Feds Exaggerated Anti-Terror Successes

Doesn’t it just astonish you.

Federal prosecutors counted immigration violations, marriage fraud and drug trafficking among anti-terror cases in the four years after 9/11 even though no evidence linked them to terror activity.

Overall, nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics on investigations, referrals and cases examined by 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.

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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.

The auditor attributed the errors to sloppiness, not deliberate inflation to exaggerate success in the War on Terror. It’s still worrisome. Reporting more “terrorist activity” than has actually been discovered and prevented has a political consequence, and we all know who’s been benefiting from “America is under constant threat from terrorists and The Other Party can’t protect you from them.”