Caroline Drees, Reuters:

The U.S. war on terrorism has made the world safer, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief said on Friday, despite more than 11,000 terrorist attacks worldwide last year that killed 14,600 people.

ThinkProgress:

A pair of Bush administration terrorism reports are due out today. The State Department’s annual terrorism report finds that Iraq has become a safe haven for terrorists and has attracted a “foreign fighter pipeline” linked to terrorist plots, cells and attacks throughout the world. Meanwhile, a National Counterterrorism Threat Center report finds that terrorist incidents and deaths more than doubled in 2005.

Reuters:

The U.S. State Department said the numbers, listed in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism released on Friday, were based on a broader definition of terrorism and could not be compared to the 3,129 international attacks listed the previous year.

But the new 2005 figures, which showed attacks in Iraq jumped and accounted for about a third of the world’s total, may fuel criticism of the Bush administration’s assertion that it is winning the fight against terrorism.

Ya think?

Officials sought to avert any conclusion that the sharply higher statistics on attacks meant the war on terrorism was not working.

“This is not the kind of war where you can measure success with conventional numbers,” Crumpton said.

Cooked numbers are so much more comforting.