politics

When Stenography Kicks In

June 10, 2005

A 20-minute, mid-week, non-election year speech by a sitting president isn’t always a newsmaker. Nonetheless, teams of road-weary reporters are sent out to parse POTUS’s every utterance for possible breaking news, and, as we all know, the results are rarely anything to write home about — but reporters do anyway.

There are times, however, when the world turns on its head — when news is made during one of these speeches, and, for whatever reason, reporters let it slip through their fingers. That happened yesterday when President Bush delivered a speech at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy, which was dutifully covered in all the major dailies. The president is currently stumping for the permanent extension of the Patriot Act (sixteen provisions of which are due to expire at the end of the year), and used his appearance to bolster his case by pointing out, according to the Washington Post, that the Act has allowed authorities to “charge more than 400 people in terrorism investigations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and convict more than half.”

All the dailies we read reported these numbers verbatim (most of them used the same quote), along with a rebuttal by Democratic Senator Russ Feingold. But in reporting those numbers, the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today, among others, all missed what should be a big part of the story.

Back on May 16 — more than three weeks before the president’s speech — the Des Monies Register‘s Bert Dalmer performed some actual investigative reporting and documentation — something we don’t see nearly enough of these days. Seems that the Register filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out how the Justice Department classifies which cases are terror-related and which aren’t. Reviewing the documents, the paper concludes that the Justice Department has, since 2001, vastly broadened its definition of “terrorism-related” — as well as expanding the number of “terrorism-related” crime categories from two to six.

For example, when the Feds are hunting for terrorists and make an arrest for other reasons, the case is still logged as “anti-terrorism.” As the paper noted, some of the people that the expansion of the definition has kept us safe from include “College entrance-exam cheaters, check forgers, sham husbands and those who overstay visas.” What’s more, the Register found that:

The records show that top officials instructed federal prosecutors nationwide to catalog their work in ways that served to inflate the number of terrorism investigations. Even tips that were immediately disregarded, the memos show, were to be counted as terrorism-related investigations. …

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This year, for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks, the department omitted without explanation any figures on terrorism-related investigations and convictions in its annual performance report.

In other words, since the category “anti-terrorism” has become so broad — and we don’t know how many investigations and convictions there have been over the past year for actual terrorist-related activity — we have to take the president at his word on the numbers he offers. Which is exactly what the reporters following the president around yesterday did, tossing in Feingold’s rebuttal to give their pieces the requisite “he said/she said” quality so beloved by editors. The big boys are either unaware of — or unimpressed by — the Register‘s findings implying that not all that glitters is prosecutorial gold when someone is charged in a terrorism case.

When the president says that we have convicted more than 200 terrorist suspects on various charges, he may well be correct under the new broad definition of “terrorism.” But it would be nice if reporters explained that widening of the net to readers. Their audience may also be interested in reading about all we don’t know — like if the president’s numbers are correct. As readers ourselves, we know we’re sure curious.

— Paul McLeary

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.