Your War on Terror

Kris Weberg | July 20, 2004
Hopefully, this thread can be a catch-all place for comments on the conduct of the domestic end of the war on terror. In my usual, uh, impartial style, I'd like to lead off with this cheery news item:

U.S. claim of terror cases in Iowa raises doubt

DES MOINES (AP) - Federal prosecutors claim they built 35 terrorism-related cases in Iowa in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, but most of the defendants have questionable links to violent extremism.

Defendants who could be identified by the Des Moines Register were, in most cases, charged with fraud or theft and served just a few months in jail.

"If there have been terrorism-related arrests in Iowa, I haven't heard about them," said U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt. But Pratt himself presided over courtroom proceedings in at least six of the criminal cases that federal prosecutors had cataloged as terrorist in nature.

Included among the 35 cases were:

• Four American-born laborers who omitted mention of prior drug convictions or other crimes when they were assigned by a contractor to a runway construction project at the Des Moines airport or when they applied for manual-labor jobs there.

• Five Mexican citizens who stole cans of baby formula from store shelves throughout Iowa and sold them to a man of Arab descent for later resale.

• Two Pakistani men who entered into or solicited sham marriages so that they and their friends could continue to live in the Waterloo area and work at convenience stores there.

........

"When people read that they're doctoring the numbers, aren't they going to have less confidence in the Justice Department and the war on terror?" asked U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. "You can't say that somebody's a terrorist when he isn't a terrorist."

.......

Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Patrick O'Meara, who heads the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Des Moines, said the "anti-terrorism" label was used in the airport cases because the crimes were discovered as part of a specific initiative to snare potential terrorists.

He said the Justice Department directs prosecutors to assign credit for an arrest during a targeted terrorism operation, "even where the offense is not obviously a federal crime of terrorism."

Why, who would've thought that laws granting extensive new powers to law enforcement to capture terrorists without actually including any language that defines terrorism would lead to lots of cases being misclassified?