The National Counterterrorism Center's definitional shift for counting terrorism: use of loci communes and embedded value hierarchies.

• Author: Winkler, Carol K.
• Position: Essay

In 1973, Congress passed a law (Title 22, sec. 2656f) requiring the U.S. Secretary of State to provide an annual public accounting of worldwide terrorism incidents. The resulting reports, known for years as Patterns of Global Terrorism, have substantial international cache in the global battle against terrorism. Edwin R. Royce, chairman of the Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation of the House International Affairs Committee, noted that Patterns of Global Terrorism (hereafter referred to as Patterns), "was widely used throughout the world, because it was authoritative and comprehensive" (Reviewing the State Department's Annual Report, 2005, p. 1). Larry Johnson (2005), former CIA intelligence analyst and Deputy Director of the State Department's Office of Counterterorrism, maintained that publicity generated about the statistical findings of the annual reports resulted in decisions by state sponsors "to back off" of their support for terrorists. The media, as well as political figures both at home and abroad, have relied on the counts presented in the annual reports to draw conclusions about whether the United States was succeeding or failing in its efforts to combat terrorism (e.g., Kessler, 2007; Moscaritolo, 2007; Schmitt, 2008).

Recently, the U.S. government changed the institutional roles of the various executive branch agencies involved in the production of the annual terrorism reports. In May of 2003, George W. Bush signed an executive order transferring the primary role for data collection from the CIA to the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC). In 2004, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act shifted responsibility for writing the final report from the State Department to the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

The resulting reorganization was initially problematic, as the fact status of the public reports came under increased scrutiny and public debate. Initially, complaints arose about the NCTC reports undercounting terrorist attacks. The NCTC's own interim director John Brennan derided his team's first report by stating, "Adequate quality control was lacking, incidents were missed, and the document was published with numerous errors" (Reviewing the State Department's Annual Report, 2005, p. 10). Controversy continued the following year, as the NCTC's original report omitted compiled terrorism statistics altogether with the explanation by U.S. State Department Counselor Phillip Zelikow that the law did not require the inclusion of compilations of the statistics (Reviewing the State Department's Annual Report, 2005). Critics both in and outside of the administration charged that the actual reason for the statistics' omission was that the administration was trying to hide that 2004 witnessed a sharp rise in significant terrorist attacks and the second highest death toll recorded in the past thirty-six years (Johnson, 2005).

By 2005, NCTC spokespersons responded by publicly denouncing the conventional definitions used to collect terrorism data and by announcing their agency's plan to develop a new methodology (Reviewing the State Department's Annual Report, 2005). Almost immediately, the NCTC's new definitional approach prompted complaints that its resulting counts overestimated the actual extent of terrorism around the globe. Various reports criticized the NCTC tallies as inflated because of the agency's decision to include incidents of insurgent and sectarian violence occurring in Iraq (Mack, 2007; Perl, 2007). One report went so far as to chastise the NCTC's conclusion that terrorism from Islamic fundamentalists was on the rise, arguing that the trend line actually went downward when Iraqi incidents and fatalities were not included (Mack, 2007).

The NCTC's public defense of its new methodological approach offers more than an opportunity to discover how the agency attempted to reclaim fact status (i.e., consensually accepted premises) for its annual reports in international debates about terrorism. Schiappa (2003) explains that the standard motivation behind re-definition is "to change other people's understanding and linguistic behavior away from the conventional patterns and towards new behaviors and understanding" (p. 31). Ivie (1974) specifically articulates the need to examine such moments in the context of war rhetoric since "the vocabulary of motives has been modified from time to time ... it should be particularly significant in the development of rhetorical theory to investigate the factors responsible for this variance in the pattern of justification" (p. 345). This study hopes to partially answer that call by demonstrating how the National Counterterrorism Center's annual report on terrorism defended its new methodology. This essay will summarize key definitional changes that NCTC employed in its public terrorism counts, analyze how the agency utilized the quantity/quality pairing to defend its new approach, and reveal the implied new value hierarchy embedded in U.S. annual public terrorism reports. In the process, the analysis will demonstrate that loci commune pairings in social contexts can function in non-antithetical ways.

THE NCTC'S REDEFINITION OF TERRORISM

Prior to the NCTC's assumption of the responsibility for producing the nation's annual reports, both the State Department and the CIA used Title 22, Section 2656f (d) of the United States Code to define terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or subnational agents." Both agencies, however, included two additional qualifiers. First, the State Department and CIA restricted their tallies of violent acts to instances of "international terrorism," which the United States Code defined as "terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country" (p. 3). Second, they restricted their discussion to significant incidents of international terrorism, i.e., incidents resulting in the loss of life or serious injury to noncombatants, or events causing $10,000 or more in property damage (Rheinheimer, 2006).

After NCTC assumed the responsibility for writing the annual reports, the counting protocols omitted the two qualifiers used historically in the Patterns' methodology. Terrorism remained "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or subnational agents" (NCTC, 2008 p. 2), but the NCTC abandoned the international qualifier by including attacks on citizens or territory that involved only one country. The shift produced notable changes in the terrorism counts. Prior to the NCTC's shift, significant international terrorist incidents numbered between 350 and 550 incidents on average per year (see Figure 1).

The NCTC's (2005) first annual report, which dropped the international qualifier but retained the practice of focusing only on significant incidents of terrorism, functioned as revealing about the impact of the international modifier as a discrete variable. In the 2005 report, the number of terrorist incidents rose by more than a hundred to 651. The previous Patterns protocol would not have counted at least three hundred of those acts because they occurred in only one country, i.e., the Kashmir region of India (Johnson, 2005). More recent NCTC reports (2008) have shown an even greater jump in terrorism, due to the counts of single country attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. The seventy-nine percent of the 2006 global fatalities from terrorism occurring in Iraq (MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, 2007), for example, fell outside the pre-NCTC definitional parameters. (1)

A second implication of the removal of the "international" qualifier was that the NCTC counts now included domestic terrorist attacks. The precise impact of that particular change is difficult to quantify, however, due to systematic reporting inaccuracies from the Department of Justice. An audit report by Inspector General Glenn Fine (2007) found that the Justice Department over-inflated the reporting of domestic terrorism by 44% (26 of 59 cases). The audit maintained that, instead of counting actual cases of domestic terrorism, various officials in the Justice Department had added instances of marriage fraud and other immigration problems due to mistaken assumptions made at the time of arrest about individual involvement in acts of terrorism.

In addition to removing the "international" qualifier, the NCTC 2007 Report on Terrorism discontinued the historic practice of limiting the reported count to significant terrorist incidents. NCTC's decision to include all attacks regardless of death, personal injury, or level of property damage substantially expanded the total count of terrorist attacks. The NCTC recorded the number of terrorist attacks in 2007 as 14,499, a more than twenty-two fold increase from the 655 attacks recorded in 2004 before the agency began omitting the "significant" qualifier. Taken together, removal of the two qualifiers resulted in a rise in the reported number of terrorism incidents almost forty times what occurred prior to the NCTC's implementation of its new methodology. (2)

Having removed the two qualifiers, the NCTC also altered the government's evidentiary source for publicly documenting that a...