Is the glass half full, or half empty? Are 158 prosecutions a lot, or not that many? This study from NYU takes the latter position, and takes a critical stance on more urgent assessments of the threat. But those numbers aside, the study also does not appear to take into account the threat posed by individuals or groups in the U.S. who may not personally plot and carry out attacks, but who may sympathize with the prospective attackers, and enable them to function either actively, through providing funds and engaging in legal intimidation and coercion, or passively, through covering over and refusing to engage the ideology that drives the jihad.
And lastly, we don’t know who may not yet be on the radar screen, and we cannot assume we have accounted for every threat to the country and its people.
“Law center: Little evidence of jihadists in the U.S.,” from CNN:
NEW YORK (CNN) — Six years of investigations and prosecutions have turned up little evidence of Islamic jihadists at work in the United States, according to a study released Monday.
The study, conducted by New York University’s Center on Law and Security, tracked 510 cases billed as terrorism-related when arrests were made.
But it found only 158 of those people arrested since al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks were prosecuted for terrorism.
In a statement issued Monday afternoon, the Justice Department said the report “reflects a serious misunderstanding” of anti-terrorism efforts and includes “wildly inaccurate” statistics.
The study found only four people — including confessed al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui and “shoe bomber” Richard Reid — were convicted of planning attacks within the United States.
“The vast majority of cases turn out to include no link to terrorism once they go to court,” the report found. The analysis “suggests the presence of few, if any, prevalent terrorist threats currently within the U.S.”
[…]
The Justice Department disputed the law center’s figures in Monday’s study, saying more than the 62 people who the study cited have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
But the law center said most of those 62 cases involved people planning attacks overseas, not inside the United States.
So we should care less if a particular attack won’t happen here?
And looking at possible attacks worldwide, just 7 percent of those arrested in what authorities called terrorism-related cases have been convicted of terrorism charges or providing material support for terrorism, the report said.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said that as of late September prosecutors had won 312 convictions in “terrorism and terrorism-related cases with an international nexus” since the 2001 attacks. And Justice Department statistics found far fewer defendants had been charged with terrorism offenses between September 11, 2006, and September 11, 2007, than the 109 the report asserted.