One of the government's principal strategies to protect the American
people against terrorist attacks is to bring a variety of criminal
charges against individuals it suspects are terrorists or in some
way helping terrorists. This approach is unusual among the various
anti-terrorism tools in the government's arsenal because -- unlike
such methods as secret surveillance by electronic and other means
-- the rules of the criminal justice system generally require
that considerable case-by-case information be made public. On
the basis of information obtained from the Justice Department
under the FOIA, TRAC on February 13 put up a special report on
its public site showing that while criminal actions against alleged
terrorists had soared during the year after 9/11/01, sentences
had declined. Eric Lichtblau in the New York Times Washington
Bureau, the AP's David Pace, Burt Hubbard of the Rocky Mountain
News and reporters at a number of other news organizations used
the data to prepare their own independent reports.
