But Bush Is Doing A Great Job
Good luck finding this story in your local paper (unless that paper is the Seattle Times):
The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
Update: I'm indebted to SirotaBlog for illustrating the pattern - dating back to 2001 - into which this fits all too neatly.
The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
Update: I'm indebted to SirotaBlog for illustrating the pattern - dating back to 2001 - into which this fits all too neatly.
posted by Management at 1:11 AM
6 Comments:
U.S. eliminates annual terrorism report
By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON — The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
Several U.S. officials defended the decision, saying the methodology used by the National Counterterrorism Center to generate statistics had flaws, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.
But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism," eliminated weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.
"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.
A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that the publication was eliminated, but said the allegation that it was done for political reasons was "categorically untrue."
According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004. That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.
The statistics didn't include attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front in the war on terror."
The intelligence officials requested anonymity because the information is classified and because, they said, they feared White House retribution. Johnson declined to say how he obtained the figures.
The numbers of incidents and fatalities in the report for 2003 were undercounted last year, forcing a revision and embarrassing the White House, which had used the original version to bolster Bush's election-campaign claim that the Iraq war had advanced the fight against terrorism. U.S. officials blamed bureaucratic mistakes involving the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, the forerunner of the National Counterterrorism Center, created under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which Bush signed Dec. 17.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily.
"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world," Waxman said. "It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it — or any of the key data — from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report."
The State Department published "Patterns of Global Terrorism" under a law that requires it to submit to the House and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a country-by-country terrorism assessment by April 30 each year.
A declassified version of the report has been made public since 1986 in the form of a glossy booklet, even though there was no legal requirement to do so.
The senior State Department official said a report on global terrorism would be sent this year to lawmakers and made available to the public in place of "Patterns of Global Terrorism," but that it wouldn't contain statistical data.
The official didn't answer questions about whether the data would be made available to the public, saying, "We will be consulting [with Congress] ... on who should publish and in what form."
One U.S. official who requested anonymity said analysts from the counterterrorism center were especially careful in amassing and reviewing data for 2004 because of the political turmoil created by last year's errors.
Another U.S. official said Rice's office was leery of the center's methodology, believing that analysts eager to avoid a repetition of last year's undercount included incidents that may not have been terrorist attacks. The U.S. intelligence officials said Rice's office eliminated "Patterns of Global Terrorism" when the counterterrorism center declined to use alternative methodology that would have reported fewer significant attacks.
Bush: Bad Data Means Stop Publishing
President Bush has said that "in a society that is a free society, there will be transparency." That means that in America, we have a government where the public gets to see as much information as possible about its government.
But as the record shows, Bush is anything but pro-transparency. A careful look shows the Bush White House has systematically tried to stop publishing government information that it finds embarrassing or disagrees with - the opposite of "transparent." See the record for yourself:
- Knight-Ridder reports today that the Bush administration announced yesterday that it has "decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered."
- When unemployment was peaking in Bush's first term, the White House tried to stop publishing the Labor Department's regular report on mass layoffs.
- In 2003, when the nation's governors came to Washington to complain about inadequate federal funding for the states, the Bush administration decided to stop publishing the budget report that states use to see what money they are, or aren't, getting.
- In 2003, the National Council for Research on Women found that information about discrimination against women has gone missing from government Web sites, including 25 reports from the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau.
- In 2002, Democrats uncovered evidence that the Bush administration was removing health information from government websites. Specifically, the administration deleted data showing that abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer. That scientific data was seen by the White House as a direct affront to the pro-life movement.
Published on Friday, January 3, 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle
George W Bush's America
Shooting the Messenger: Report on Layoffs Killed
by David Lazarus
The Bush administration, under fire for its handling of the economy, has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies.
The statistic, which had been issued monthly and was closely watched by hard-hit Silicon Valley, served as a pulse reading of corporate America's financial health.
There's still plenty of economic data available charting employment trends nationwide. But the mass-layoffs stat comprised an easy-to-understand overview of which industries are in the greatest distress and which workers are bearing the brunt of the turmoil.
"It was a visible number," said Gary Schlossberg, senior economist at Wells Capital Management in San Francisco. "In times like these, it was a good window on how businesses were cutting back."
No longer. But then, businesses cutting back didn't exactly jibe with the White House's recent declarations that prosperity is right around the corner.
You had to look pretty hard just to learn that the mass-layoffs stat had been scotched. No announcement was made by the Labor Department, and no prominent mention of the change was posted at the department's Web site.
In fact, news of the program's termination came only in the form of a single paragraph buried deep within a press release issued on Christmas Eve about November's mass layoffs.
It simply said that funding for the program had dried up and that the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics was unable to find an alternative source of funding.
No doubt as intended, the announcement slipped by virtually unnoticed. Even state officials were surprised to learn of the demise of what they called an important, if downbeat, barometer of the nation's economy.
Sharon Brown oversaw compilation of the mass-layoffs number at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington. She was pleased to blow her agency's horn.
HIGH-QUALITY PROGRAM
"This was a high-quality program, producing timely information on important developments in the labor market," Brown said.
According to the bureau's final monthly report, U.S. employers initiated 2, 150 mass layoffs in November, affecting 240,028 workers. A mass layoff is defined as any firing involving at least 50 people.
California by far had the most employees given the boot -- 62,764, primarily in administrative services. Wisconsin was a distant second with 15, 544, followed by Texas with 14,624.
Between January and November, 17,799 mass layoffs were recorded and nearly 2 million workers were handed their hats by businesses.
Brown said that because of a bureaucratic quirk, the $6.6 million in annual funding for the mass-layoffs program -- money primarily doled out to state officials to gather relevant data -- was channeled through the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration.
FUNDING ELIMINATED
When that agency decided it needed more cash to handle its own affairs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was told to look elsewhere for its budget needs.
Apparently no extra money was to be found anywhere within the Labor Department, which had a total budget of $44.4 billion last year, up from $39.2 billion in 2001.
"With very finite discretionary resources, we have to make difficult decisions," said Mason Bishop, the Labor Department's deputy assistant secretary for employment training. "We didn't see how this program was helping workers re-enter the workforce."
Coincidentally, the same conclusion was reached in 1992 when the first President Bush canceled the Mass-Layoffs Statistics program amid election-year charges that he had bungled handling of the economy.
REVIVED BY CLINTON
The program was resuscitated two years later by the Clinton administration.
Now Bush the younger is following in his father's footsteps, once again deciding that the American people have no real need to know how many mass layoffs are made each month.
"It's questionable what value this program has for workers," insisted Bishop.
On the other hand, the Labor Department this week released a sweeping study of volunteer work over the past year, reporting that 59 million Americans donated their time and know-how to helping others.
President Bush has spoken repeatedly about the virtues of volunteerism since taking office in 2001.
VOLUNTEERISM MEASURED
During his own stint in the White House, the elder Bush was a proud advocate of community service. That was also the last time the Labor Department was told to devote its finite discretionary resources to a study of volunteer work by U.S. citizens.
Then, as now, it's difficult to see how feel-good surveys of volunteer activities contribute to an understanding of the economy's vitality or the re- employment of displaced workers.
There does seem to be merit, though, in easily seeing how many people have received pink slips as companies tighten their belts, and which states and industries are in facing the greatest challenges.
"The United States economy is growing again," Bush declared in a holiday radio address from his Texas ranch. "This economy is strong and it can be stronger."
And if not, best to just sweep the whole mess under the rug.
Seek and Ye Shall Not Find
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, March 11, 2003; Page A21
That'll teach 'em.
Last month, the nation's governors came to Washington complaining about inadequate federal funding for the states. But states are about to find it much harder to make this complaint -- because the Bush administration has decided to stop publishing the budget report that states use to see what money they are, or aren't, getting from Washington.
The White House's Office of Management and Budget is discontinuing the annual report called "Budget Information for States" -- the primary federal document reporting how much states get under each federal program. In fiscal 2003, the report ran 422 pages. In 2002, it was 415 pages.
And for fiscal 2004? "The volume will not be produced this year," said Trent Duffy, OMB's spokesman. He said the change will reduce the cost of "paper and producing another volume."
State advocates are displeased. "There's no one place in the public domain for this information anymore," said Alysoun McLaughlin of the National Conference of State Legislatures. "You can't get that comprehensive picture anymore."
Democrats say it's an effort to conceal cuts the administration is making in popular programs. "George Bush's credibility problem has reached a truly embarrassing level: Instead of being honest with states about the huge budget cuts he proposes, he prefers to desperately hide the facts by no longer printing them," said David Sirota, spokesman for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.
Not so, Duffy responded. The information will continue to be available "in a different mode" from the various agencies. "If that [concealment] was the motivation, it didn't work," he said.
The report's demise comes amid a feud between Washington and state capitals. States are facing budget shortfalls of about $30 billion this year and $82 billion next year. States say they want about $20 billion from the federal government, but President Bush proposed no direct aid to the states in his $726 billion 11-year economic plan.
Bush, appearing before the National Governors Association on Feb. 24, said his 2004 budget proposes $400 billion in grants to the states, and "that's a 9 percent increase." He pointed out that "that's a bigger increase than 4 percent," which is the growth he proposed for overall spending.
But according to Bush budget documents, the $398.8 billion the administration proposes for state and local grants in 2004 is an increase of 3.8 percent from 2003 -- less than Bush's overall budget increase. And if you take out the Medicaid health plan for the poor, an entitlement program with automatic spending levels, Bush's budget actually proposes a 2.4 percent decrease.
Because the increase for states comes from swelling claims for Medicaid, "essentially they are bragging about the effects of their own recession," Sirota said.
The OMB's Duffy said that because of "technical errata," Bush's budget understated state grants, which are actually proposed to be $406.6 billion for 2004. Even then, the increase is 5.8 percent and without Medicaid a 1.1 percent increase.
Duffy said Bush's 9 percent claim was based on averages since he became president. Acknowledging that the non-Medicaid increase Bush proposed for states was 1.1 percent, Duffy added: "Taking out Medicaid from an aid-to-the-states story is like taking Jim Morrison out of a story on the Doors."
An organizing principle of the Bush administration is that principles don't change -- because as spokesman Ari Fleischer has said, "Once the principle changes in one case, it makes it easier to change in the next case."
Yet last week Bush amended one of the principles for restructuring Medicare that the administration offered nearly two years ago. In July 2001, the White House stated as the third of three principles, "Today's beneficiaries and those approaching retirement should have the option of keeping the traditional plan with no changes."
But when restating those principles last week, the new version said only, "Beneficiaries should have the option of keeping the traditional plan with no changes." The change is potentially vast. By dropping the qualifier about "today's beneficiaries and those approaching retirement," Bush appears to be extending the guarantee of "no changes" to Medicare beneficiaries in perpetuity. That guarantee would make the proposal more popular but eliminate most hope of improving Medicare's long-term solvency -- another Bush principle.
Bush spokesman Scott McClellan declined to say whether the change in language indicated a change in principle. "The framework is consistent with what he has previously said," the spokesman said.
Verbatim
"He denied he had these weapons, and then he destroys things he says he never had."
-- White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, March 3, referring to Saddam Hussein's destruction of Al Samoud missiles.
"In the missile area, Iraq has declared the development of a missile known as the Al Samoud, which uses components from an imported surface-to-air missile."
-- Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, Dec. 19.
Published on Monday, November 1, 2004 by St. Paul Pioneer Press / Minnesota
On Women's Issues, Bush Going Backward
by Carol Towarnicky
In the third debate, George W. Bush and John Kerry were asked what they had learned from their wives and daughters. Both candidates' responses — about how their women made them honest, told them to stand up straight, yadda yadda yadda — made this particular wife and mother want to hurl.
I just don't care. What matters to me is what a president's administration will do to protect women's lives. I mean, Bill Clinton was a lousy husband (to put it mildly), but his administration marked real progress and protection for women.
About the only women George W. Bush supports are those in the ultra-conservative Independent Women's Forum (including Lynne Cheney) who recently were handed part of a $10 million grant to train Iraqi women for their January elections. As the National Organization for Women put it, "Think Halliburton in a Skirt."
To give you an idea of where these ladies stand, they opposed the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women — not only because the convention supports reproductive rights (heaven forfend!), but because it advances such radical feminist ideas as equal pay for equal work, maternity leave with pay and child-care facilities for working mothers.
While I have nothing but goodwill for our Iraqi sisters and their January election, we American women have our own election coming up in a couple of days — and our choice couldn't be clearer: The Bush administration has stealthily rolled back many of the gains for which women have fought for decades. It must be replaced with one led by John Kerry who, throughout his career, has championed the cause of women. Some examples:
The Bush administration has reduced enforcement of Title IX, the law that protects equal opportunity for women and girls in education, including sports. Kerry has pledged to defend it.
Gone from the Labor Department is the Equal Pay Initiative, which enforced laws against discriminatory practices in the workplace. The Department of Justice has reduced enforcement of laws against gender discrimination and sexual harassment.
For the 4.5 million women earning the $5.15 minimum wage — and the millions more earning slightly more — the real value of their income is worth less than when it was raised in 1996. Kerry wants to increase the minimum wage to $7. Bush proposed a raise of a buck an hour — but only if the states could opt out. That is, another sham.
The Bush administration has cut 500,000 kids from after-school programs and plans to cut 300,000 children from child care by 2009. Bush has no plan to increase health insurance coverage for kids. By stark contrast, Kerry plans to expand after-school programs to include 3.5 million kids. His health care plan will cover all kids younger than 18.
Bush's plan to privatize — or whatever he calls it — Social Security will drastically reduce benefits. Social Security is the only source of retirement income for 26 percent of unmarried elderly women.
John Ashcroft's Justice Department has not properly enforced the Women Against Violence Act and has appointed women from the aforementioned Independent Women's Forum — who sneer at so-called "victim politics" and downplay the incidence of rapes and domestic violence — to his Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women.
The recent illness of Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist reminds us that the next president will have the opportunity to set the direction of the court, not only for the next four years but for decades. Kerry has said he will nominate justices who will protect reproductive rights. Overturning Roe v. Wade clearly is high on the Bush agenda. If that happens, women in 30 or more states could lose their rights to choose abortion. Soon to follow: the right to choose contraception.
If these facts come as a surprise, there's good reason. As the National Council for Research on Women documented last spring, information about women has gone missing from government Web sites, including 25 reports from the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau. Apparently, Bush & Co. believe that if they stop publishing the data, the discrimination will be invisible.
Notice how the titles for Bush's programs mean exactly the opposite? The "Clear Skies Initiative" makes it easier to pollute. "No Child Left Behind" actually leaves many children behind.
Add to that: "W. is for Women."
Towarnicky is chief editorial writer for the Philadelphia Daily News
Government Technology
Democrats Accuse HHS of Putting Ideology Over Science
Associated Press
Oct 22, 2002
WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) -- Two Democratic congressman contended Monday that the Bush administration is putting ideology over science, citing appointments to advisory committees and the removal of information from Web sites.
Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Sherrod Brown of Ohio demanded explanations in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.
They complained that information about the effectiveness of condoms had been removed from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web site; that experts serving on advisory committees were being replaced because their views do not match the administration's; and that HHS is singling out AIDS groups with probing audits.
In addition, they said, information showing that abortion does not increase the risk of breast cancer was removed from a National Institutes of Health Web site. "Scientific information ... has been removed, apparently because it does not fit with the administration's ideological agenda," Waxman and Brown wrote.
They charged that "ideology has replaced scientific qualifications" as HHS chooses members of advisory committees. Among other examples, they pointed to a report on a CDC advisory committee on safe lead levels for children. The report found that nominations of respected academics had been withdrawn and replaced with consultants to the industry.
"We are deeply concerned that stacking advisory committees with individuals whose qualifications are ideological rather than scientific will fundamentally undermine the integrity of scientific decision-making at our leading public health agencies," the Democrats wrote.
HHS spokesman Bill Pierce said it is Thompson's prerogative to appoint whomever he chooses for advisory committees. By contrast, he said, Waxman and Brown "would like all of us to follow their agenda, their liberal agenda, on these issues."
"They should stop looking for conspiracy theories," Pierce added.
Copyright 2002. Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Associated Press
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