Terrorist Trial Report Card Shows Domestic Terrorism Threat Less Severe Than Suggested
Wednesday, Dec 06, 2006
N-199, 2006-2007
The Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law has put together a comprehensive analysis on how successful law enforcement and the U.S. legal system have been in fighting the domestic threat of terrorism.
The Terrorist Trial Report Card: U.S. Edition (TTRC) demonstrates that the actions of the Department of Justice-while focused on early detection and disruption of alleged terrorism and its prosecution practices- have revealed that there are few, if any, prevalent terrorist threats within the United States.
The TTRC finds, from 510 cases that have been announced as terrorism cases:
- Only four individuals have been convicted of federal crimes of terrorism, per se.
- Nobody affiliated with a radical Islamic group has been convicted of crimes related to chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.
- No sleeper cell with logistical or tactical links to al Qaeda has been convicted.
- The vast majority of cases turn out to include no link to terrorism once the case goes to court.
- No distinctive definition of terrorism or of a terrorist emerges from the data.
In the process of compiling the TTRC, the Center’s law student researchers provided thousands of hours of work to create the most comprehensive database available on this issue. Their research covered cases announced by the U.S. Department of Justice, those in major and minor national publications that were not cited by the Justice Department or included in FindLaw or Westlaw, and cross-checked other institutes and databases.
The Center’s first Terrorist Trial Report Card, recently cited in a PBS Frontline episode (“The Enemy Within”, October 2006), found that as of October 2004, the legal war on terror had yielded few visible results, none enough to rationalize the billions of dollars spent towards the domestic legal counterterrorism efforts.
Karen Greenberg, Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security and Editor of the Terrorist Trial Report Card is available for comment: 212.992.8854.
The full PDF of the report is available on www.lawandsecurity.org.
James Devitt
(212) 998-6808
james.devitt@nyu.edu
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