There was quick action when the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the Department of Justice had dramatically overstated its record of convicting terrorists, with conservative and liberal congressmen calling for an investigation. The December story, which documented a five-year pattern of inflated terrorism statistics, went unchallenged by the Justice Department. Our basic data came from Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
We paired the justice information with federal court data offered through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER). The pairing is painfully time consuming and best suited to small samplings of cases. PACER allowed us to select all cases filed on a specific date in any federal court district. For each federal district, we entered the date of each Justice Department's terrorism case. Usually, there were no more than a dozen criminal cases filed on a single day.
Of those, there usually would be only one with the specific criminal charge matching the Justice Department data. In one supposed case of terrorism in Seattle, a pilot sent a phony report that another pilot was planning a hijacking due to a personal feud. The agent told us this was his 'only real case of terrorism' in three years. Now Congress wants to know how pervasive the problem is.