Terror war a bust, or is it?

Terror war a bust

Stats inflated: study

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Federal authorities' strategy of arresting terror suspects on any charge possible has proved effective in thwarting attacks, but too often prosecutors have inflated the importance of the busts, a new study says.
"The strategy of disruption has worked, but they hyped these cases to be more than what they seemed," said Karen Greenberg, author of the study by New York University's Center of Law and Security.

"It leaves their record of prosecuting the war on terror unconvincing," she said yesterday.

Of 510 cases since the Sept. 11 attacks that the government said were terrorism-related, only 30% of the defendants were actually prosecuted on a terrorism charge, the NYU study found. Most of the others faced charges such as fraud, racketeering or conspiracy.

While 169 cases are still pending, only four people charged since the 2001 attacks were convicted for trying to commit an act of terrorism, the study said.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the report "reflects the underlying premise of our strategy to prevent and disrupt terrorists before they can carry out what they may be conspiring to do, by using any and all tools at our disposal in the U.S. code."

Terror prosecutions have declined from a spike in the three months following the 9/11 attacks, when 116 people were indicted. Only 57 have been indicted in 2006.

The NYU study found that only 14% of the defendants were tied to Al Qaeda. Of the 510 defendants, more than half had "no known affiliation" with any terrorist group.

Justice officials said that suggests homegrown terror is a bigger threat than many realize.

Material support for terrorism was the most common charge in cases where a defendant was slapped with a federal terrorism offense - but only 30% were convicted. Officials noted, however, that the pending cases skew that statistic.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who led probes of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, said the strategy has worked. But he said when the feds oversell a case's terror ties, it's "woefully unproductive [because] it tells the bad guys that we don't know what we think we know."

The report also found that no sleeper cell with "logistical or tactical links to Al Qaeda" has been uncovered in the U.S.

Originally published on December 6, 2006

I suppose that the administration works on the premise that if you cast a big enough net you are bound to catch some fish. Would you as the caption suggests call the terror war a bust????