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04-27-2005, 09:47 AM
'04 terrorist attacks at record high

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Of 650 incidents worldwide, 198 occurred in Iraq
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By JONATHAN S. LANDAY
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Knight Ridder Newspapers
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WASHINGTON — Terrorists staged nearly 200 significant attacks in Iraq in 2004, according to data the Bush administration gave to Congress but had been withholding from the public.

The total, which exceeded the record number of strikes worldwide the year before, did not include some Iraqi insurgent attacks and more than 100 operations by foreign terrorists in Iraq because they didn't fit the State Department's criteria of what constitutes an international terrorist attack.

The statistics showed that an all-time high of about 650 significant terrorist attacks occurred worldwide in 2004, compared with the previous record of 175 the year before.

According to the statistics, 198 attacks occurred in Iraq, compared with 22 the previous year.

The report raises questions about President Bush's claim that the United States and its allies are winning the war on terrorism and comes as the Pentagon has acknowledged that violence in Iraq remains as high as last year.

“In terms of incidents, it's right about where it was a year ago,” Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday.

Rep. Henry Waxman of California, senior Democrat on the House Governmental Affairs Committee, disclosed the data in a letter sent Tuesday to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in which he asked that the statistics be made public.

Rice decided several weeks ago to replace a report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” which has been published every year for 19 years, with a document stripped of country-by-country statistics on attacks and casualties for 2004.

The State Department said the job of releasing the statistics belonged to the National Counterterrorism Center, a clearinghouse for intelligence on terrorism that was created in 2004.

But some current and former U.S. officials charged that Rice made a political decision to withhold the figures because they showed a dramatic increase in the number of significant terrorism attacks around the world over the high recorded for 2003.

The data disclosed in Waxman's letter were provided Monday to congressional staffers at a briefing by Karen Aguilar, the State Department's acting counterterrorism coordinator, and Russ Travers, deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center.