Politics: The War Against Veracity

Via Alternet, Washington Monthly's Alexander Gourevitch gives us the skinny on how the War on Terror -- and the Department of Justice's bloodthirsty demand for results, even without any connection to reality -- has driven America's local law enforcement infrastructure into a frenzy of overstating and misclassifying regular crimes as acts of terrorism. Read:

Under post-9/11 rules promulgated by the Justice Department – which created a number of new terrorism-related categories by which to classify cases, but left it to district attorneys to determine which crimes fit the bill – federal prosecutors across the country are turning in creative anti-terrorism records to their superiors in Washington, who are under enormous pressure to produce results and have little incentive to double-check them. The result is an epidemic of phony reporting. According to a January report by the General Accounting Office, at least 46 percent of all terrorism-related convictions for FY 2002 were misclassified; of those cases listed as "international terrorism," at least 75 percent didn't fit the bill.

If it were just a matter of wasting a few million dollars, the shenanigans at Justice might be just another example of typical Washington game-playing. But it's far more consequential than that. In any bureaucracy, reliable statistics are an important feedback; for our anti-terrorism efforts, reliable statistics are a matter of life and death. Without them, it's impossible for policymakers and the public to guess how many terrorists are operating within the United States, how many of them we've caught, which of our anti-terrorism strategies are effective – and which are useless. But like Robert McNamara's generals, who inflated enemy body counts so politicians could claim the Vietnam War was going better than it actually was, federal prosecutors are giving us a false sense of security. "You have to have numbers if you are going to manage anything," says William Wechsler, a former director for transnational threats at the National Security Council who helped shut down al Qaeda's finances after 9/11. "If you're not effectively measuring what's going on, then you might miss something that you should have caught," says Wechsler. "And you might have people that are abusing authority because they are driven to push up the only measure that matters: convictions related to terrorism."

Tremendous. I feel safer already.