(By comparison, in the same two-year period, federal investigators recommended the prosecution of about 3,600 official corruption matters and 2,400 environmental matters.) Of the 6,400-plus terrorist and anti-terrorist matters referred to the prosecutors by the investigative agencies during the period more than half - about 3,500 of them were classified as involving actual acts of terrorism international terrorism, domestic terrorism and financial terrorism (see figure 3). Here are the counts for the presumably more serious "terrorism" category. (See figure 2 for a table of program categories.) Most prominent among the new groupings is what it now calls "Anti-Terrorism." This area, according to the department's data manual, covers immigration, identity theft, drug and other such cases brought by prosecutors that were "intended to prevent or disrupt potential or actual terrorist threats where the offense conduct is not obviously a federal crime of terrorism."Įven with the so-called anti-terrorism matters put aside, however, the data indicate that in the two years since 9/11 the Justice Department has been extremely active. The data cover referrals made by the agencies between Septemand Septemthat the Justice Department classified as terrorism or anti-terrorism and describe how the government has dealt with these matters in the ensuing months.Īs a result of the 9/11 attacks, the Department added a number of new crime categories to its internal record-keeping system tracking actions that in its view are in some way related to terrorism.
attorneys around the country in the last two years is sobering, considerably more sweeping than suggested in administrative statements and news accounts. Whatever the case, the absolute number of terrorism and anti-terrorism situations that have been recorded by assistant U.S. At this point, however, it is not known how well the department has acted on the GAO's recommendation. It recommended that the department be more exacting in the way it categorized the cases, an essential requirement for realistic assessment of this very important work. The General Accounting Office (GAO) reported in January of 2003 that the Justice Department's classification system in this area was flawed. An analysis of case-by-case Justice Department data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), however, further showed that of the convicted only five have so far been sentenced to twenty years or more in prison and that for those categorized as international terrorists the median sentence half got more, half got less was 14 days (see figure 1).īecause the Bush Administration is now withholding information that the government had previously released to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), it no longer is possible to determine the exact number of individuals who the investigative agencies recommended be prosecuted and who the prosecutors then categorized as falling into one of two classifications "terrorism" or "anti-terrorism." However, TRAC's analysis of Justice Department data estimates that since the total number of such "referrals" involves more than 6,400 individuals.
On the basis of these recommendations, as of September 30, 2003, the government had in one way or another completed the processing of 2,681 individuals who had been subject to these investigative referrals. In the two years since 9/11/01, federal investigators recommended the prosecution of more than 6,400 individuals who the government concluded had either committed terrorist acts or who were targeted on the grounds that charging them with some crime might "prevent or disrupt potential or actual terrorist threats."
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