Agency inflates terrorism charges

[Joe]

JUSTICE: Most cases labeled "terrorism" by the Justice Department early this year had nothing to do with terrorists or attacks.
BY MARK FAZLOLLAH
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

PHILADELPHIA - In the first two months of this year, the Justice Department filed "terrorism" charges against 56 people.

But an investigation has found that at least 41 of them had nothing to do with terrorism -- a point that prosecutors acknowledge.

Among the cases:

• 28 Latinos charged with working illegally at the airport in Austin, Texas, most of them using phony Social Security numbers.

• Eight Puerto Ricans charged with trespassing on Navy property on the island of Vieques, long a site of civil protests of ordnance testing.

• A Middle Eastern man indicted in Detroit for allegedly passing bad checks who has the same name as a Hezbollah leader.

• A Middle Eastern college student charged in Trenton, N.J., with paying a stand-in to take his college English-proficiency tests. He received a one-month jail sentence after pleading guilty.

But also included in the new terrorism listings are several cases that involved suspects with ties to foreign militant groups.

Six on the list are alleged members of the Abu Sayyaf Muslim group, charged with murdering two Americans and kidnapping a third in the Philippines.

Several others have pleaded guilty to illegal money transactions believed to have terrorism connections.

And there's Ahcene Benrekia, an Algerian living in Philadelphia with a criminal record that should have kept him out of the United States.

The problems are nothing new. In January, the General Accounting Office reported that three-fourths of all "international terrorism" convictions were wrong in fiscal 2002.


http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/du...ne/5874897.htm

Again, only the terrorists right?