In the year after 9/11/01 federal prosecutors in Indiana handled ten cases they categorized as being related to terrorism. But when reporter Shannon Tan dug into the details of each case she discovered that federal investigators were not turning up shoe bombers or al-Qaida cells. Beginning with a TRACFED listing of all the cases that the government identified as somehow involving terrorism, Tan examined court records and interviewed the assistant U.S. Attorneys handling the cases to dig into what the feds in the state actually were doing when it came to fighting terrorism. Tan also included information from a February General Accounting Office Report that focused on systematic shortcomings in the way the department was classifying these high-profile matters.
