HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ----- Original Message ----- From: JOHN PAUL CUPP Sent: Sunday, December 23, 2001 7:31 PM Subject: [C-I] When "terrorism" isn't really terrorism (Phillie Inquirer 12/16) Sunday, December 16, 2001 U.S. overstates arrests in terrorism By Mark Fazlollah and Peter Nicholas INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU WASHINGTON - The Department of Justice has overstated its record of arresting and convicting terrorists for
years, inflating the numbers it gives
Congress with garden-variety crimes that
have no connection to terrorism.
The practice has continued even after Sept. 11, when attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon underscored the horror of real terrorism. Current and former Justice
Department officials say the reports showing inflated
terrorism convictions are provided to
Congress as supporting material to justify
the department's $22 billion annual
budget, which includes counterterrorism
funding.
"It's awful," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), a former Intelligence Committee chairman, after The Inquirer showed
him some of the cases classified as terrorism.
"It's more than problem-some - it's
awful."
Cases labeled as terrorism involve erratic behavior by people with mental illnesses, passengers getting drunk on airplanes, and convicts rioting to get better prison food. There were the Mexican who concocted a phony passport application, the former court employee who shoved and threatened a judge, the babbling man who walked into an FBI office and threatened to kill former President Bill Clinton - though he didn't realize Clinton was no longer president. Cases such as these, improperly labeled as terrorism, continue to wind through the court system. In one vivid example, an assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco asked U.S. District
Judge Marilyn H. Patel on Monday to
stiffen a sentence against an Arizona man who got drunk on a United Airlines flight from Shanghai, repeatedly rang the call button, demanded more liquor, and put his hands on a flight attendant. Justice Department records show the case as "domestic terrorism." The judge told the prosecutor who argued the case that it wasn't terrorism - rather a man "being an annoyance beyond belief." The most recent Justice Department annual report, issued in May, says that
in the fiscal year ending
in September 2000,
FBI investigations led to 236 terrorism convictions. That
number is
generated from an FBI computer system that follows
criminal
cases from beginning
to end.
"I promise you there weren't 200 convictions in the last year for what you and I think of as terrorism," said Thomas G.> Connolly, who served as an assistant U.S. attorney in suburban Washington and received the CIA's Intelligence Medallion for his prosecution of CIA-agent turned-Russian-spy James Nicholson in 1997.
On Friday, Patrick J. Leahy (D., Vt.) said he wants information from the Justice Department to explain what is
being classified as "terrorism."
"As the department seeks new power in
terrorism cases, it is important
that we know the types of cases that the
department is trying to sweep
within that definition," said Leahy, chairman
of the Senate Judiciary
Committee. Intestimony before Congress this month,
Attorney General
John Ashcroft gave a succinct definition of a
terrorist: "Since 1983, the
U.S. government has defined terrorists as
those who perpetrate
premeditated, politically motivated violence
against noncombatant targets."
The Justice Department did not respond to repeated written requests for comment about terrorism statistics. One department official, who did not want to
be named, said she would not "rule out" the possibility
that benign
cases find their way into
the terrorism category.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Jacobs of the federal prosecutor's office in San Francisco said that "from our perspective, you shouldn't read too much into the categorization." During the last three years, San Francisco listed more "domestic terrorism" cases than any of the 93 other U.S. attorneys'
offices. From September
1998 until September
2001, the San Francisco office was headed by Robert
S. Mueller,
now director of the FBI. Why are the
numbers important?
Statistics on arrests and convictions, including those related to the hot-button issue of terrorism, are a measuring stick for the
JusticeDepartment
They are
submitted to the department's outside
auditors, usedto assess the
performance of the
U.S. attorneys' offices, and made available to the public in
an annual report.
"In some ways, the Justice Department continues to operate under the body count approach in
Vietnam," said Jonathan Turley, who teaches constitutional
criminal procedure
at George Washington University Law School. "They feel a
need to produce a
body count to Congress to justify past appropriations and
secure
future increases."
The government would not release details of the 236 cases identified as terrorism in the Justice Department's latest annual report. But
The Inquirer reviewed dozens
of cases over
a five-year period ending Sept. 30. The
information was obtained
underthe Freedom
of Information Act by Syracuse
University's TRAC Resource
Center, which collects data from various federal
agencies.
Some of the cases listed as terrorism were clearly a stretch. Here is a sampling: A tenant fighting eviction called his landlord, impersonated an FBI agent, and said the bureau did not
want the tenant evicted. The landlord recognized the man's voice
and called the real
FBI.
A man from Ecuador tried to hide 12 pistols in a television set he was sending home from Miami. He
admitted he planned to resell the guns for a profit in
Ecuador.
A commercial pilot in Seattle pleaded guilty to falsely implicating his copilot in a bogus plot to
hijack a private airplane. The case boiled down to two men
feuding.
Seven Chinese sailors were convicted of taking over a Taiwanese fishing boat and sailing to the
U.S. territory of Guam, where they hoped to win political
asylum.
A man under treatment in California told his doctor he needed anti-psychotic medication because
he was hearing voices telling him to kill President
Bush.
Others clearly did involve terrorism, such as the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia
in 1996, and the conviction of Algerian
Ahmed Ressam in a plot to
bomb Los Angeles International Airport two years ago. The records also included
the Sept. 27 arrest of three men in a Detroit apartment allegedly occupied by an
associate of Osama
bin Laden.
And the indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspected al-Qaeda conspirator in the Sept. 11 attacks, appears certain to fall into the terrorism category. Some federal prosecutors expressed concern about the cases that clearly do not measure up. Karon Johnson, an assistant U.S. attorney who won conviction of the seven Chinese sailors for commandeering the boat, said the goal of the men was to find jobs, not practice terror. "This isn't a political crime - this is economic," she said.
Prosecutors said there has been confusion about the definition of terrorism, and there
have been no recent instructions from the
Justice Department to
clarify it in coding
cases. In any case, prosecutors usually are not
responsible
for the terrorism classification. That is
often left to the discretion of supervisors
or others in the U.S. attorneys' offices across the country.
"There's a great desire to take any case, and incident, and place it under the terrorism category
to show some return for all these appropriations," said Turley,
of George Washington
University Law School.
Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.), the ranking member of the subcommittee that oversees the Justice
Department's budget, said that he did not think terrorism convictions
played
a part in the
budget process.
But former department officials and congressional aides see a link. "They can be used to justify
overall budget increases for large swaths of the agency," said David
Sirota, Democratic spokesman for the
House Appropriations Committee.
The Justice Department's budget was passed into law last month. Discussions are already beginning on
the fiscal year 2003 budget. The $22 billion is used to fund
prosecutions of criminal and civil cases,
secure the nation's borders, and investigate
a wide variety of federal
crimes involving drugs, guns, civil rights - and
terrorism.
Holder said: "It's just not the right thing to go up [to Capitol Hill] with numbers that aren't meaningful. It hurts
your credibility."
==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://TOPICA.COM/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================ |
