Powell: Erroneous terrorism report 'very embarrassing'

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday that he was embarrassed by a State Department terrorism report that misstated the number of terrorist incidents that occurred worldwide last year.

The State Department in April released its 2003 "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, which claimed that the number of terrorist incidents has been on the decline over the past three years and that last's years count, 190, represented the lowest reported total since 1969. U.S. officials at the time trumpeted the report as evidence that the United States was winning the war on terrorism.

Late last month, however, two U.S. academics published an opinion piece in The Washington Post criticizing the State Department for mischaracterizing the information in the report. The only verifiable information in the report shows that the number of terrorist incidents has instead increased annually over the past few years, according to Princeton University economics professor Alan Krueger and Stanford University political science professor David Laitin.

The State Department acknowledged last week that it had underreported the number of terrorist incidents that occurred in 2003 and announced plans to soon release an updated version of the terrorism report. In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday, Powell went even further and said that the report was "very embarrassing."

"I am not a happy camper over this. We were wrong," Powell said.

He denied any "political" motivations behind the incorrect numbers in the report, and instead blamed the error on poor "data collecting and reporting" procedures.

"I don't think there was anything political or policy-driven about it. It was just data that was incorrect or it wasn't properly measured compared to the way it was measured in previous years," Powell said.

During an appearance on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," though, Powell seemingly defended the main thrust of the report - that terrorism still poses a threat to international security.

"If you read the report, though, the report makes it clear that terror is a continuing problem. We didn't say it had gone away," he said.

Powell also said yesterday on "Meet The Press" that he is set to meet today with officials from a number of agencies involved in the preparation of the report, including the State Department, CIA and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, to discuss how the errors occurred.

"They are working all weekend long and they will have a big meeting … to figure out where the errors crept in, why they crept in, and we're going to correct this report as quickly as possible," Powell said on "This Week."