTC Report Elements
On April 27, the National Counterterrorism Center issued its long-awaited report titled A Chronology of Significant International Terrorism for 2004. [PDF File] It was eagerly awaited by the left since the leakage from the ever loyal State Department suggested that the number of terrorist incidents would be much higher, and, of course, that would be all George Bush’s fault.
In keeping with the general helpfulness of the State Department, the PDF is encoded so that the normal copy / paste operations are not allowed and data must be extracted from the report by hand. Armed Liberal at Winds of Change and a helpful reader there have done so. Here are the posts involved:
Winds of Change 1
Winds of Change 2
Winds of Change 3
The third post contains a table with the relative numbers extracted from the original PDF file. I’d love to quote the methodology statement here, but I don’t feel like transcribing it and cannot copy / paste. Suffice it to say that the report clearly states that changes in methodology make it no longer comparable with prior year reports. In addition, the report was constructed around legal definitions of terrorism and some examples of exclusions are listed.
It appears that nearly all of the terrorist incidents in 2004 were confined to three countries, India with 45.9% of the incidents, Iraq with 30.8%, and Palestine with 6.1%. Those three countries total 82.8% of the total incidents. No other nation accounts for even 3% of the total.
Of those three nations, only Iraq could even remotely be considered the fault of the United States, i.e. George Bush. The simple facts are that terrorism happens in places where the United States has little or no control, Look at the list in Winds of Change 3. The vast majority of terror incidents happened in places where there has been fighting for a generation or more. And, as Armed Liberal and other have pointed out, many of these terror movements are losing badly or are defeated and conducting dead-ender operations.
All in all, nothing to be greatly alarmed about. Other have discussed the methodology and terminology, and there are issues there. On September 12 2001 I realized that every country with a problem would want us to consider their local bandits as terrorists, so that the money and weapons and good will would flow from the great American trough to them. That debate continues every day in many places, and the report does not resolve it.
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