Too many 'terrorists' are hapless innocents

[struggle4progress]

NYT
Saturday, October 9, 2004

In the days of fear following the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Congress gave the government new powers to track down terrorists. Most Americans approved, expecting that, at worst, they were trading minor infringements of civil liberties for well-planned and well-executed operations that would make us safer. Instead we got a mounting pile of bungled operations, ranging from merely inept to scandalously abusive, and military prisons filled with Afghans, Iraqis and other Muslims who had committed no real offenses.

Our investigators, sent after dangerous terrorists, came back with a motley crew of hapless innocents and people who had said and done stupid things but were hardly a threat to the nation's security.

Some cases were Keystone Kops capers, like the grounding of a trans-Atlantic flight so the authorities could nab the former pop singer Cat Stevens, now a Muslim named Yusuf Islam, who was on the federal watch list. Others were more serious, like the terrible miscarriage of justice, reported Thursday in The New York Times, by top Justice Department officials in moving against four Middle Eastern immigrants. Three of them were convicted and imprisoned - two on terrorism charges - until the government was forced to repudiate its own case. <snip>

Confidence in the Justice Department's judgment and sense of proportion has been undermined by the government's tendency to make a huge deal out of arrests that turn out to involve unimportant people with bad attitudes but no ability - or even any apparent will - to do anything dangerous. In November, a Somali citizen was imprisoned in Columbus, Ohio, for supposedly talking about blowing up a shopping mall. There was no evidence of any confederates or weapons, or even a plot, but people in Ohio were treated to days of debate about whether it was safe to go shopping anymore. <snip>

http://www.iht.com/articles/542693.htm+