One cannot be so keen about a Giuliani campaign advisor prospectively feeding him statistics about the war on terror from the Office of the AG to use in national debates against democratic rivals, if that ever happens.
David Cole at the Nation does a roundup of how silly looking all the necessary legislation has been so far. It can be summed up in one line:
Meanwhile, despite the Bush Administration's boasts, the total number of people it has convicted of engaging in a terrorist act since 9/11 is one -- Richard Reid, the shoe bomber.
The rest have been material support. Even then, the numbers are weak, including the Gitmo numbers. AND, they've been inflated by the Gonzales-Bush Justice Department:
The Justice Department claims on its website www.lifeandliberty.gov to have charged more than 400 people in "terrorism-related" cases, but its own Inspector General has criticized those figures as inflated. The vast majority of the cases involved not terrorism but minor nonviolent offenses such as immigration fraud, credit-card fraud or lying to an FBI agent.
In fact, all the ideological arguments about 'the principle of the thing' are a little bit wild, when you start to look at the effectiveness of the whole effort. One can only imagine what the ratios look like for the classified programs that we know exist but cannot talk about. So far as we know, their "results" might be mimicking this statistic:
The government's record, in what is surely the largest campaign of ethnic profiling since the Japanese internment of World War II, is 0 for 93,000.
