State Dept. doubles '03 terrorism death toll

WASHINGTON -- State Department officials yesterday blamed inaccurate data from the CIA, poor proofreading, and an "antiquated" database for errors in an annual terrorism report released earlier this year that incorrectly claimed that the number of international terrorist attacks had declined to their lowest point in three decades.

A revised report issued yesterday by the department shows that the total number of terrorist attacks rose slightly in 2003 and that the number of "significant attacks" had climbed to the highest it has been in 20 years.

"We here in the Counterterrorism Office, and I personally, should have caught any errors that marred the [previous report] before we published it," Cofer Black, the department's coordinator for counterterrorism, told reporters yesterday. "But I assure you and the American people that the errors in the . . . report were honest mistakes and certainly not deliberate deceptions, as some have speculated."

The earlier report, which was released in April, had been used by senior Bush administration officials to show progress in the war on terrorism. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage declared in April that the report provided "clear evidence that we are prevailing in this fight."

But yesterday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters that Armitage was speaking on the basis of flawed information. "His characterization obviously was based on a report that had errors in it," an apparently irritated Powell told reporters. "It is still a war on terror. It is not won; it continues."

The new report counts 208 acts of terror last year. But the previous report said the number of attacks had declined to 190, down from 198 in 2002 and 346 in 2001. The 2003 figure would have been the lowest in 34 years and would have reflected a 45 percent drop since 2001, Bush's first year as president.

The previous report also inaccurately stated that 307 people died in attacks last year, down from 725 in 2002. In fact, more than double that number, 625, were killed, according to the new report.

The revised report said a total of 3,646 people were wounded worldwide in terrorist attacks last year, a sharp increase from the 2,013 wounded in 2002. The previous report put the number of wounded last year at 1,593.

Neither report includes the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq, which State Department officials said did not fall under the classification of terrorism.

The data in the report were compiled by the Terrorist Threat Information Center, a newly created organization that reports directly to the director of the CIA.

The previous report contained major errors, including the omission of the month of December in a chronology of attacks and major terrorist bombings in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Yesterday, in explaining the various factors that contributed to the errors, Black said, "We do rely upon the TTIC and the CIA to provide us accurate information. . . . But we in my office have to do a better job of proofreading what we get."

Black insisted that the new report still showed significant progress in the war on terror and that the errors were, in most cases, relatively minor.

"You know, you can look at this -- and I guess it's like a Rorschach test, you know, you can see what you want," Black said during a news conference. "What I'm trying to do is stick with the aspects of counterterrorism. I think this gives an opportunity to make a product, a publication that is increasingly useful to people."

But analysts said the previous report contradicted conventional thinking among specialists that the attacks are increasing in both number and severity.

"The thing that was disturbing about this is that it was not a subtle error. These were glaringly obvious errors to anyone that has been following this issue," said Ben Venzke, CEO of IntelCenter, a private intelligence company that tracks the number of terrorist attacks and conducts terrorism analysis for the US government.

"Everyone that I know that had been working in the counterterrorism field had a very different sense of the number of attacks and what was going on than was in the initial reports, which led to many people coming back to the State Department and saying, 'This is wrong,' " he said.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com.