Tuesday, February 20, 2007

US Terrorism Statistics Flawed

The US administration has made a crusade of preaching the fear of terrorism since 9/11 with Bush frequently referring to reports of foiled terrorist plots (which of course he says he can't share details about because they're "classified" and might "jeopardize national security"). In 2005, former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge admitted that terror alert levels were often raised based on "flimsy evidence". Now, the justice department's inspector general provides even more facts to weaken Bushco's fearmongering.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics reported by the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI from the September 11 attacks until early 2005 had some inaccuracies, the department's inspector general said on Tuesday.
[..]
The report found that only two out of 26 statistics were accurate after reviewing the number of terrorism convictions in the 2003 and 2004 financial years, the number of convictions or guilty pleas from September 11, 2001, through February 3, 2005, and the number of terrorist threats tracked by the FBI in 2003 and 2004.

"We found many cases involving offenses such as immigration violations, marriage fraud, or drug trafficking where department officials provided no evidence to link the subject of the case to terrorist activity," the report said.

Marriage fraud=terrorism. I guess we'll soon find out there are bigamists in Gitmo although, now that a federal appeals court has upheld the government's decision to disallow detainees from challenging their imprisonment, I guess those marriage fraud terrorists will just have to take what's coming to them.

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