The DoJ called these cases "terrorism":
28 Latinos charged with working illegally at the airport in Austin, Texas, most of them using phony Social Security numbers.
Eight Puerto Ricans charged with trespassing on Navy property on the island of Vieques, long a site of civil protests of ordnance testing.
A Middle Eastern man indicted in Detroit for allegedly passing bad checks who has the same name as a Hezbollah leader.
A Middle Eastern college student charged in Trenton with paying a stand-in to take his college English-proficiency tests. He received a one-month jail sentence after pleading guilty.
One category of the reported terrorism convictions, "international terrorism," was particularly misreported. Of 174 convictions originally classified under that category, only 43 were verified as such, the GAO said.
|
Justice Dept's stats on terrorism
prosecutions are largely lies
| |
Justice Dept. lied about
terror cases, says GAO
Associated Press
Feb. 21, 2003
WASHINGTON (AP) — In the year after the Sept. 11 attacks, federal prosecutors exaggerated their success convicting would-be terrorists by wrongly classifying three of every four cases originally labeled as international terrorism, congressional investigators said this week.
Overall, almost half of 288 convictions deemed terrorism-related were wrongly classified as such for the 2002 fiscal year that began three weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the General Accounting Office, Congress' nonpartisan watchdog agency, said Wednesday.
GAO concluded that the Justice Department "does not have sufficient management oversight and internal controls in place to ensure the accuracy and reliability of terrorism-related conviction statistics included in its annual performance reports."
The inaccuracies hampered "the Congress' ability to accurately assess terrorism-related performance outcomes of the U.S. criminal justice system" — information needed for Congress to make decisions on federal law enforcement budget requests — GAO said in a report requested after a December 2001 story in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Sept. 11 attacks reshaped law enforcement's mission as federal officials from Attorney General John Ashcroft to the FBI declared that preventing future attacks would be a priority for the Justice Department and would require millions more federal dollars.
And, in fact, the number of reported terror-related convictions jumped, GAO found.
In five years before the attacks there were an average of 35 terrorism convictions reported annually. In the year afterward, the report said, prosecutors reported 160 terror convictions.
But GAO said prosecutors wrongly classified at least 132 of 288 convictions — 46 percent — as terrorism-related for fiscal 2002. All were reclassified.
One category of the reported terrorism convictions, "international terrorism," was particularly misreported. Of 174 convictions originally classified under that category, only 43 were verified as such, the GAO said.
Prosecutors blamed the discrepancies on the limited time their staffs had to evaluate the data. GAO noted that the Justice Department and the prosecutors who report to it have since enacted a series of changes to correct the figures and ensure that future annual reports would be accurate.
But one member of Congress said the revisions undermined the war against terrorism.
"Playing shell games with numbers is counterproductive," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It blurs our focus and undercuts accountability and credibility."
A Justice Department spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.
The GAO said the discrepancies were due in part to different definitions of terror-related cases used by the agency and the federal prosecutors whose data are included in the Justice Department's annual performance report.
The Justice Department, for example, typically has reported more terrorism-related convictions than the prosecutors because it included convictions obtained in international, federal and state courts, the GAO said.
In contrast, the U.S. attorneys only included federal convictions, the report said.
But the statistics related to both groups were overstated nonetheless.
Published by
Associated Press
|
|
Justice Dept. lies about
terror cases — again
by Mark Fazlollah, Philadelphia Inquirer March 15, 2003
In the first two months of this year, the Justice Department filed charges against 56 people, labeling all the cases as "terrorism."
But an Inquirer investigation has found that at least 41 of them had nothing to do with terrorism — a point that prosecutors of the cases themselves acknowledge.
Among the cases:
28 Latinos charged with working illegally at the airport in Austin, Texas, most of them using phony Social Security numbers.
Eight Puerto Ricans charged with trespassing on Navy property on the island of Vieques, long a site of civil protests of ordnance testing.
A Middle Eastern man indicted in Detroit for allegedly passing bad checks who has the same name as a Hezbollah leader.
A Middle Eastern college student charged in Trenton with paying a stand-in to take his college English-proficiency tests. He received a one-month jail sentence after pleading guilty.
But also included in the new terrorism listings are several cases that involved suspects with ties to foreign militant groups.
Six on the list are alleged members of the Abu Sayyaf Muslim group, charged with murdering two Americans and kidnapping a third in the Philippines.
Several others have pleaded guilty to illegal money transactions believed to have terrorism connections.
And there's Ahcene Benrekia, an Algerian living in South Philadelphia with a criminal record that should have kept him out of the United States.
The problems are nothing new. In January, the General Accounting Office reported that three-fourths of all "international terrorism" convictions were wrong in fiscal 2002.
The GAO audit, opened in response to a Dec. 16, 2001, Inquirer article, said the exaggeration was serious because it prevented Congress and the public from understanding how much taxpayer money was being spent to prosecute terrorism.
The audit did not take into account another batch of "terrorism" cases filed last fall in New Jersey against 60 Middle Eastern men. The Inquirer, aided by Syracuse University's nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, found that they were students and that the only charges against them were allegations that they had cheated on the English test for admission to a U.S. university.
The Justice Department, which promised to fix the problem, says that some prosecutors may have misclassified cases but that the goal is to accurately report terrorism.
Terrorism prosecutions from January and February show that the goal remains elusive.
Puerto Ricans who have long protested the use of Vieques as a practice bombing range for the Navy were outraged to hear last week that demonstrators had been labeled as terrorists.
"This wasn't terrorism. It was an act of heroism," said Manuel Rodriguez Orellana, former minority leader of the Puerto Rican Senate.
The Vieques protest occurred as the Navy conducted its final live-ammunition practice in January.
"The terrorism was the bombing by the Navy for 60 years," said Rodriguez Orellana, a leader in the commonwealth's Independence Party. "The terrorism was disregard for the people of Vieques that the Marines and Navy always displayed."
The eight Vieques protesters pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and were given sentences ranging from one to four months in jail.
Prosecutor Sonia Torres-Pabon, who handled the eight cases, said she was unclear why they were classified as terrorism. More than 200 people have been arrested in Vieques protests since 1999, but earlier cases were not listed as terrorism.
"I don't see them as any different than the other Vieques cases," she said.
The largest group of "terrorism" cases this year was from Texas, where prosecutors have won guilty pleas from 20 of 28 Latinos charged with illegally working at the Austin airport.
Daryl Fields, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Texas, said there was no evidence that any were linked to terrorism.
The arrests were part of the Justice Department's Operation Tarmac, started after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Since then, about 1,000 airport workers have been arrested, most of them Latinos. None is known to have links to terrorism. The Justice Department says it is essential to ensure that no illegal workers have access to planes.
Prosecutors in Iowa also listed four January indictments of Des Moines airport workers, all U.S. citizens, as being terrorism. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Des Moines said no court evidence linked the four to any terrorist group.
Meanwhile, in Detroit, the case of Hassan Nasrallah — whose name is the same as that of the chief of the Lebanese group Hezbollah — was, like the 55 others, labeled as terrorism.
His attorney, Mark Haidar, said he is charged with using six phony checks to pay his MasterCard bill.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric M. Straus, who is prosecuting the case, said last week:
"He is not the leader of Hezbollah.... This is not a terrorist case."
Published by
The Philadelphia Inquirer
|
There's much more than this at Unknown News.
|
Return to today's Unknown News
This material is copyrighted by its original publisher.It is reprinted by Unknown News without permission, solely for purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting, in accordance with the Fair Use Guidelines of copyright material under § 107 of U.S.C. Title 17.
|
| You can help |
We
try not to whine too much or too loudly, but we are poor
and this site eats a lot of money and time.
We
couldn't do it without the help of our volunteers. And for
those who can't afford the time, giving just a buck or two
can make all the difference and keep Unknown News alive.
|
Talk
to Us |
Archives |
| If
you have something to say, we'd love to hear
from you. |
Click
here for archives of recent editions of Unknown News |
|
