Bush Campaign Lies
Monday, September 27, 2004
Bush Campaign Lie #67: Bush is 'Bringing Terrorists to Justice'
In a continuation of lies brandished in a piece titled 'Three Years of Progress in the War on Terror', the Bush campaign claims that the hard work of John Ashcroft and the Bush Justice Department has 'charged over 350 individuals uncovered in the course of terrorist investigations, and convicted or secured guilty pleas from over 185 individuals'. That may be so. But it is highly questionable whether any of the individuals charged or convicted had anything to do with terrorism.
The Bush Justice Department has a long and distinguished history of puffing up stats about the efficacy of its war on terrorism, to the point where no one should believe anything they say. Harper's points out that although the DoJ had made 1182 arrests within two months of the 9/11 attacks, as of August 2003 none of those arrested were shown to have any connection to terrorism. In June 2003, Washington Monthly's Alexander Gourevitch wrote how overreporting of terrorism-related arrests and convictions was not only widespread, but actually hindering progress in the war on terror.
And, of course, there was the recent case in Detroit, in which the Justice Department asked a judge to set aside guilty verdicts and dismiss without prejudice terrorism charges against two men, and 'excoriated' their own lawyers' prosecution of their case. The Nation's David Cole tells us that this reduces the number of terrorism convictions by jury trial which the Bush Justice Department has secured over the past three years to zero.
