On the Exaggerated Threat of Terrorism

There is legitimate concern over future terrorism, but there is also plenty of reason to be skeptical of the claim of widespread terrorist sympathies in the United States. The Justice Department's own internal investigator basically stated as much. In a report released in February 2007, the Department of Justice's inspector general sharply criticized the FBI and other branches of the department for the gross inaccuracies it found in its reporting of terrorism statistics as well as the far too frequent overstatements made regarding terrorism-related cases. (See "The Department of Justice's Internal Controls Over Terrorism Reporting," U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Feb. 2007). A few months earlier, New York University's Law and Society Program reached very similar findings. They also cataloged the Justice Department's claim of fighting terrorism and, after their thorough investigation, found that there are in fact "few, if any, prevalent terrorist threats currently within the U.S." ("Terrorist Trial Report Card, US Edition," New York University Center of Law and Security, Dec. 2006, p. 3). The Washington Post had deduced the same thing previously, that the vast majority of prosecution that are loudly touted as "terrorism-related" are in reality relatively mundane matters of immigration violations, credit-card fraud, or lying to a government official. (Dan Eggen and Julie Tate, "U.S. Campaign Produces Few Convictions on Terrorism Charges: Statistics Often Count Lesser Crimes," Washington Post, June 12, 2005.) The inflation of these figures clearly serves other ends, as political gain is being made on the backs of U.S. Muslims. David Cole and James Lobel have argued that virtually all of those who in fact have been convicted of "material support" for terrorism in the United States (around fifty people) have been convicted of "a crime that requires no proof that the defendant ever intended to further a terrorist act." Cole and Lobel also point out that "prosecutors have obtained a handful of convictions for conspiracy to engage in terrorism, [yet] several of those convictions rest of extremely broad statutes that don't require proof of any specific plan or act, or on questionable entrapment tactics by government informants." David Cole and James Lobel, "Why We're Losing the War on Terror," Nation, Sept. 24, 2007.

-pg. 288-239, fn. 267 of Moustafa Bayoumi's excellent How Does It Feel to be a Problem?