The State Department stopped publishing a terrorism report after the terrorism center concluded there were more attacks in 2004 than in any year since the report began in 1985.

Several U.S. officials defended the decision, saying the methodology the National Counter-Terrorism Center used for the report may have been faulty and may have included incidents that were not terrorism.

But other officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered the report 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,” said 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.