Saturday, September 27, 2003
Just Like Clockwork...
You can set your watch to these guys.0 comments
People have been saying for two years now that John Ashcroft could not be trusted to lead the Justice Department effectively, and definitely could not be trusted with the sweeping revisions to law enforcement protocols contained in the unfortunately named Patriot Act.
Maybe the best to be said of him was that he seemed to exhibit boundary issues.
Critics have been saying for two years that he was lying.
Today, as we see in Eric Lichtblau's story in The New York Times, we now know that he was.
This, at a time when he is barnstorming the country, drumming up support (which he is forbidden to do by Federal law, by the way...) for passage of a secondary version of the bill.
Publicly, Attorney General John Ashcroft and senior Justice Department officials have portrayed their expanded power almost exclusively as a means of fighting terrorists, with little or no mention of other criminal uses.
"We have used these tools to prevent terrorists from unleashing more death and destruction on our soil," Mr. Ashcroft said last month in a speech in Washington, one of more than two dozen he has given in defense of the law, which has come under growing attack. "We have used these tools to save innocent American lives."
Internally, however, Justice Department officials have emphasized a much broader mandate.
A guide to a Justice Department employee seminar last year on financial crimes, for instance, said: "We all know that the USA Patriot Act provided weapons for the war on terrorism. But do you know how it affects the war on crime as well?" (My emphasis)
In essence, what has happened here, is that Ashcroft has used 9/11 to ram through every bit of law enforcement's long-standing wish list. Every office of this administration has wrapped itself callously in the banner of the victims of 9/11 to cram through every legislative / administrative wet dream they ever had.
September 11th is now celebrated as "Christmas on the Potomac".
A study in January by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that while the number of terrorism investigations at the Justice Department soared after the Sept. 11 attacks, 75 percent of the convictions that the department classified as "international terrorism" were wrongly labeled. Many dealt with more common crimes like document forgery.
Ashcroft has fended off critics for two years, saying that these blanket powers were only to be the hefty tool to defend us against terrorism. Rubbish. The Justice Dept. is happily using it to help every investigation they have on the books.
Before, it may merely have been paranoiac twaddle on the part of the far left.
Today, it is real, and acknowledged as such by the functionaries at the Justice Dept. itself.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said members of Congress expected some of the new powers granted to law enforcement to be used for nonterrorism investigations.
But he said the Justice Department's secrecy and lack of cooperation in implementing the legislation have made him question whether "the government is taking shortcuts around the criminal laws" by invoking intelligence powers—with differing standards of evidence—to conduct surveillance operations and demand access to records.
"We did not intend for the government to shed the traditional tools of criminal investigation, such as grand jury subpoenas governed by well-established precedent and wiretaps strictly monitored" by federal judges, he said.
Justice Department officials say such criticism has not deterred them. "There are many provisions in the Patriot Act that can be used in the general criminal law," Mark Corallo, a department spokesman, said. "And I think any reasonable person would agree that we have an obligation to do everything we can to protect the lives and liberties of Americans from attack, whether it's from terrorists or garden-variety criminals."
At this rate, the members of this administration will be lucky to merely be voted out of Washington. It's looking more and more as if they could well be hit with mass indictments before they're through.
The only question remains, how much more damage will they inflict on this country before they're gone?
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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posted by Gotham 4:28 PM
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