Philadelphia Inquirer
February 21, 2003
By Mark FazlollahFederal prosecutors overstated their success in convicting terrorists last year, with at least three of four cases wrongly classified as "international terrorism," the General Accounting Office has found.
A GAO study, begun in response to a December 2001 article by the Inquirer Washington Bureau, said federal prosecutors initially had classified 174 convictions this way in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 - but had been wrong most of the time.
The report, released Wednesday, said the error rate might be even higher but not all cases were reviewed by the GAO, the nonpartisan watchdog arm of Congress.
The GAO said the Justice Department has enacted a series of changes to correct its fiscal 2002 figures and to ensure that future reporting to Congress and the public would be accurate.
The report said the inaccurate labeling of convictions had the result of limiting "the Congress' ability to accurately assess terrorism-related performance outcomes of the U.S. criminal justice system."
The watchdog agency said statistics on convictions, including those related to terrorism, were a key measuring stick for the Justice Department. The information is submitted to Congress, as well as to the department's outside auditors, and is used to assess the performance of U.S. Attorney's Offices around the country and made public in annual reports.
Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said yesterday that many of the wrongly labeled cases involved illegal immigrants who worked at airports around the country.
He said those arrests were part of antiterrorist efforts to protect airports, but he acknowledged they should not have been classified as "international terrorism" cases.
"If you had either legal immigrants or illegal immigrants working in sensitive areas of our airports with false documents," he said, "that is certainly an attractive avenue for a terrorist."
He said none of the arrested airport workers had been charged with crimes of terrorism.
Erratic behavior cited
The House Government Reform Committee requested the GAO review four days after The Inquirer reported that prosecutors were wrongly categorizing run-of-the- mill criminal indictments as terrorism cases.The Inquirer article was done by comparing federal court records to Justice Department data. Syracuse University's nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse assisted in the research.
The article found that among the cases classified as terrorism were incidents of erratic behavior by people with mental illnesses, passengers getting drunk on airplanes, and convicts rioting to get better prison food.
When a Mexican citizen filed a phony passport application, the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco labeled that a terrorism case. The same office placed that label on the case of a babbling man who entered an FBI office and threatened to kill President Bill Clinton - at a time when Clinton was no longer president.
The problem of inflated statistics intensified after the Sept. 11 attacks, the GAO said.
Before and after 9/11
In five years before Sept. 11, there were an average of 35 terrorism convictions annually. In the year after Sept. 11, the report said, prosecutors reported four times more terrorism convictions.The GAO also reviewed convictions listed as "domestic terrorism," a category typically used for cases involving white supremacist groups, so-called eco- terrorists and other home-grown violent organizations. It said there were far fewer errors in how those prosecutions were classified, with only eight percent of the cases incorrectly reported.
Federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania and New Jersey said past errors were inadvertent. They said cases sometimes initially appeared to involve terrorism- related issues but later were found to be common crimes. They said their offices had become more vigilant on classifying such cases.
Among the convictions that Philadelphia prosecutors classified as terrorism was the case of South Philadelphia pizza-delivery man Anis Mzoughi.
Mzoughi, then 22, was arrested Nov. 27, 2001, for falsifying a U.S. passport application. He spent five months in prison, pleaded guilty, was fined $200 and was deported to his native Tunisia.
His public defender has said there was no evidence that Mzoughi was involved in anything more sinister than falsifying a passport application.