http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=20762&mode=nested&order=0
Monday, April 18
By P.M. Carpenter
Q: What does the Bush administration do with bad news?
A: It starts thinking like the Stalin "administration."
What else, other than scrubbing reality - which Uncle Joe performed
with bureaucratically ruthless efficiency -- would you call the State
Department's recent decision to purge unwelcome news by simply
suppressing its publication?
Admittedly the bad news was really bad, even for this administration.
It seems the international-violence bean-counters over at the National
Counterterrorism Center tabulated last year's terrorist attacks and
the number popped out as 625.
By itself, the number is perhaps a tad unstartling.
By comparison to 2003's count, however, it's hair-raising, because
that count - and the use of emphasis is a sad way to have to put it -
was only 175.
So we suffered a blistering three-and-a-half-fold increase in
"significant" attacks in just one year.
Worse yet, the 2003 count itself was the highest on record since
experts started counting in 1985.
And even worse than that, the 625 number did not include attacks on
American military personnel in Iraq.
One cringes at the thought of the true count had those terrorist
attacks - emanating from what the president himself calls "a central
front in the war on terror" -- been counted in, oh, say, a terrorist
attack count.
So what does the administration do with data that contradicts its
tireless claims of "winning the war on terrorism"?
It just quashes its publication.
Presto.
Contradiction begone; bad news be expurgated.
It's the happy miracle of censorship.
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See how easy it is? Why didn't *you* think of that?
Harry
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