Statistics Often Count Lesser Crimes
On Thursday, President Bush stepped to a lectern at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy in Columbus to urge renewal of the USA Patriot Act and to boast of the government’s success in prosecuting terrorists.
Flanked by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush said that “federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted.”
Those statistics have been used repeatedly by Bush and other administration officials, including Gonzales and his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft, to characterize the government’s efforts against terrorism.
But the numbers are misleading at best.
An analysis of the Justice Department’s own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows that 39 people — not 200, as officials have implied — were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security.
By Dan Eggen and Julie Tate, Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 12, 2005; Page A01 First of two parts
39 convicted who obviously didn’t come here to site see!
A lot of the people we’ve got in Guantanamo were captured on the battlefield during the war in Afghanistan. We’d pay the Northern Alliance for producing bodies…so they’d pick up people indiscriminately and say, ‘He’s a terrorist’. Take their money, and we had an innocent man in our custody.
The amount of convictions compared with the amount of captures after this long of a time is clear proof that the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing. We assume that the people in charge of intelligence gathering and the detaining of these prisoners have their act together, but that’s obviously not wise.