From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

For 20 years, the State Department has issued two annual reports on terrorism, one classified to Congress

and one, bound and and glossy to the public.

Apart from its pure information value, the patterns of global terrorism report allowed a succession of administrations to justify their policies.

But now, in the midst of the Bush administration's war on terror,

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has decided not to release the statistics for public review.

That report would have cited the National Counterterrorism Center's tally of 625 terrorist attacks worldwide last year,

up from a previous high in 2003 of 175 attacks, raising questions about

the success of the war. Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ritter newspapers wrote about the cancellation

of the terrorism report.

The official State Department rationale for this is that last year, on the recommendation

of the Independent 9-11 Commission,

the Congress passed legislation that created a new entity called the National Counterterrorism

Center. In fact, the center is actually a successor to a number of other animals of the same

characteristic, part of whose job was to put together the actual data

that would then go to the State Department that the State Department would then use to put into

this publication.

The State Department's explanation for its decision not to produce this kind of report anymore

is because now we've got this National Counterterrorism Center.

It should be their job.

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