The War On Bullsh*t

From McClatchy Newspapers via Common Dreams:

The Justice Department has routinely misrepresented the number of terrorism prosecutions, possibly undermining decision-making in the war on terrorism, an independent government audit has found.
The report, released Tuesday by the Justice Department's inspector general, concluded that the department in most cases "could not provide support for the numbers reported or could not identify the terrorism link used to classify statistics as terrorism-related."

All but two of the 26 statistics reviewed from October 2000 through September 2005 were wrong. "These inaccuracies are important because department management and Congress need accurate terrorism-related statistics to make informed . . . decisions," Inspector General Glenn Fine said in the report.

Part of the problem, according to Fine, was that the Justice Department routinely counted criminal cases as terrorism-related even when prosecutors had found no links to terrorism. Fine also blamed a "decentralized and haphazard" system.

The Justice Department defended its tracking system and the inclusion of cases that aren't directly linked to terrorism.

From Democracy Now!:

[A] new audit has found widespread inaccuracy in how the government collects statistics on terrorism. The Justice Department Inspector General says hundreds of completely unrelated cases have helped inflate numbers on offenses and prosecutions. Offenses including drug trafficking, marriage fraud and immigration violations were among those wrongly included. Just two of twenty-six collections of statistics were found to be accurate. The Bush administration has previously cited the statistics in efforts to provide evidence of successes in prosecuting terrorism cases.