THERE are lies, damn lies and statistics. And then, there are numbers games that go even beyond parsing present-day realities, but instead presume to predict the future based on a mistaken reading of past history.

In certain fields, this is called “risk analysis.” In the real world, it’s called “guesswork.”

It’s that latter category into which the widely reported, “confidential” Cushman & Wakefield analysis for the Port Authority falls.

Not only that, but it’s guesswork commissioned by a bureaucracy that just happens to be Cushman & Wakefield’s client.

The brokerage is the PA’s leasing agent for 1 World Trade Center, the 1,776 foot-tall tower now under construction.

The study has the effect of discrediting both the strategy and purposefulness of Ground Zero developer Larry Silverstein, with whom the PA is locked in a brutal battle over financing — a fight in which the PA isn’t necessarily wrong.

But, according to the study, leasing prospects for Silverstein’s new office towers at Ground Zero are dim, and one of his buildings might not even start construction until 2026.

The PA is using the analysis to buck Silverstein’s pitch for the agency to “backstop’ financing on Towers 2 and 3. If Tower 2 faces leasing prospects as bleak as the analysis suggests, and if the developer won’t even start Tower 3 until 17 years from now, why should the PA back him up to the tune of a dime?

Now, downtown obviously faces trouble over the short term, thanks to Wall Street’s retrenchment and alarming, looming job losses (although it’s today tied with Midtown South as the strongest office market in the US, with a scant 8.1 percent vacancy rate as reported last week by none other than Cushman & Wakefield).

But can today’s travails justify an utter loss of faith in New York’s commercial resiliency five and 10 years from now?

Cushman is a great global firm; its leadership, influence and integrity are not in question.

But its risk analysis for the PA — done not by its regular office market-research team but by its corporate investment-banking group — is loaded on the side of permanent doom and gloom.

When I asked Cushman CEO Bruce Mosler if he endorsed the report, he said he wasn’t “involved” in its preparation, but merely reiterated his view, which he’s enunciated before, that the office space lost on 9/11 should not be rebuilt “all at once.”

Later, Cushman decided to show us the report but without letting us make or keep a copy.

Unless I’ve forgotten how to do arithmetic, its methodology falls well short of offering a fair or helpful guide to forecasting how well Silverstein’s towers might do.

In fairness, it did not state — as was reported elsewhere — that Silverstein would delay building Tower 3 until 2026.

In fact, that notion was merely part of a larger, “what-if” scenario for the whole WTC site that an executive involved in writing the report termed “one possibility.”

Among the study’s chief predictions is that Silverstein’s 2.8 million square-foot Tower 2 (or 2 WTC) will lease up at the sluggish rate of around 250,000 square feet per year.

That was based mainly on two facts: First, from 1995-2008, downtown saw a total 2.5 million square feet of Class-A office leasing annually (including new leases and renewals). Second, during that period, the annual “capture rate” of downtown’s total leasing volume by new, “trophy” buildings was only 10 percent.

But wait: During that period, only one new, trophy product actually came to market downtown: Silverstein’s 7 WTC, which has leased 83 percent of its total 1.7 million square feet since it opened three years ago.

That’s 470,000 square feet annually — nearly twice the 250,000-a-year forecast for 2 WTC.

The PA would not comment on the record.

But authority insiders are known to believe that 7 WTC actually had a leasing advantage in that it’s a great building and because insurance financing allowed Silverstein to take lower rents.

That will surprise anyone who recalls Mayor Bloomberg accusing Silverstein of asking too much; or who’s aware of the baggage the “World Trade Center” name carried at the first tower to be rebuilt after 9/11, or of the continued blight of ruined Fiterman Hall at 7 WTC’s foot.

Here’s another weird fact about the Cushman sur vey: It forecasts that while 2 WTC’s 2.8 million square feet will re quire 11 years to lease up, the 1.5 million feet still available in the PA’s 1 WTC (which pre-leased some space to government agencies and China’s Vantone) will need only four years to fill, if the towers open at the same time by the end of 2013.

That means the remaining floors of 1 WTC will somehow fill at the rate of 375,000 square feet a year, compared with only 254,000 feet a year at 2 WTC.

How likely is that, though — considering that 2 WTC will have a better location with closer subway access, and carry none of the baggage that might be associated with a former “Freedom Tower” full of government offices?

A PA insider claims the agency wasn’t predicting that 1 WTC would whip 2 WTC in a leasing race — only that it’s proposing a slower leasing pace for 2 WTC as a favor to Silverstein’s bottom line, a notion hard for us to comprehend.

Cushman, for its part, says the leasing chart was based on the “assumption” that Silverstein won’t even try to bring tenants to 2 WTC until he’s filled every square inch of smaller 4 WTC, the first of his towers scheduled to go up.

Lots of “assumptions” indeed in this report — every one of them in favor of the PA’s side, and none in favor of Silverstein’s. steve.cuozzo@nypost.com