What Terrorists?

In our effort to keep track of the administration's radically inflated terrorism statistics, we bring you further evidence of Bush's attempt to make a mountain out of a molehill. This time it comes from David Cole, civil rights lawyer, and persistent critic of the Bush administration. In an article in the New York Review of Books, and a follow-up comment, Cole attacks what he calls the 'legal war on terror', or Bush's use of various preventive measures, like indefinite detention, tougher immigration policies, 'national security letters,' and enemy combatants, to 'prevent terrorism.' A few of the myths include:

1. At the height of the NSA scandal, Bush announced that the government disrupted a plot to blow-up the Library Tower in Los Angeles. Cole observes that this plot was something more like idle speculation by a few Southeast Asians captured in 2002 in Asia. Moreover, 'as far as we know, no one has been charged, much less convicted.'

2. Of 80,000 Arabs and Muslims required to register, 8,000 called in for FBI interviews, and more than 5,000 locked up in preventive detention 'not one stands convicted of a terrorist crime today.'

3. Most of the 400 criminal indictments and over two hundred convictions in 'terrorism-related' cases 'are for minor, nonviolent crimes such as immigration fraud or making false statements, not terrorism.' Of the thirty-nine serious offenders, most were convicted of association with terrorism under broadly worded statutes, and had no direct connections to actual terrorist actions.

4. Most of the above cases involve prosecuting individuals for giving 'material support' for terrorism. To convict for 'material support' the government 'maintains that it need not show the person it arrests has anything to do with furthering a terrorism act.' Cole reports that he is defending a human rights advocacy group, being prosecuted under this statute, for meeting with a Turkish group, designated as terrorist by the State Department, and training them for human rights advocacy.

5. 515 deportations carried out under anti-terrorism efforts were of foreigners who the FBI had cleared of terrorism.

6. Terrorist 'cells' or conspiracies in Detroit, Buffalo, Seattle, Portland, and Virginia, all reported in speeches and on the government's website, all turn out to be either individuals convicted of lesser crimes because the government could not prove terrorism, or based on false testimony.

7. 'The only criminal convicted for a terrorist act since September 11 is the shoe bomber Richard Reid, captured not through any preventive initiative of the government but because an alert flight attendant noticed a strange-looking man trying to set fire to his shoe.' The other two were a madman who thought he could take apart the Brooklyn Bridge with an acetylene torch, and a man who the Saudis tortured into confession.

For those of you keeping score at home, you can add this to other evidence that the threat from terrorism is massively exaggerated.