"The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation....

"But the audit says that lower-level department officials agreed that some older information in the inventory “was of low quality and that they had little faith in it.

“The presence of large numbers of out-of-place assets taints the credibility of the data,” the report says."

By Deborah Howell
Sunday, July 2, 2006; B06

The reporting that appears in The Post is supported by an infrastructure of research that readers do not see, except as credited in the occasional tag line at the end of a story.

Those tag lines don't begin to acknowledge the work done for reporters and readers by the News Research Center. The musty newspaper morgue of lore, brimming with crumbling clippings in tidy little envelopes, is now full of computers and researchers that Post journalists can't live without. Yes, there's still paper -- about 7,500 books, 30 periodicals a month and 15 daily newspapers.

Center director Bridget Roeber said the researchers are "news junkies, who see themselves not just as librarians but journalists finding and analyzing original documents, tracking people down, finding leads, using obscure databases." [more]