Terror Prosecution Statistics Criticized by GOP Were Originally Touted by Bush Administration

Maybe it's time to stop some of the name-calling over counterterrorism policy and start checking the facts. As the debate over Obama administration counterterrorism policies has heated up in the wake of the failed Christmas Day underpants airplane bombing, prominent Republicans, ranging from leading senators to a former press secretary for George W. Bush, have attacked the current administration for claiming that hundreds of terrorist suspects had been successfully prosecuted through the civilian court system during Bush's presidency. But it turns out that the Obama administration's claims do appear to be well documented—assuming that an official budget request sent to Congress by Bush's last attorney general was truthful itself.

Over the last several days, an increasingly shrill chorus of GOP personalities has slammed the Obama administration for defending its decision to process accused Christmas underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab through the civilian court system, rather than some kind of military tribunal. Republicans have gone so far as to suggest that the administration basically fabricated claims, articulated earlier this month in a letter sent to senators by Attorney General Eric Holder, that the Bush administration had successfully prosecuted more than 300 terrorists via civilian courts. Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Judiciary Committee's top Republican, called Holder's statistic "unsubstantiated" and dared him to back it up:  "If this figure is valid, why is the attorney general not willing to explain it?" Another prominent Senate Republican, John Kyl of Arizona, said that he had been bugging the administration since last year to substantiate such statistics, which he says were first were alluded to when President Obama, in a speech touting his plan to close the terrorist detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, talked about how civilian "supermax" prisons already hold "hundreds" of convicted terrorists. "It's a disingenuous argument," Kyl told the conservative Washington Examiner. Last week the Fox News Web site quoted Dana Perino, George W. Bush's former press secretary, snapping: "The 300 number is as false as false gets."

Apparently, the falsehood is Perino's, not the administration's. It turns out, according to official Justice Department records (which were made available to Declassified by a nonpolitical government official), there is at least a credible, if not rock-solid foundation for the administration's claim. According to this official summary of a 2009 Justice Department budget proposal that the Bush administration sent to Congress in 2008: "Since 2001, the Department has increased its capacity to investigate terrorism and has identified, disrupted, and dismantled terrorist cells operating in the United States. These efforts have resulted in the securing of 319 convictions or guilty pleas in terrorism or terrorism-related cases arising from investigations conducted primarily after September 11, 2001, and zero terrorist attacks on American soil by foreign nationals from 2003 through 2007."

To its credit, Fox News, which apparently besieged Obama officials seeking backup for the statistical claim, late on Monday did post a story on its Web site acknowledging that the 300 figure did come from an official Bush administration document.

The Fox story also noted that Bush administration accounts of how many terrorists it jailed in the wake of 9/11 were sometimes, well, erratic. In 2006 the Justice Department claimed "288 defendants have been convicted or have pleaded guilty in terrorism or terrorism-related cases" since 9/11, while Bush himself had claimed in a Sept. 11, 2003, speech that  "more than 260 suspected terrorists have been charged in the United States courts, [and] more than 140 have already been convicted."

Fox's writer avoids mention of the fact that one of the news outlets to promote the unfair charge that the Obama administration had  made up its statistics out of thin air was . . . Fox News's Web site itself.  By the same token, Fox arguably has a point that the current administration should do some additional fact-checking, since Obama himself claimed to CBS last weekend that the Bush administration "prosecuted 190 folks in these [civilian] courts, got convictions, and those folks are in maximum-security prisons right now."