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SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Tuesday, April 25, 2006

U.S. REPORTS MAJOR INCREASE IN TERROR WASHINGTON — The United States has completed a report that points to a huge increase in terrorism.

Officials said the National Counterterrorism Center has drafted a report that cited a significant rise in incidents termed terrorism in 2005. They said the report does not provide statistics.

"The count this year will be unique," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "You can't compare it against the count from the previous year or the year before that."

Officials said the State Department has removed many of the statistics from the NCTC for release of the report. The department has been mandated to produce an annual report on terrorist incidents worldwide.

The Knight-Ridder news agency said the latest NCTC report cited a huge increase in the number of terrorist incidents in 2005. The agency quoted officials as reporting an increase of 10,000 terrorist incidents, most of them stemming from Iraq.

In an April 21 briefing, McCormack said the State Department would release the report by the end of the week. He said the methodology of gauging terrorism has been revised by U.S. law.

"I guess technically you could say that there might be a larger number of incidents from one year to another," McCormack said. "But it's comparing apples and oranges. You don't have a common baseline. Just this past year, the change was made because of a change in the law."

The change in the NCTC mandate was ordered by Congress after the 2005 report, which first claimed a decline in terrorism. Members of Congress complained that the counter-terrorism center had ignored numerous incidents deemed terrorist. A revised report then acknowledged a major increase in terrorism.

"In prior years, it was actually just a change in methodology that the NCTC made that was an internal change in the way they counted things," McCormack said.


Copyright © 2006 East West Services, Inc.

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