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| Boucher gives insight into errors in terror report |
| 2004-06-15 |
| excerpted from State Department Daily Press Briefing. -snip- QUESTION: Just want to understand how the State Department didn’t realize that the info from the CIA about the global terror report was so wrong. MR. BOUCHER: The numbers are put together by the Terrorist Threat Information Center I think he meant Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which is an interagency group. It’s headed by the Central Intelligence Agency and a number of different agencies work there, and these are the authorities on terrorism issues. So we -- they are the ones who put the numbers forth to us. Now, I think part of your question is why didn’t we see these numbers and say, "Hey, that can’t be right." I don’t know what the answer is to that and, frankly, that is one of the things the Secretary wants to try to get to the bottom of as well. How did we get these numbers and how come the numbers are wrong and how come we didn’t question them around here? But I think that’s a question that doesn’t have an answer yet, and we recognize that there are two elements to coming out with the wrong numbers, as we did. -snip- QUESTION: He’s certainly made clear how displeased he is at what happened here. Given how embarrassing it was and how wrong it was, is there a process looking into whether people’s careers should be affected by having contributed to this mistake? MR. BOUCHER: What we first need to do is to get the right numbers, determine what was missing and how the things went wrong in the last set of numbers, and I think appropriate conclusions will be drawn based on what we find out. QUESTION: If I understood the Secretary correctly, I think he told ABC yesterday that there was going to be a meeting today involving various agencies to look at this. Has that meeting taken place? What’s it looking at? Where’s it meeting? MR. BOUCHER: It hasn’t taken place yet. He’ll be meeting later this afternoon -- I think it’s 2:15 or something like that -- with the head of the Terrorist Threat Information Center, Mr. [John]Brennan, who is coming over, I think, with some of his people, and then some of the people in the building. And the purpose is, as he explained over the weekend, to try to get to the bottom of the errors, figure out how quickly we can get the correct information available and out to the public, and make whatever determinations are necessary to correct this mess. -snip- QUESTION: Can you tell us whether INR is involved or was involved in looking at the data when it came in, or did the data just come straight from the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and go straight to the Counterterrorism Coordinator’s Office? MR. BOUCHER: I’m not sure to what extent INR is involved. It does go straight from them to the Counterterrorism -- to our Counterterrorism Coordinator’s Office. But whether INR is involved out there or back here after it gets here, I don’t know. -snip- QUESTION: Richard, if I understand, you don’t exactly know what the errors were? MR. BOUCHER: I think we have -- we have two -- we have indications that there are two major sources for the numbers being wrong, one being that they did not count the last, essentially the last two months almost of the year. For some reason they cut off the counting at November 10th. And second of all, that -- QUESTION: November 10th or 11th? MR. BOUCHER: Yes, something around there. QUESTION: I just want to help you get this right. It’s -- MR. BOUCHER: No, I do want to get this right -- around November 10th or 11th. Let me rephrase that. I appreciate that. Second of all, it appears that the classification of significant and non-significant incidents, and the counting of non-significant incidents was done differently this year than it had been in previous years and that incidents that didn’t necessarily cause death or casualties were not counted this year, whereas they had been in the past. QUESTION: Do you know -- can you give me -- MR. BOUCHER: There may be other reasons. There may be more detailed explanations of why some of these things happened. QUESTION: Is there a specific example you can point to at the moment of one of these? MR. BOUCHER: Well, I’d just point out that that in November and December there were several very significant and terrible attacks that occurred resulting in large numbers of casualties, including the bombings in Turkey that apparently were not counted. QUESTION: Okay, and -- but to the best of your knowledge, there is no -- none of the errors revolved around the definition that you used for terrorist attacks -- MR. BOUCHER: No. QUESTION: -- and accounting, perhaps, attacks against U.S. military personnel? MR. BOUCHER: No. Apparently not. Let me put it that way. We won’t be able to say for sure until we really have gotten to the bottom of it and made every possible determination. QUESTION: Did I understand you correctly to say that one of the errors, you think, was a failure to count terrorist attacks that did not result in death or casualties? MR. BOUCHER: That’s right. QUESTION: Thanks. MR. BOUCHER: Again, these are preliminary indications. There may be more things that went wrong. There may be more details on how those things went wrong or exactly how they were done that we’ll get to as we pursue this further. -snip- there is plenty more onthe same subject. |
| Posted by:Super Hose |