So how is the war on terrorism going? Are terrorists “on the run,” as the president claims? Are there fewer terrorist attacks?

The State Department has issued a “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report to Congress for 19 years, but this year it stripped out the hard numbers. After much criticism that it was trying to hide bad news, the agency released the figures but termed them meaningless.

According to the report, the number of significant terrorist attacks grew by 651 last year. The number of fatalities grew to 1,907 from 625. But the State Department says those comparisons are faulty because the 2003 figures didn’t include terrorist attacks in Iraq.

The State Department created a controversy last year by not fully counting the number of terrorist attacks. This year, counterterrorism officials conducted a more rigorous accounting that produced more complete numbers. Then the State Department dropped them from the report.

If all of this leaves your head spinning, you’re not alone.

What appears to be clear from all of this is that the war on terror had not been going as well as advertised, and the government wanted to keep the American people in the dark. The condescension and selfishness implicit in that calculation is insulting. And once again a government agency has made matters worse by choosing secrecy over clearing the air.

The report stated: “Because terrorism is a tactic, used on many fronts, by diverse perpetrators in different circumstances and with different aims, the Counterterrorism Center cautions against using incident data alone to gauge success in the war on terrorism.”

Fair enough. But in the future the State Department ought to release information and explain it, rather than cover it up and further fuel public mistrust.