Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Ashcroft, go home

Travesty of Justice
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Published: June 15, 2004
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.

 aggressively uninterested in the terrorist threat. He
Can you explain, please, what does "aggresivly
uninterestes" mean?
    Vilco

 uninterested" mean?
It's called "humour".
Namib