[Dialogue] Travesty of Justice

Tue Jun 22 11:04:53 EDT 2004

To all:

I got this from another list serve to which I belong.

Regards,

Ed Reames
Temporarily back in Maryland, USA
Resident of La Ribera de Belén, Costa Rica
Travesty of Justice

June 15, 2004
  By PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/15KRUG.html

No question: John Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in
history.

For this column, let's just focus on Mr. Ashcroft's role in
the fight against terror. Before 9/11 he was aggressively
uninterested in the terrorist threat. He didn't even
mention counterterrorism in a May 2001 memo outlining
strategic priorities for the Justice Department. When the
9/11 commission asked him why, he responded by blaming the
Clinton administration, with a personal attack on one of
the commission members thrown in for good measure.

We can't tell directly whether Mr. Ashcroft's post-9/11
policies are protecting the United States from terrorist
attacks. But a number of pieces of evidence suggest
otherwise.

First, there's the absence of any major successful
prosecutions. The one set of convictions that seemed fairly
significant - that of the "Detroit 3" - appears to be
collapsing over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct.
(The lead prosecutor has filed a whistle-blower suit
against Mr. Ashcroft, accusing him of botching the case.
The Justice Department, in turn, has opened investigations
against the prosecutor. Payback? I report; you decide.)

Then there is the lack of any major captures. Somewhere,
the anthrax terrorist is laughing. But the Justice
Department, you'll be happy to know, is trying to determine
whether it can file bioterrorism charges against a Buffalo
art professor whose work includes harmless bacteria in
petri dishes.

Perhaps most telling is the way Mr. Ashcroft responds to
criticism of his performance. His first move is always to
withhold the evidence. Then he tries to change the subject
by making a dramatic announcement of a terrorist threat.

For an example of how Mr. Ashcroft shuts down public
examination, consider the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former
F.B.I. translator who says that the agency's language
division is riddled with incompetence and corruption, and
that the bureau missed critical terrorist warnings. In 2002
she gave closed-door Congressional testimony; Senator
Charles Grassley described her as "very credible . . .
because people within the F.B.I. have corroborated a lot of
her story."

But the Justice Department has invoked the rarely used
"state secrets privilege" to prevent Ms. Edmonds from
providing evidence. And last month the department
retroactively classified two-year-old testimony by F.B.I.
officials, which was presumably what Mr. Grassley referred
to.

For an example of changing the subject, consider the
origins of the Jose Padilla case. There was no publicity
when Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002. But on June 6,
2002, Coleen Rowley gave devastating Congressional
testimony about failures at the F.B.I. (which reports to
Mr. Ashcroft) before 9/11. Four days later, Mr. Ashcroft
held a dramatic press conference and announced that Mr.
Padilla was involved in a terrifying plot. Instead of
featuring Ms. Rowley, news magazine covers ended up
featuring the "dirty bomber" who Mr. Ashcroft said was
plotting to kill thousands with deadly radiation.

Since then Mr. Padilla has been held as an "enemy
combatant" with no legal rights. But Newsweek reports that
"administration officials now concede that the principal
claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his
detention - that he was dispatched to the United States for
the specific purpose of setting off a radiological `dirty
bomb' - has turned out to be wrong and most likely can
never be used in court."

But most important is the memo. Last week Mr. Ashcroft,
apparently in contempt of Congress, refused to release a
memo on torture his department prepared for the White House
almost two years ago. Fortunately, his stonewalling didn't
work: The Washington Post has acquired a copy of the memo
and put it on its Web site.

Much of the memo is concerned with defining torture down:
if the pain inflicted on a prisoner is less than the pain
that accompanies "serious physical injury, such as organ
failure," it's not torture. Anyway, the memo declares that
the federal law against torture doesn't apply to
interrogations of enemy combatants "pursuant to [the
president's] commander-in-chief authority." In other words,
the president is above the law.

The memo came out late Sunday. Mr. Ashcroft called a press
conference yesterday - to announce an indictment against a
man accused of plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio.
The timing was, I'm sure, purely coincidental.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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