June 22, 2004
Seems Like Mighty Damn Convenient "Incompetence"
Terrorism report more than just an 'oops'In April, the State Department released its annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, based on data from the CIA, the FBI and other agencies, which claimed that terrorist attacks in 2003 had declined to the lowest level since 1969. Senior Bush administration officials touted this as evidence that we're winning the war on terrorism.
U.S. Amends Report to Show Rise in Terror
Significant acts of terror worldwide reached a 21-year high in 2003, the State Department announced Tuesday as it corrected a mistaken report that had been cited to boost President Bush (news - web sites)'s war on terror.So we go from a 34 year low to a 21 year high in one easy correction. Way to win the war on Terra. That's quite a mistake. Somehow, nobody ever gets fired over these mistakes. Unless you count Tenet.
Max Boot (1st link) doesn't think this was a deliberate lie but a rather a genuine mistake. He might be right on this one because if it was a lie, it was a massively stupid and easily spotted lie. How some ever, the Bushies have made a long string of "mistakes," all of which I can recall, if they hadn't been exposed, would have favored the Administration. If the whole Administration is hopelessly incompetent, as Boot seems to think, how come they don't make many mistakes that make them look bad?
I can conceive of two possibilities Boot doesn't mention. Colin Powell deliberately sandbagged the President by releasing an obviously false report. He has to know the country can't stand much more of the Goober King. Or maybe they're incompetent liars, just don't know how to put together a plausible lie with legs. But it doesn't matter. In practice, incompetence is as bad as lying. People still suffer, people still die.
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