The justice Department has released an audit admitting that terrorism isn't that common and that they are using the laws passed after 9/11 to incarcerate people who aren't terrorists:
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.
This is not news in this community, nor is the speculation that "terrorism laws" would be used for other purposes unrelated to the task at hand. However, it is unusual for a DOJ spokesman to say so, even if he implies that those other cases are sorta kinda related:
The Justice Department defended its tracking system and cases that aren't directly linked to terrorism.
"While such cases often result in convictions for other crimes, their underlying purpose is to prevent and deter terrorist infiltration," spokesman Dean Boyd said.
Unfortunately, with the loose way this administration interprets both terrorism and habeas corpus; any arbitrary crime, and my UTA Government professor always claimed that every U.S. citizen probably broke at least one Federal statute daily; can get you thrown in jail with no recourse.