In "State (Dept.) of Confusion [when It Comes to Palestinian Terror against Israel]," I documented the deeply deficient 199-page Department of State Patterns of Global Terrorism for 2003, released on April 29, 2004, then the revisions to it, released on June 22, by looking specifically at the Palestinian-Israeli theater. I concluded that the Department of State,
even in revising its basic research document on terrorism, does such a shoddy job points to its inability to carry out this task which needs to be handled by some other department or agency, one that can properly do objective work.
Now the full weight of State's Office of Inspector General has been brought to bear on this travesty. And what does the OIG find? As Josh Meyer sums it up in the Los Angeles Times, it
blamed the problems on sloppy data collection, inexperienced employees, personnel shortages and lax oversight. Investigators also concluded that the procedures used by the State Department, CIA and other agencies to define terrorism and terrorist attacks were so inconsistent that they couldn't be relied upon. ... The department's independent investigative unit concluded, however, that politics played no role in allowing so many mistakes to be published in the original version.
The OIG reassuringly concludes that those errors were fixed in a second version.
Comment: The State Department is just digging itself in deeper and deeper, covering up, apologizing, and doing anything but admit to its inaccurate, politicized, and negligent "research." (Nov. 21, 2004)
