Methodological changes and the Iraq war jointly explain the jump in reported terrorist incidents

Evidence

To ensure a more comprehensive accounting of terrorist incidents, we in the NCTC significantly increased the level of effort from three part-time individuals to 10 full-time analysts, and we took a number of other steps to improve quality control and database management. This increased level of effort allowed a much deeper review of far more information and, along with Iraq, are the primary reasons for the significant growth in a number of terrorist incidents being reported. (Zelikow 2005, 3) As compared with the (upwardly revised) 208 incidents for 2003, the 2004 report enumerated a full 651 significant international terrorist incidents-a tripling of the count in a single year. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 852

Categorization

• QUESTION: Brennan’s ‘along with Iraq’ is doing heavy work - the count jump partly reflects the Iraq insurgency being now classified as terrorism; worth chasing how event definitional changes drove the tripling more than ‘more analysts’ did.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 852
• XREF: connects to: Terrorist incident counts tripled in one year due to counting changes — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 853; A new counterterrorism agency abandoned established statistics-reporting conventions — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 851; Reported terrorist attacks fell below 1980s levels by the early 2000s — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 878