US admits to wrongly reporting decline in terrorist attacks
PTI Washington June 11: The United States has said it was correcting the report which wrongly concluded that terrorist acts had declined worldwide last year but denied any “manipulation or political distortion”.
“We will put out a corrected report,” the Secretary of State, General (retd) Colin Powell said on the `Patterns of Global Terrorism’ report.
“We didn’t look deeply enough into the data to realise there were inconsistencies in reporting,” he said.
“Errors crept in that frankly we did not catch here.”
Gen Powell, however, claimed “There was no attempt to mislead or cook the books in any way.”
“And our goal with respect to the annual terrorism report is to give the American people the facts. And we are rechecking those facts... and I think I will wait until I see the revised report before making any comment on the trends that are reflected in the revised report from last year’s report.”
The report, released in April, said attacks had declined last year to 190, the lowest level in 34 years, and dropped 45 per cent since 2001, the President, Mr George Bush’s first year in office.
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