A Knight in Dragonland

The United States State Department released the 2006 terrorism statistics today. No big surprise … there’s been another massive increase in terrorism deaths since 2005.

The graph below was created using the Terrorism Knowledge Base from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. They have an incident analysis wizard that can generate all sorts of graphs. This graph shows terrorism deaths by year over the last decade. The “targets” I included in the wizard’s calculations were only non-military: educational institutions, journalists & media, NGO, private citizens and property, religious figures/institutions and tourists. Click the graph to enlarge.

There’s an interesting upsurge in terrorism deaths starting in 2003. What happened in 2003? Hmmmm …

I know I feel safer … don’t you?

I think I’ll try singing kumbayah. It would certainly work better than the Bush administration’s strategy.

UPDATE (5/1/07): I’m forestalling an obvious criticism of the above graph … where’s 9/11? I went back and played around with the tkb.org incident analysis wizard to find out. The attacks of 9/11 were factored into the “business” target category (for the WTC attacks) and the “government” target category (for the Pentagon), which I did not include in generating the graph above. The revised graph, including those two target categories, is below (click to enlarge):

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As you can see … the significant post-2003 upswing in deaths due to terrorism remains. The fact that the carnage of 2005 and 2006 equaled and then surpassed the 2001 toll is especially disturbing.