corrente

"If you build it, they will come," the movie said. You thought they meant heartwarming nostalgia for baseball? Nope, they meant field-testing a policy of classifying damn near anything they like as "terrorism" for the purposes of the criminal justice system.

(via Des Moines Register)

By BERT DALMER

Federal prosecutors say they built 35 terrorism-related cases in Iowa in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But a Des Moines Sunday Register analysis of the cases found that most defendants had questionable links to violent extremism. Those defendants who could be identified by the newspaper were, in most cases, charged with fraud or theft and served just a few months in jail.

The number of terrorism-related cases even took one court official by surprise.

"If there have been terrorism-related arrests in Iowa, I haven't heard about them," said U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt.

Ironically, Pratt presided over courtroom proceedings in at least six of the criminal cases that federal prosecutors had cataloged as terrorist in nature.

Included among the 35 cases were:

•Five Mexican citizens who stole cans of baby formula from store shelves throughout Iowa and sold them to a man of Arab descent for later resale.

•Two Pakistani men who entered into or solicited sham marriages so that they and their friends could

OMG! So they could take flight lessons? Set up terrorist training camps in Oskaloosa? Negotiate an alliance with radicals at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi University in Fairfield?

continue to live in the Waterloo area and work at convenience stores there.

Okay, so what's the real motive here? You guessed it...

The Iowa arrests were part of a national compilation of statistics cited by the U.S. Department of Justice in requests to Congress for $400 million this year for federal anti-terrorism efforts. The department's figures were again cited last week when Attorney General John Ashcroft lobbied lawmakers for continued support of the controversial U.S.A. Patriot Act, which gives law-enforcement officials greater authority to surveil and search foreigners and U.S. citizens.

Skeptics of the Bush administration's response to the terrorist threat said that lumping minor crimes under the terrorism label could wrongly heighten public anxiety and provide a questionable rationale for more anti-terror resources.

"When people read that they're doctoring the numbers, aren't they going to have less confidence in the Justice Department and the war on terror?" asked U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Ia. "You can't say that somebody's a terrorist when he isn't a terrorist."

Pay particular notice to this: "The Iowa arrests were part of a national compilation of statistics.." That means there is a similar list in YOUR state.

Go read the whole story, particularly the sidebars. This goes a long way to explain why Dear Leader doesn't seem to want to mention what his goals are for his (increasingly hypothetical) "second" term.

UPDATE: Link fixed thanks to alert reader woid. One durn "?" left out and the whole durn thing don't work, durn it.