Associated Press
NEW YORK - The vast majority of convictions that the Bush administration cites as victories in the legal front of its anti-terror campaign are not related to national security, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
On Thursday, President George W. Bush urged renewal of the USA Patriot Act and boasted of the government’s success in prosecuting terrorists.
Flanked by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush said that “federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted,” the Post said.
Those statistics have been used repeatedly by Bush and other administration officials, including Gonzales and his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft, to characterize the government’s efforts against terrorism.
But the numbers are misleading at best, the Post said.
An analysis of the Justice Department’s own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post showed that 39 people -- not 200, as officials have implied -- were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security.
Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigration law -- and had nothing to do with terrorism, the Post analysis shows. For the entire list, the median sentence was just 11 months.
Taken as a whole, the data indicate that the government’s effort to identify terrorists in the United States has been less successful than authorities have often suggested. The statistics provide little support for the contention that authorities have discovered and prosecuted hundreds of terrorists here. Except for a small number of well-known cases -- such as truck driver Iyman Faris, who sought to take down the Brooklyn Bridge -- few of those arrested appear to have been involved in active plots inside the United States, the Post said.
Among all the people charged as a result of terrorism probes in the three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Post found no demonstrated connection to terrorism or terrorist groups for 180 of them.
Just one in nine individuals on the list had an alleged connection to the al-Qaida terrorist network and only 14 people convicted of terrorism-related crimes -- including Faris and convicted Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui -- have clear links to the group, the Post said. Many more cases involve Colombian drug cartels, supporters of the Palestinian cause, Rwandan war criminals or others with no apparent ties to al Qaeda or its leader, Osama bin Laden.
But a large number of people appear to have been swept into U.S. counterterrorism investigations by chance -- through anonymous tips, suspicious circumstances or bad luck -- and have remained classified as terrorism defendants years after being cleared of connections to extremist groups, the Post said.
For example, the prosecution of 20 men, most of them Iraqis, in a Pennsylvania truck-licensing scam accounts for about 10 percent of individuals convicted -- even though the entire group was publicly absolved of ties to terrorism in 2001.
“For so many of these cases, there seems to be much less substance to them than we first assume or have first been told,” Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who heads the Washington office of Rand Corp., a think tank that conducts national security research, told the Post. “There’s an inherent deterrent effect in cracking down on any illicit activity. But the challenge is not exaggerating what they were up to -- not portraying them as super-terrorists when they’re really the low end of the food chain.”
Justice Department officials say they have not sought to exaggerate the importance or suspected associations of those prosecuted in connection with terrorism probes, and they argue that the list provides only a partial view of their efforts.
Officials said all the individuals were first put on the list because of a suspected connection or allegation related to terrorism. Last week, they also said that the department had tightened the requirements for including a case on the terrorism list.
Barry M. Sabin, chief of the department’s counterterrorism section, said prosecutors frequently turn to lesser charges when they are not confident they can prove crimes such as committing or supporting terrorism. Many defendants also have been prosecuted for relatively minor crimes in exchange for information that is not public but has proven valuable in other terrorism probes, he told the Post.
“A person could not have been put on this list if there was not a concern about national security, at least initially,” he said. “Are all these people an ongoing threat presently? Arguably not. . . . We are not trying to overstate or understate what we’re doing. You don’t want to put language or a label on people that is inconsistent with what they have done,” the Post quoted him as saying.