WASHINGTON, 5 September 2006 — Nearly three-quarters of terrorism suspects seized by the United States in the five years following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks have not even made it to trial because of lack of evidence against them, says a new report based on government data.
The surprising decline followed a sharp increase in such criminal prosecutions in the year after the attacks, according to a study released Sunday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research group at Syracuse University. The TRAC report called the decline in prosecutions “unexpected” and said it seemed to contradict regular warnings from the government that the threat of global terrorism is higher than before.
“Considering the numerous warning statements from President Bush and other federal officials about the continuing nature of the terrorism threat . . . the gradual decline in these cases since the FY 2002 high point and the high rate at which prosecutors are declining to prosecute terrorism cases raises questions,” the report said.
The analysis of data from Justice’s Executive Office of US Attorneys also found: Since the attacks, the FBI and other government agencies have referred 6,472 individuals to prosecutors on terrorism-related charges, the report said.
But only a small fraction of them ever saw the inside of a courtroom.
In the eight months ending last May, Justice attorneys declined to prosecute more than nine out of every 10 terrorism cases sent to them by the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies. Nearly 4 in 10 of the rejected cases were scrapped because prosecutors found weak or insufficient evidence, no evidence of criminal intent or no evident federal crime. Overall, of the 1,329 individuals who were sentenced, 704 received no prison time at all, and an additional 327 received sentences ranging from one day to less than a year, says the report.
The sharp decline in prosecutions may show that prosecutors have moved away from “all kinds of secondary infractions” they pursued early on, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project.
Those early cases drew criticism that Arab-Americans were rounded up based on mere racial profiling. The report comes at a difficult time for the Bush Administration as it was released just before congressional midterm elections.
Democrats hope to regain control of at least one house of Congress, and President Bush has urged Republicans to run in part on his record in the war on terror. Officials were quick to respond to the study: “There are many flaws in the report,” Justice Department Spokesman Bryan Sierra told reporters. “It is irresponsible to attempt to measure success in the war on terror without the necessary details about the government’s strategy and tactics.” For instance, Sierra said, prison sentences are “not the proper measure of the success of the department’s overall counter-terrorism efforts. The primary goal … is to detect, disrupt and deter terrorist activities.” Questions about whether US arrests on terrorism charges are driven by political consideration surfaced last June, when Justice Department officials took into custody seven residents of Miami, Florida, accusing them of plotting acts of terrorism, including a possible bombing of the Sears Tower in Chicago.
However, the officials acknowledged the suspect mostly talked about the attack and their plot was “more aspirational than operational.” President George W. Bush is portraying his campaign against terrorism as a key achievement of his presidency.
But critics say Bush’s credibility has also been hurt over his “war on terror” when one considers the Guantanamo detainees.
The US prison facility for detainees in the war against terrorism still houses about 450 detainees who remained locked up at the US naval installation on Cuba. This has left President Bush in the difficult position of trying to portray himself as a world leader of human rights while keeping people locked up for years without trial.
Bush has repeatedly said he wants to close Guantanamo but will not free detainees who continue to pose a security threat to the US and its allies, a position that has not satisfied human-rights organizations and foreign leaders who have pressured the White House to shut the facility.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as well as European leaders have urged Bush to close the prison camp, and Guantanamo’s existence continues to haunt Washington and tarnish US credibility when it comes to human rights.
Guantanamo has ensnared Bush in a legal battle with US courts. Most recently the Supreme Court ruled that Bush’s plan to try 10 detainees in military commissions was unconstitutional. The ruling has left the detainees’ fate in limbo while Bush works with Congress to rewrite the law so the trials can proceed.
In the meantime, the Bush Administration has released several hundred prisoners, and is now trying to figure out what to do with those who have not been charged with crimes but are still considered “enemy combatants” facing indefinite detention.
About 120 of them fall have been categorized as no longer dangerous and offering little intelligence about the al-Qaeda network. Their release has been tied up in negotiations by the State Department and the Pentagon with possible destination countries — some of them home countries, others third countries.
