Well. We Hope You're Happy Mr. Terrorist

Those pesky terrorists. The President has told them and told them and told them that we are winning the war on terror, but will they listen? No. So now we can't print our yearly report that says we're winning the war on terror.

The State Department won't publish an annual report on 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.

Thanks terrorists. And since this would have been the twentieth year of the report, we had a party planned with cake and clowns and everything.

Officials defended the sudden cancellation, saying the methodology used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, possibly including incidents that may not have been terrorism. "There were several situations where the terrorists were chanting "Yankee go home and we weren't sure if they were talking about the baseball team or not," said one State Department official on condition of anonymity.

A senior State Department official said a report on global terrorism would be sent to lawmakers and made available to the public in place of "Patterns of Global Terrorism," but that it wouldn't contain statistical data. "In fact," the official explained, "it won't have any data at all, but there will be some tasty recipes."

Another U.S. official said Secretary Rice was concerned about the methodology the National Counter terrorism Center used to generate the data for 2004, believing that analysts were anxious to avoid a repetition of last year's undercount "We only counted attacks from left handed terrorists last year," the official said, "now they want us to count, like, all of them. Do you know how much work that is?"