LatinaLista — If ever proof was needed to show that this Administration would go out of its way to connect terrorism with undocumented immigrants, we have it now, courtesy of a federal audit.
The Department of Justice’s Internal Controls Over Terrorism Reporting, Audit Report 07-20 released yesterday revealed that government officials in the FBI, the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys mislabeled cases as anti-terrorism.
According to nearly all of the terrorism-related statistics on investigations, referrals and cases examined by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine’s office only two of 26 sets of department data reported between 2001 and 2005 were true.
The Inspector General concludes that these “mistakes” were not intentional, but rather were a result of how different groups within the government defined anti-terrorist cases and how the numbers were gathered.
Yet given the track record of this Administration, which has learned quite well how to “spin” information to its own advantage, one has to wonder how 24 “mistakes” were made out of 26 cases.
At any rate, some of those “mistakes” were (as detailed in a TIME magazine article):
A November 2001 federal crackdown on security breaches at airports, for example, yielded arrests on immigration and false document charges, but no evidence of terrorist activity. Nonetheless, the attorneys’ office lumped them in with other anti-terror cases since they were investigated by federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces or with other counterterror measures.
Charges against a marriage broker for being paid to arrange six fraudulent marriages between Tunisian nationals and U.S. citizens.
Prosecution of a Mexican citizen who falsely identified himself as another person in a passport application.
It’s reported that each of the government entities included in the audit have either fixed the problems by changing the way it counts and classifies anti-terrorism cases or are working internally on redefining the term anti-terrorism.
If that is the case, numbers should be drastically altered and it will be seen that terrorism isn’t knocking quite as loudly on our southern border door as we were led to believe.
Then too, hopefully, the rhetoric will subside equating undocumented immigrants as terrorists.
