What do you do if an upcoming report contains unfavorable information about your administration? Stop it from being published, of course. Knight Ridder's Jonathan S. Landay has the big scoop:

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

[...]

[C]urrent and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.

How bad is the news in the report?

According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004.

That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.

The statistics didn't include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front in the war on terror."

The numbers in the report raise two significant questions. The first, of course, is whether President Bush is doing enough to combat terrorism. I always believed that John Kerry should have tried to outflank Bush on the right on issues of terrorism, a la JFK on the missile gap. The same strategy still holds today, and the Democrats now have firm proof that the President's policies are not cutting down worldwide terrorism (and in fact are allowing more terrorist attacks than ever).

The following is an equally important question: should the Americal people support a man who blocks information from the public that might tarnish his image? If ever there were proof of this President's "divorce from reality" (thank you, Mr. Guckert), this is it. The Dems -- or their allies -- should really consider running an ad on this because it's high time Americans realized what type of man their President really is.