Russia Hauls in People

According to a story out of The Moscow Times, it seems that, "In two days of raids, Moscow police have rounded up more than 11,000 Russians and foreigners on suspicion of living in the city without registering with the authorities."

It would appear that Russia has some problems, and without having two oceans to help protect it from so many terrorists and terrorist sympathizers, it looks like the Mama Bear might be up and about in her cave.

OTHER NEWS:

I was curious to see some statistics on how many people have been arrested in the United States since September 11th, and especially those arrests tied to the evil Patriot Act. It goes to figure that there were some conflicting stories associated with it.

NPR had a piece from May 24th of this year stating, "In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of arrests have been made..."

Thousands as of May 24th... good to know. Of course, since it was NPR I wanted to be a bit more responsible than CBS so I decided to check for some more data since I was not comfortable with that source all together.

In a less vague report from The Washington Times reported something quite different, "The USA Patriot Act has helped federal, state and local terrorism investigators arrest 310 persons since the September 11 attacks, 179 of whom have been convicted, and has proved to be "al Qaeda's worst nightmare," the Justice Department said yesterday in a report."

Ah, so it is the evil and demonic John Ashcroft is the one who does the count. So I said let us look at the DoJ's site and see what we can find. Bingo! It did not take long to find some answers.

Over the last two years:

• Our intelligence and law enforcement communities, and our partners, both here and abroad, have identified and disrupted over 150 terrorist threats and cells;
• Worldwide, nearly two-thirds of al Qaida's known senior leadership has been captured or killed -- including a mastermind of the September 11th attacks;
• Worldwide, more than 3,000 operatives have been incapacitated;
• Terrorist cells across America have been broken up, in cities including Buffalo, Seattle, Tampa and Portland (Oregon);
• 361 individuals have been criminally charged in the United States in terrorism investigations;
• Already, 191 individuals have been convicted or have pled guilty in the United States, including shoe-bomber Richard Reid and "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh; and
• Over 515 individuals linked to the September 11th investigation have been removed from the United States.
  

So, I was still looking for the arrests number in the thousands. The Washington Post cites from the DoJ, NPR just kind of blathers... I do admit that 361 people being CHARGED has nothing to do with arrests in the sense that they are being held without charges being filed. This is understood. What is also needs to be understood is that you shouldn't just go around spouting numbers as if they were opinions about the weather when you can not substantiate those numbers.

It never fails that even when just looking around for some simple figures you can run into some very biased 'reporting' on the part of even government funded programs.