Reclaim Democracy!

Black-Majority Congressional Districts May Undermine Black Americans’ Political Power

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By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
First published by The NY Times, Sept 23, 2004

The Voting Rights Act – signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965 – was a high point of the civil rights era. In 1965, there were 5 black members of Congress; today there are 39. No single piece of legislation since the 14th Amendment has had such a measurable and dramatic effect on the political fortunes of black Americans.

What’s not so clear is whether the effect is now mainly a positive one.

In 1965, in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” police riot on Pettus Bridge in Selma, a young civil rights leader named John Lewis risked his life for the cause of black enfranchisement. Yet two years ago, the same John Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia, found himself accused by John Ashcroft’s Justice Department of violating the Voting Rights Act.

That’s because he and his fellow Georgia Democrats backed a plan to reduce the concentration of minority voters in various districts. And Section 5 of the act prohibits “retrogression”: a change in district boundaries that would diminish a district’s percentage of black voters.

It sounds like some political “Freaky Friday”: was Mr. Ashcroft really trying to protect black Georgians from Mr. Lewis? Not exactly.

Mr. Lewis says Georgia is now a place where black candidates can be elected by black-white coalitions. “More and more, black and white voters, especially in the South, see that they’re in the same boat,” he says. “A lot of issues, like protecting the environment, creating jobs, protecting neighborhoods, cleaning up a toxic site, or trying to do something about Iraq, have very little to do with race.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Ashcroft’s record shows little concern for black voters but abundant concern for Republican candidates. As governor of Missouri, he vetoed two bills designed to redress racial inequalities in voter registration.

As U.S. attorney general, he has effectively seconded the Justice Department’s Voting Section to the G.O.P. Remember Tom DeLay’s plan to redistrict Texas to gain seats for Republicans? As Jeffrey Toobin has reported in The New Yorker, career lawyers at the Voting Section had drafted a long internal memo arguing that the DeLay plan would illegally dilute minority voting power. But late last year, Mr. Ashcroft’s political staff approved the plan anyway. Come November, you’ll see the results.

The creation of black-majority districts was necessary when the Democratic Party had a monopoly in the South, and whites would almost never vote for blacks. But since 1990, districting deals between Republicans and black Democrats have led to political mischief. Shepherding black voters into black districts left other districts lily-white – and skewed to the right. You saw the consequences in 1994, when the House came under Republican control.

In Georgia and elsewhere, there has been a clash between what the constitutional scholar Richard Pildes calls “descriptive” and “substantive” representation. Descriptive representation is centered on the symbolism of skin: a black face for a black constituency. But it came at the cost of substantive representation – the likelihood that lawmakers, taken as a whole, would represent the group’s substantive interests. Blacks were winning battles but losing the war as conservative Republicans beat white moderate Democrats.

Still, Georgia v. Ashcroft – finally settled in favor of the Georgia Democrats by the Supreme Court – is really a symptom of a bigger problem: not racial districting but partisan districting. “The United States is the only country that places the power to draw election districts in the hands of self-interested political actors,” Mr. Pildes says. “The joke is that the voters don’t really choose the candidates; the candidates choose their voters.”

Iowa, which has genuinely competitive districts drawn by a nonpartisan panel, is an exception. Jim Leach, a Republican congressman from Iowa, says about 390 seats in the U.S. House are safe for one party or the other: he calls it “the collegiality of incumbency.” The safe Republican districts “tend to nominate to the right of center, while safe Democratic districts tend to nominate left of center.” The result is a polarized Congress.

In 2007, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is set to expire and Congress will have to decide how to respond. After years of race- and party-based redistricting, two things seem likely. There’ll be many black faces in the House – and the Republicans will be running the place.

© 2004 NY Times

Fred Korematsu Speaks Out on Racial Profiling and Scapegoating

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By Fred Korematsu
First published by the San Francisco Chronicle, Sep 16, 2004

In 1942, I was arrested and convicted for being a Japanese American trying to live here in the Bay Area. The day after my arrest a newspaper headline declared, “Jap Spy Arrested in San Leandro.”

Of course, I was no spy. The government never charged me with being a spy. I was a U.S. citizen born and raised in Oakland. I even tried to enlist in the Coast Guard (they didn’t take me because of my race). But my citizenship and my loyalty did not matter to the federal government. On Feb. 19, 1942, anyone of Japanese heritage was ordered excluded from the West Coast. I was charged and convicted of being a Japanese American living in an area in which all people of my ancestry had been ordered to be interned.

I fought my conviction at that time. My case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in 1944 my efforts to seek protection under the Constitution were rejected.

After I was released in 1945, my criminal record continued to affect my life. It was hard to find work. I was considered to be a criminal. It took almost 40 years and the efforts of many people to reopen my case. In 1983, a federal court judge found that the government had hidden evidence and lied to the Supreme Court during my appeal. The judge found that Japanese Americans were not the threat that the government publicly claimed. My criminal record was removed.

As my case was being reconsidered by the courts, again as a result of the efforts of many people across the country, Congress created a commission to study the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans. The commission found that no Japanese American had been involved in espionage or sabotage and that no military necessity existed to imprison us. Based on the commission’s findings and of military historians who reconsidered the original records from the war, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, declaring that the internment of Japanese Americans was unjustified. Finally, it seemed that the burden of being accused of being an “enemy race” had been lifted from our shoulders.

But now the old accusations are back. Fox News media personality Michelle Malkin claims that some Japanese Americans were spies during World War II. Based upon her suspicions, Malkin claims the internment of all Japanese Americans was not such a bad idea after all. She goes on to claim that racial profiling of Arab Americans today is justified by the need to fight terrorism. According to Malkin, it is OK to take away an entire ethnic group’s civil rights because some individuals are suspect. Malkin argues for reviving the old notion of guilt by association.

It is painful to see reopened for serious debate the question of whether the government was justified in imprisoning Japanese Americans during World War II. It was my hope that my case and the cases of other Japanese American internees would be remembered for the dangers of racial and ethnic scapegoating.

Fears and prejudices directed against minority communities are too easy to evoke and exaggerate, often to serve the political agendas of those who promote those fears. I know what it is like to be at the other end of such scapegoating and how difficult it is to clear one’s name after unjustified suspicions are endorsed as fact by the government. If someone is a spy or terrorist they should be prosecuted for their actions. But no one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.

Fred Korematsu was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medial of Freedom, in 1998. He and his wife, Kathryn, continue to live in their longtime hometown of San Leandro.

© 2004 SF Chronicle

Law Firm Fined for Frivolous SLAPP Suit

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Judge punishes firm for attempted intimidation

By Henry Weinstein
First published by the Los Angeles Times, August 16, 2005

Los Angeles federal judge on Monday ordered a large law firm and two of its attorneys to pay $267,000 in sanctions for filing a “frivolous lawsuit” against a community activist and three Forest Service employees who opposed a luxury condominium development on Big Bear Lake.

U.S. District Judge Manuel Real issued the unusual order against Foley & Lardner and two lawyers in its San Diego office, who had filed suit on behalf of developer Irving Okovita against the employees and Sandy Steers, executive director of the Friends of Fawnskin. The group played a key role in fighting Okovita’s proposed Marina Point development.

Real in March threw out the suit against the Forest Service, which substituted as a defendant for its employees, and Steers, saying she was exercising her 1st Amendment right to petition the government.

New York University law professor Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics, said it is “quite unusual” for a federal judge to issue a “six-figure sanction against a law firm. For a court to award that kind of money, the court has to find an utter lack of basis” for the position that the lawyer took in the case, Gillers said.

Attorney David Greene, director of the Oakland-based 1st Amendment Project, who represented Steers, said “hopefully this award of sanctions will have a deterrent effect, not only on these lawyers, but lawyers elsewhere, preventing attacks like this one on people who legitimately petition their government.”

The 1st Amendment group had asserted in a court brief that the developer had “sued Steers in order to harass and intimidate her, to chill her exercise of free speech and to intimidate others from similarly engaging in the lawful activity of petitioning government agencies.”

Steers said she was pleased with Real’s order. “I know that I did nothing wrong. All I’ve been trying to do is make this developer follow the law.”

Foley & Lardner, a large law firm with 18 offices around the country, including six in California, issued a statement: “We are disappointed by the ruling. With all due deference to the court we disagree with the decision and anticipate filing an appeal.” The two attorneys named in the sanction order are S. Wayne Rosenbaum and Suzanne Washington.

Okovita’s suit had raised eyebrows in legal and law enforcement circles because it was believed to be the first time the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act – known as RICO – had ever been used against Forest Service workers.

Okovita’s proposed development would place 132 luxury condominiums, a 175-slip marina and tennis courts on 12.5 acres on Grout Bay on the north shore of Big Bear Lake near the tiny town of Fawnskin.

Developer Okovita filed his RICO suit last year after U.S. District Judge Robert Timlin, in response to a suit filed by his opponents, issued an order to halt the project. Timlin found it had “the potential to both harass and harm the bald eagle,” which is protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. Further hearings on the opponents’ suit are scheduled for next week.

© 2005 Los Angeles Times

Editors note: To let the giant national law firm of Foley & Lardner know what you think of their plan to appeal, costing taxpayers additional tens of thousands of dollars in court costs, try their San Diego office at 619.234.6655.

Will the Induce Act Outlaw Silly Putty?

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By Hanah Metchis
First published by Reason.com, August 11, 2004

Editor’s note: Unmentioned in this article, Sen. Orrin Hatch, co-sponsor of the Induce Act, suggested last year that people who download copyrighted material without prior permission deserve to have their computers destroyed. At the time, Hatch’s website was using unlicensed software. Details here.

A few short years ago, technology enthusiasts used to claim that technology moves too fast for the law to hold it back. Those predictions turn out to be overly optimistic. In fact, lawmakers trying to put a stop to one evil are likely to create dozens more with legislation about a field they don’t fully understand. Vague language designed to catch potential technological workarounds can put a stop to innovation in completely unrelated areas.

The latest example of this dangerous mix of law and technology is the Induce Act, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch. Its intent-to stop downloading of copyrighted material by making peer-to-peer file trading networks illegal-is bad enough. P2P networks have legitimate uses, like the distribution of taped Senate hearings. But the language of Hatch’s bill is so open-ended that many other electronic devices, from the iPod to TiVo to email-to-RSS converters, would be called into question.

The Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (S. 2560) says that anyone who “intentionally aids, abets, induces, or procures” a copyright violation can be sued for copyright infringement. That surely applies to the file trading networks, which make it easy to find and download a free copy of any song you desire. Apple’s iPod could also come under fire for its huge hard drive, which would cost about $10,000 to fill with legally downloaded music. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has prepared a sample complaint against the iPod, pointing out the dangers of the Induce Act against established, respectable companies and technologies.

Others have gone even farther in pointing out the absurdities that could result from an expansive reading of the Induce Act. Tech blogger Ernest Miller is keeping track of an Induce Act “Hit List,” pointing out products and companies that might be seen to “induce” copyright infringement. Among the everyday companies on Miller’s list are The New York Times, which in a recent article “painted a romantic picture of copyright infringers who violate the public performance right for films,” and Lego, which lets users upload pictures to create a Lego mosaic template. One commenter even joked that the manufacturers of Silly Putty could be liable for promoting the gooey toy’s ability to lift an impression off a printed page.

The Induce Act would have a definite chilling effect on technological innovation. Even if judges are not inclined to interpret it broadly, the vague language opens the door to harassing lawsuits. Companies creating multipurpose technologies would have to be prepared to defend themselves against copyright infringement allegations. To avoid that, the Business Software Alliance has proposed changes to the bill, including a limit on frivolous lawsuits and a provision for products with legitimate commercial purposes to be exempted from liability. The latter would reaffirm the Supreme Court’s 1984 Betamax decision which held that the VCR maker was not responsible for copyright infringement by its customers.

Faced with so many unintended consequences, Congress needs to consider whether this solution to copyright infringement is worse than the original problem. Digital content distribution is still in its infancy, but iTunes and other legal download services are growing in popularity. The digital music landscape could change next year, or even next month, in ways that the Induce Act would be unprepared to deal with. The law can undoubtedly cut off some avenues of technological innovation. But at the same time, the tech lovers of 1999 are right-the law cannot anticipate where technology will turn next. In the worst case scenario, a bad tech law could be simultaneously stifling and irrelevant.

© 2004 Reason Foundation

Editor’s note: The bill is co-sponsored by Senators Leahy (D-VT), Frist (R-TN), Daschle (D-SD), Graham (R-SC), Boxer (D-CA). You can reach your Senators via the U.S. Capitol switchboard at 1-800-839-5276 (temporary number).

Voting With Your Dollars?

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Wal-Mart executives raise big money for Bush while Costco execs favor Democrats

By Michael Forsythe and Rachel Katz
First published by Bloomberg News July 25, 2004

WASHINGTON — Executives at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp., competitors in the $76 billion US warehouse-club market, have taken their rivalry to a new level: national politics.

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer and owner of Sam’s Club warehouse stores, gives more money to Republican candidates than any other company. Its top three managers, including chief executive H. Lee Scott, donated the individual maximum $2,000 to President George W. Bush, and Jay Allen, vice president for corporate affairs, raised at least $100,000 to reelect the president, earning him the Bush campaign’s designation of ”Pioneer.”

Wal-Mart — two-thirds of whose 3,580 stores are in the ”red states” that voted for Bush in 2000 — is backing White House policies on everything from trade to limiting overtime pay.

Costco chief executive Jim Sinegal, 68, is a Democrat who says Bush’s $1.7 trillion in tax cuts unfairly benefit the wealthy. He opposed the Iraq war and supports Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts for president. And he’s the only chief executive of a company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index to donate money to independent political groups formed to oust Bush, Internal Revenue Service records show.

”Wal-Mart is extremely strong in Republican strongholds; they are a red-state retailer,” said Amy Bonkoski, an investment adviser at Cleveland-based National City Corp.’s private-client group, which manages about $26 billion, including Wal-Mart and Costco shares. ”Costco is stronger in Democratic states. Costco is a friend to labor. Unions hate Wal-Mart.”

The differences are based on more than ideology: Each retailer has a stake in the election’s outcome in areas from healthcare to the minimum wage to the way unions can organize workforces.

Kerry, 60, a four-term senator, pledges to induce more employers to insure workers with a $257 billion proposal calling for the government to pay most so-called catastrophic healthcare costs — only for companies that provide comprehensive coverage. He’d raise the minimum wage and make it easier for workers to join unions.

Those policies may benefit Costco and hurt Wal-Mart.

Issaquah, Wash.-based Costco offers comprehensive health insurance to most of its 78,000 US employees, making it eligible for Kerry’s plan, said Kerry’s top domestic policy adviser, Sarah Bianchi, 31. That may cut 10 percent, or $35 million, off its annual healthcare premiums.

Wal-Mart’s health plan for its 1.3 million US workers is probably not broad enough to qualify for the savings that Kerry’s proposal would bring, since it doesn’t cover enough workers, said Jason Furman, 33, the Democrat’s chief economic policy adviser. Fewer than half of Wal-Mart’s employees are enrolled in the company health plan, according to figures supplied by the retailer.

Costco wouldn’t have to raise salaries with Kerry’s proposal to increase the minimum wage to $7 an hour, from $5.15 now. It already pays hot-dog vendors as much as $16 an hour, and the lowest wage it pays is $10 an hour. That’s higher than the $9.96 average wage paid at discount stores bearing the Wal-Mart name.

Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart supports the Bush administration’s expansion of free-trade agreements and its bid to curtail the number of workers eligible for overtime pay, according to its lobby disclosure reports.

Wal-Mart has benefited from the president’s opposition to raising the minimum wage, since some employees make less than $7 an hour, and from the Republican-controlled Congress’s reluctance to make it easier for workers to unionize. Wal-Mart has no unions; about one-sixth of Costco’s workers are represented by labor groups.

Wal-Mart and Costco aren’t the only companies in the same industry whose executives are on opposing sides in the election. Google Inc. chief executive Eric Schmidt is backing Kerry, while Internet rival Yahoo Inc. chief executive Terry Semel endorsed Bush.

What makes the Wal-Mart and Costco rivalry stand out is that their political donations are so partisan and both companies are likely to gain if their party wins in November.

IRS disclosure records show that Sinegal and Costco chairman Jeffrey Brotman each gave $95,000 last December to the fund-raising arm of America Coming Together, a group organizing voters against Bush, and the Media Fund, which is running anti-Bush advertisements.

Wal-Mart’s political action committee, the biggest company PAC, gave Republicans 81 percent of its $1.3 million in donations in the past two years, a higher proportion than any of the top 25 corporate PACs, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan Washington-based group.

Sixty-seven percent of Wal-Mart’s stores are in the 30 states that voted for Bush and Cheney in 2000, according to a comparison of store-location figures in the Wal-Mart 2003 annual report and election results. Costco’s stores are mostly located on either coast, with 208 of its 321 stores in the higher-wage, more union-friendly 20 states that voted for Democrat Al Gore in 2000.

Sinegal makes no apologies for Costco’s policies, saying higher wages reduce employee turnover, which lowers training costs. ”I’m not a social engineer,” he said in an interview. ”Paying good wages is simply good business.”

© 2004 Bloomberg News

Related features:

The Costco Dilemna: Is Treating Employees Well Unacceptable for Publicly Traded Corporations? (Wall St. Journal)

Wal-Mart Becomes Largest Corporate Political Investor

The better alternative: support your local, independent businesses

Many of Bush Administration’s Claimed “Terrorism” Arrests Are Misleading

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Non-crimes and misdemeanors among Ashcroft’s examples of success in “war on terror”

By Bert Dalmer
First published by the Des Moines Register, July 18, 2004

Editor’s note: Mr. Dalmer again investigated this topic in early 2005 and found more of the same.

Federal prosecutors say they built 35 terrorism-related cases in Iowa in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But a Des Moines Sunday Register analysis of the cases found that most defendants had questionable links to violent extremism. Those defendants who could be identified by the newspaper were, in most cases, charged with fraud or theft and served just a few months in jail.

The number of terrorism-related cases even took one court official by surprise.

“If there have been terrorism-related arrests in Iowa, I haven’t heard about them,” said U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt.

Ironically, Pratt presided over courtroom proceedings in at least six of the criminal cases that federal prosecutors had cataloged as terrorist in nature.

Included among the 35 cases were:

Four American-born laborers who omitted mention of prior drug convictions or other crimes when they were assigned by a contractor to a runway construction project at the Des Moines airport or when they applied for manual-labor jobs there.

Five Mexican citizens who stole cans of baby formula from store shelves throughout Iowa and sold them to a man of Arab descent for later resale.

Two Pakistani men who entered into or solicited sham marriages so that they and their friends could continue to live in the Waterloo area and work at convenience stores there.

The Iowa arrests were part of a national compilation of statistics cited by the U.S. Department of Justice in requests to Congress for $400 million this year for federal anti-terrorism efforts. The department’s figures were again cited last week when Attorney General John Ashcroft lobbied lawmakers for continued support of the controversial U.S.A. Patriot Act, which gives law-enforcement officials greater authority to surveil and search foreigners and U.S. citizens.

Skeptics of the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist threat said that lumping minor crimes under the terrorism label could wrongly heighten public anxiety and provide a questionable rationale for more anti-terror resources.

“When people read that they’re doctoring the numbers, aren’t they going to have less confidence in the Justice Department and the war on terror?” asked U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Ia. “You can’t say that somebody’s a terrorist when he isn’t a terrorist.”

Prosecutors interviewed by the Sunday Register stressed that many of the Iowa cases were classic examples of illegal activities that are perpetrated by terrorist groups. And though any evidence of terrorist connections or motives was rarely mentioned in the courtroom, officials implied that some of the suspects might still be under suspicion, even since their release.

” ‘Bona fide’ terrorism is a matter of semantics,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Murphy, who heads the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Cedar Rapids. “I don’t think you can draw conclusions based on what a person is convicted of.”

Prosecutors decline to explain most cases
With few exceptions, Murphy and his fellow prosecutors declined to explain why any of the 35 cases were classified as terrorism, citing attorney rules and orders from Justice Department officials in Washington, D.C. Since 9/11, the Justice Department has largely equated secrecy with security, even in court.

Top Justice Department officials have told Congress that some foreign suspects have been deported rather than being charged with terror-related crimes because authorities are afraid to reveal their evidence before they have built cases against the ringleaders. Local prosecutors say they have been instructed to charge such suspects with “spit-on-the-sidewalk” crimes if necessary, just to get them out of the country.

Beginning in late 2001, federal prosecutors in Cedar Rapids filed charges against nine people and issued arrest warrants for at least 11 more in connection with Youssef Hmimssa, a document forger whose customers included members of a suspected terrorist cell in Detroit. None of those in Iowa who bought fake IDs from Hmimssa answered to charges more serious than fraud or conspiracy to commit fraud. All who were convicted served between two and 11 months in jail.

Yet all of their cases were listed by Iowa prosecutors as terrorist-related.

“We charged them with readily provable offenses,” explained U.S. Attorney Charles Larson, who heads the Justice Department’s Cedar Rapids office. “We haven’t had a shoe bomber or a McVeigh,” he said, referring to Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for his role in the April 1995 Oklahoma City federal building blast. “But if we’ve disrupted one part of what might have developed into a cell, we’ve done something important in prevention.”

In the two full years prior to the 9/11 attacks, there were no federal criminal prosecutions in Iowa related to terrorism, according to a Justice Department database obtained by researchers affiliated with Syracuse University.

Nationally, the trend was similar. The number of terrorism-related cases in the two years after Sept. 11 was 3,555 – a number six times greater than the sum for the prior two years, the Syracuse researchers said.

No pressure from D.C., prosecutors assert
Federal prosecutors in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids denied any suggestion that their bosses in Washington ordered them to label cases “terrorism” more liberally. Rather, they say, the Justice Department has become more proactive in its hunt for would-be terrorists.

When four Iowans were indicted on Jan. 29, 2003, for making false statements to Des Moines airport officials on job documents, the cases were marked internally by federal prosecutors as “anti-terrorism.”

Officials did not appear to consider the defendants a threat to the public. Most were charged months after their offenses, and all four were released on bond while awaiting trial.

Lawyers for the men said they could not recall hearing, either in court or during plea discussions, any allegations from prosecutors about terrorist motives. But to be safe, some defense lawyers filed motions to prevent prosecutors from describing the men’s alleged crimes to jurors as terror-related.

“It had nothing to do with terrorism at all. It’s just that it happened after 9/11,” said one defense lawyer, who asked not to be identified because of federal rules on out-of-court statements by attorneys.

Most of the defendants contended that they had signed the airport forms without reading them or had misunderstood the disclosures they were required to make as part of their jobs or their job applications. Their arguments were effective. Two of the airport suspects, one an employee of an asphalt paving company and the other a delivery service job applicant, were found not guilty by a jury. A case against an air-freight handler was dismissed when he agreed to report to a probation officer. The fourth man, an applicant for a freight-handler job, pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.

A fifth man who was indicted separately was an immigrant from Mexico who worked as an electrician. He was the only airport suspect convicted by a jury. He was sentenced to six months in jail and was deported because he was in the United States without proper immigration documents.

Charges are linked to anti-terror initiative
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Patrick O’Meara, who heads the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Des Moines, said the “anti-terrorism” label was used in the airport cases because the crimes were discovered as part of a specific initiative to snare potential terrorists.

In retrospect, O’Meara said, he still believes the cases were coded correctly, given the Justice Department’s directives that assign credit for an arrest during a targeted terrorism operation, “even where the offense is not obviously a federal crime of terrorism.”

Researchers and advocates who are tracking the government’s post-9/11 policing methods said that classifying routine arrests as terrorism related helps to justify the resources that government security forces receive. But they also noted that the Justice Department, in public statements, generally does not distinguish between “anti-terrorism” cases and “terrorism” cases, which focus on genuine terrorists.

That approach, the researchers and advocates said, renders the Justice Department’s statistics practically useless as a measure of the presence of terrorists in the United States.

“You can’t objectively know whether it’s a gross mischaracterization designed to puff their stats or a case in which we have hearty intelligence out of Afghanistan,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former federal prosecutor and now senior legal researcher at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group. “I think record-keeping is the least important thing in their minds.”

O’Meara, the prosecutor in Des Moines, acknowledged that the government’s statistics are at times imprecise and should be used with caution.

“The real purpose in all of this isn’t in any situation to label someone a terrorist,” he said. “But where those statistics are used, that’s something we have to be more particular with.”

A handful of the other Iowa terrorism cases seemed to fit the more conventional definition.

Luke Helder, who is accused of planting mailbox bombs in Iowa and four other states in 2002, was listed among federal statistics as Iowa’s only domestic terrorist in the two years after 9/11.

The Hmimssa forgery case was classified as terrorism-related financing, although he was never shown in court to have funneled money to a terrorist group. Convicted immigrants who bought fake IDs from Hmimssa came from several locations, including Algeria, Eritrea, France, Palestine, Pakistan and Morocco. None was jailed for as long as a year.

Hmimssa’s co-defendant, Brahim Sidi, who was alleged to have solicited business for Hmimssa, had his case classified as international terrorism. Sidi served seven months for fraud and was deported to Morocco.

Hmimssa eventually agreed to testify against his Detroit associates and was portrayed during the trial as more an opportunistic criminal than a murderous ideologue. Later, he voluntarily testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Grassley is a member. Hmimssa told senators about his methods of forging Social Security cards and talked about the vulnerabilities of the government’s ID-making system.

Hmimssa’s guilty plea to credit card and document fraud charges, if accepted, will get him a maximum of 46 months in prison. Two of the four men he testified against were acquitted of terrorism charges. The others were convicted of providing material support to a plan to blow up an American military air base in Turkey, although the verdicts are in question because of alleged prosecutorial misconduct.

Publicity about cases kept to a minimum
Although the Hmimssa case received national attention as one of the government’s first terrorism prosecutions, the majority of the government’s terrorism cases have not been well-publicized – by design.

Attorney General Ashcroft, for the first time, provided some details last week on a few dozen of the 310 arrests and 179 terrorism convictions nationwide that he had referred to during a recent appearance before Congress. But most of the cases were not discussed, and others were shown to be unrelated to terrorism activities.

Ashcroft’s terrorism figures are very different from those cited in President Bush’s proposed budget to Congress, which claims 1,283 such arrests in 2003 alone. A Justice Department spokesman could not explain the discrepancy.

In general, members of Congress have not succeeded in coaxing much substantive case information from the Justice Department. The curtain of secrecy has frustrated lawmakers, particularly in light of a report that questioned the department’s claims of anti-terrorism successes.

Investigators challenge Justice’s statistics
Congress’ investigating arm, the General Accounting Office, found in a small-sample survey last year that nearly half of the cases called terrorist-related by the Justice Department had been mislabeled. The GAO said the department’s statistics were inaccurate and unreliable.

The Justice Department officially agreed with the GAO’s findings and promised to make its statistics more precise.

Since then, federal prosecutors have expanded their definition of terrorism and have declined to make public case details that they previously had released. Department officials have cited national security as the reason.

Grassley and Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, wrote to Ashcroft to complain, but they have not received a reply.

“You never get every question answered, or you never get every question answered fully,” Grassley said in an interview. “In order to have confidence in the government, it’s very important that we have as much transparency as possible.”

© 2004 Des Moines Register