Federal prosecutors inflated their success in terrorism-related convictions last year by wrongly classifying almost half of them, the General Accounting Office has found. Over all, 132 of 288 convictions reported as international or domestic terrorism or terrorism-related hoaxes were found by investigators to have been wrongly classified as such for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the accounting office, the investigative arm of Congress, found. The Department of Justice “does not have sufficient management oversight and internal controls in place to ensure the accuracy and reliability of terrorism-related conviction statistics included in its annual performance reports,” the agency said in a report that was released on Wednesday. The report, in response to an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer that raised concerns about the conviction statistics, sheds light on the effect of public pressure on the department to crack down on terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001. The accounting office said the inaccuracies hampered Congress’s “ability to accurately assess terrorism-related performance outcomes of the U.S. criminal justice system,” information that would be crucial to such Congressional endeavors as approving the department’s budget requests. Full Story
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