Listening to the Bush administration’s explanation of the problems in its annual State Department report on terrorism – it seems that instead of terrorism being down sharply, as the report says, terrorism is actually up sharply, but aside from that it’s an inspiring document – stirs up thoughts of Thomas Reed.

Reed, the acid Republican speaker of the House in the late 19th century, once beamed down from the chair at a Democrat seeking to correct a previous statement.

“No correction needed,” said Reed graciously. “We didn’t think it was so when you said it.”

At a time when the Bush administration is constantly occupied by explaining things it got wrong, that seems the only polite response.

Back at the end of April, the State Department issued its annual report on global terrorism, explaining that in 2003 the number of terror attacks had dropped to a historic low, that terror deaths were way down and that al Qaeda was losing the ability to launch major attacks.

Blushing prettily, officials conceded the administration might have had something to do with this dramatic success.

“You will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight,” declared Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage when the report was released. Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism J. Cofer Black praised “the very low level of terrorist attacks last year,” noting it was a 34-year low, and predicted the trend would continue in 2004.

And while nobody wants to make these things political, Ken Mehlman, running the president’s re-election campaign, did say, “Ultimately the most important thing that people want to see on the war on terror is: What is your vision for dealing with it and what is your record?”

But as people started to read the report and compare it with reality, annoying little problems kept popping up. By mid-May, professors Alan B. Krueger and David Laitin wrote in the Washington Post, “A careful review of the report and the underlying data supports the opposite conclusion: The number of significant terrorist acts increased from 124 in 2001 to 169 in 2003 – 36 percent – even using the State Department’s official standards.”

By last week – only about a month later – the State Department was admitting that its annual report was, um, a mess. For one thing – as Krueger and Laitin noticed from reading the report, and as you’d think anyone might have noticed from copyreading it – the list of terrorist acts in 2003 didn’t include a single one after Nov. 11, even though the year still had more than seven weeks to go. That way, the report didn’t count terrorist acts such as the multiple bombings on Nov. 15 in Istanbul, which killed 61 people.

A State Department official told the Post that to meet a printing deadline, it had to stop counting 2003 terrorist acts on Nov. 11. Another, speaking on the world’s most understandable insistence on not being quoted, said the report’s corrections might run to eight pages.

Thomas Reed, who always enjoyed watching Washington officials step on themselves, has no idea what he’s missing.

The administration did what it always does in these situations: It sent out Secretary of State Colin Powell, perhaps its last national security official who can count on a polite reception. “It’s a numbers error,” Powell said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

“Nobody was out to cook the books,” he explained. “Errors crept in.”

Although these errors do raise the question of how an administration can stop terrorist acts when it can’t manage to count terrorist acts.

As Powell admitted, “I am not a happy camper about this. We were wrong.”

These days, various administration officials seem to be saying that a lot.

Often, they say it only long after other people have pointed it out.

So now, it’s hard to know just what to believe of what the Bush administration says at the time it first says it. This is known as a credibility problem, and it extends to more and more of the things the administration says.

Except, of course, when it says “Oops.”

On those occasions, it’s completely believable.

Even to someone like Thomas Reed.