Is the Department of Justice padding it's terror prosecution stats?

Between September 11, 2001 and 2005, nearly every single terrorism related statistic reported by the Justice Department and the FBI had at least some inaccuracies, according to the department's inspector general.

Democratic Senators said the report "raised doubts" as to how effectively the Bush administration was handling the fight against terrorism.

"If the Department of Justice can't even get their own books in order, how are we supposed to have any confidence they are doing the job they should be?," said Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat.

"Whether this is just an accounting error or an attempt to pad terror prosecution statistics for some other reason, the Department of Justice of all places should be classifying cases for what they are, not what they want us to think them to be," Schumer said.

Hmm, I'm going to go with the "padding the stats" theory, especially given the following:

The report found that only two out of 26 statistics were accurate after reviewing the number of terrorism convictions in the 2003 and 2004 financial years, the number of convictions or guilty pleas from September 11, 2001, through February 3, 2005, and the number of terrorist threats tracked by the FBI in 2003 and 2004.

"We found many cases involving offenses such as immigration violations, marriage fraud, or drug trafficking where department officials provided no evidence to link the subject of the case to terrorist activity," the report said.

So essentially the plan was to prosecute just any random case, and on occasion mark it down as "terror" related, so it would seem as though the Department was successfully prosecuting many more terrorists than it actually was.

Oh, and once again, the Republicans love the terrorists as long as they're contributing money to the GOP.