Can't These Morons Get Anything Right?

I didn't post anything about it earlier, but there was a big flap over the Terrorist Threat Integration Center's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report released earlier this year. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage went around, loudly proclaiming that the report showed that we were "winning the war" on global terror because, you see, there were fewer terrorist attacks in 2003 than in the previous 20 or so years.

If that sounds odd, that's because it is. It's dead wrong. And the news of this amazing error was well covered by lots of commentators.

Paul Krugman has an article about that flap today. He cites Princeton economist Alan Kreuger and Stanford political scientist David Laitin as debunkers. I have no experience with Kreuger's work, but I've read Laitin, and I wouldn't want to try to pull the wool over that guy's eyes. He's smart. Anyway, like so much else, the Bush people got this wrong. Was it incompetence or mendacity--does it matter? President anti-Midas and his crew have screwed up everything they've touched.

The erroneous good news on terrorism also came at a very convenient moment. The White House was still reeling from the revelations of the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who finally gave public voice to the view of many intelligence insiders that the Bush administration is doing a terrible job of fighting Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush was on a "Winning the War on Terror" campaign bus tour in the Midwest.

Mr. Krueger, a forgiving soul, believes that the report was botched through simple incompetence. Maybe — though we can be sure that if the statistics had told the administration something it didn't want to hear, they would have been carefully checked. By the way, while the report's tables and charts have been fixed, the revised summary still gives little hint of how bad the data really are.

In any case, the incompetence explanation is hardly comforting. In a press conference announcing the release of the revised report, the counterterrorism coordinator Cofer Black attributed the errors to "inattention, personnel shortages and [a] database that is awkward and antiquated." Remember: we're talking about the government's central clearinghouse for terrorism information, whose creation was touted as part of a "dramatic enhancement" of counterterrorism efforts more than a year before this report was produced. And it still can't input data into its own computers? (It should be no surprise, in this age of Halliburton, that the job of data input was given to — and botched by — private contractors.)

Think of it as just one more indication that Mr. Bush isn't really serious about this terrorism thing. He talks about terror a lot, and invokes it to justify unrelated wars he feels like fighting. But when it comes to devoting resources to the unglamorous work of protecting the nation from attack — well, never mind.

I like that Krugman guy.