WASHINGTON - The federal government has fallen back to prosecuting international terrorists at about the same rate it did before the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a study based on Justice Department data.
The surprising decline followed a sharp increase in such criminal prosecutions in the year after the attacks, according to a study released Sunday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research group at Syracuse University.
The analysis of data from Justice’s Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys also found:
* In the eight months ending last May, Justice attorneys declined to prosecute more than nine out of every 10 terrorism cases sent to them by the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies. Nearly 4 in 10 of the rejected cases were scrapped because prosecutors found weak or insufficient evidence, no evidence of criminal intent or no evident federal crime.
* Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, only 14 people have been sentenced to 20 years or more in prison in terrorism cases. Of the 1,329 convicted defendants, only 625 received any prison sentence. More than half got no prison time or no more than they had already served awaiting their verdict.
“There are many flaws in the report,” said Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra. “It is irresponsible to attempt to measure success in the war on terror without the necessary details about the government’s strategy and tactics.”
For instance, Sierra said, prison sentences are “not the proper measure of the success of the department’s overall counterterrorism efforts. The primary goal ... is to detect, disrupt and deter terrorist activities.”
Because prosecutors try to charge potential terrorists before they act, they often allege fraud, false statements or immigration violations that carry lesser penalties than the offenses that could be charged after an attack, Sierra said. This “allows us to engage the enemy earlier than if we waited for them to act first.”
TRAC totaled the cases that prosecutors labeled as terrorism or antiterrorism no matter what charge was brought. It found only 14 prosecutions in fiscal 2000. That rose to 57 in fiscal 2001, which ended three weeks after the 9/11 attacks. The figure then soared to 355 in fiscal 2002. But by fiscal 2005 it dropped to 46. And in the first eight months of fiscal 2006, through last May, there were only 19 such prosecutions.
Past critics of administration tactics found both favorable and unfavorable possible explanations.
The sharp decline in prosecutions may show that prosecutors have moved away from “all kinds of secondary infractions” they pursued early on, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project. Those early cases drew criticism that Arab-Americans were rounded up based on mere racial profiling.
The small number of long prison sentences shouldn’t be a surprise because “terrorism is actually very rare — far more people are killed in ordinary street crime,” said James Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
One issue that struck me is the Justice Department's extreme zeal in going after supposed terrorists after the September 11th attacks. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the Justice Department probably targeted the more extreme fringe groups within U.S. society, labeling them as potential terrorist organizations, and then breaking them up by charging these suspects with lesser crimes. The question I would have to ask here is how many of these were potentially serious terror plots, verses how many of these cases were pursued by an overzealous Justice Department? It is interesting that in the September 11th investigations, there was a lot of criticism placed on the FBI's middle-management for ignoring reports by field agents saying that potential al Qaida suspects were taking flight training classes. The FBI never followed up on these reports. I would say that because of this criticism, the Justice Department doubled its efforts in taking out these potential terrorist threats--whether they are real threats or imagined threats. Then after cracking down for four years after the attacks, the number of suspected terror threats had dropped down to almost pre-9/11 levels. The actual number of potential terror plots had probably remained the same between the years 2000--2006. The only difference here is that the Justice Department pushed for more terror convictions in the aftermath of 9/11.
And yet, check out the Department of Homeland Security's Terror Alert Level.
Does it make any sense to you?
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