The Domino Effect of Lies

Audit: Justice stats on anti-terror cases flawed

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal prosecutors counted immigration violations, marriage fraud and drug trafficking among anti-terror cases in the four years after 9/11 — despite no evidence linking them to terror activity, a Justice Department audit found Tuesday.

Overall, nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics on investigations, referrals and cases examined by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine 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 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 disagreements over how the numbers are reported, or "decentralized and haphazard" methods of collecting them, and 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 U.S. targets — compiled by the FBI, the Justice Department's Criminal Division, and the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys.

It found that data from the Executive Office of U.S. 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.

Much of the problem stemmed from how that office defines anti-terrorism cases.

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 anti-terror cases since they were investigated by federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces or with other counterterror measures.

Other examples, according to the audit, included:

• Charges against a marriage-broker for being paid to arrange six fraudulent marriages between Tunisian nationals and U.S. citizens.

• Prosecution of a Mexican citizen who falsely identified himself as another person in a passport application.

• Charges against a suspect for dealing firearms without a license. The prosecutor handling the case told auditors it should not have been labeled as anti-terrorism.

"We do not agree that law enforcement efforts such as these should be counted as anti-terrorism," the audit concluded.

The office has since agreed to change the way it counts and classifies anti-terrorism cases, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said.

"The IG's findings, with respect to U.S. attorneys' statistics, largely boiled down to a difference of opinion over the definition of anti-terrorism," Boyd said.

Additionally, Boyd said, Criminal Division prosecutors at the department's headquarters and the FBI have overhauled their respective case reporting systems since 2004 for a more accurate picture of terror-related workloads. He said both agencies were "strained" to accurately report terrorism data in the flood of cases immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In all but one area, Criminal Division prosecutors either accurately stated or underreported their data — the ones the department usually uses in public statements about its counterterror efforts, Boyd noted. He said the Justice Department has already completed most of the fixes recommended in the audit.

Original article posted here.