6,400 Terrorists and Anti-Terrorists

That's how many individuals the government has concluded have committed terrorist acts according to a recent report using Dept. of Justice data analyzed by the non-partisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Did you have any idea there were so many? I didn’t. It’s not surprising—now that I think about it. How do we define a terrorist? This study has brought up an interesting point. The GAO has reported that the government’s classification is flawed and both the GAO report and the TRAC report note that there’s little evidence that the government has taken steps to improve the accuracy of its terrorism-related data assessment capabilities.

Apparently, the DOJ added a new classification since 9/11 called “anti-terrorism,” which according to the DOJ, 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.” Hmm.

About 3,500 of the 6,400 committed terrorism-terrorism, so the number was almost doubled if you include these anti-terrorists. (Take a look at fig. 2 of the TRAC report for definitions of the post-9/11 classifications).

Even more interesting, I think, are the conviction numbers (compare figures 1 and 3). Notice that of the 879 total convictions (out of the 6,400-plus cases which include anti-terrorism and terrorism-terrorism), only 341 of those convictions were for terrorism-terrorism cases. My math says that less than half of the convictions since 9/11 were for real terrorist activities. Aside from the obvious point that we've convicted less than half of real terrorist related prosecutions, isn't it odd that only 341 cases are convicted for real terrorism out 6,400 referrals for prosecution for what our government is calling terrorism? How can the DOJ say, with a straight face, that there's a reasonable explanation for the large gap other than they're clearly stretching the idea of terrorism?

I’m not claiming that there are mischievous intentions at play on the part of the DOJ or the Bush Administration; there are many ways you can approach an analysis here. I’m simply noticing that we’re doubling the pool of potential terrorists since 9/11. Why?