Thread: Immigration, drug cases counted among antiterror stats

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washi ... dit_finds/

Immigration, drug cases counted among antiterror stats, audit finds
By Lara Jakes Jordan, Associated Press | February 21, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors counted immigration violations, marriage fraud, and drug trafficking as antiterrorism cases in the four years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, despite no evidence linking them to terrorist activity, a Justice Department audit found yesterday.

Overall, nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics on investigations, referrals, and cases examined by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine of the Justice Department were either diminished or inflated. Only two of 26 sets of department data reported between 2001 and 2005 were accurate, the audit found.

Responding, a Justice spokesman pointed to figures showing that prosecutors in the department's headquarters, for the most part, either accurately or underreported their data, underscoring what he called efforts to avoid pumping up federal terror statistics.

The numbers, used to monitor the Justice Department's progress in battling terrorists, are reported to Congress and the public, and they help, in part, shape the department's budget needs.

"For these and other reasons, it is essential that the department report accurate terrorism-related statistics," the audit concluded.

Still, Fine's office took care to say that the flawed data appear to be the result of "decentralized and haphazard" methods of collecting information or disagreements over how the numbers are reported and that they do not appear to be intentional.

Auditors looked at 26 categories of statistics -- including numbers of suspects charged and convicted in terror cases and terror-related threats against cities and other US targets -- compiled by the FBI, the Justice Department's Criminal Division, and the Executive Office for US Attorneys.

It found that data from the Executive Office for US Attorneys were the most severely flawed. Auditors said the office, which compiles statistics from the 94 federal prosecutors' districts nationwide, both under- and over counted the number of terror-related cases during a four-year period.

A November 2001 federal crackdown on security breaches at airports, for example, yielded arrests on immigration and false document charges, but no evidence of terrorist activity.

Nonetheless, the attorneys' office lumped them in with other antiterror cases because they were investigated by federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces or with other counterterrorism measures.

The US Attorneys' Office has since agreed to change the way it counts and classifies antiterrorism cases, said Dean Boyd, Justice Department spokesman.

To view the audit, go to www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/plus/a0720/final.pdf .

Another strike against our the truthfulness of our federal government and its war on terror. Since ICE is unable to do its job, I guess they needed some success.