Tag: John Ashcroft

Freedom of Disinformation.

Also courtesy of Looka, John Ashcroft is encouraging Justice Department lawyers to evade — or break — the Freedom of Information Act whenever possible. How frighteningly typical of our Attorney General…you gotta wonder at this point if he dresses up like Judge Dredd when nobody’s looking.

WE have the body.

Oh, these suspects have very important information…they’re just not allowed to tell it. As the Ashcroft Justice Department leaps at the chance to try out their newly validated surveillance powers, the Post examines their contortion of a 1984 material witness statute to keep terrorist suspects locked up indefinitely. Very sneaky…but how far can you bend a law before it breaks?

The Rollback begins.

An appeal court today approved broadened wiretap powers for John Ashcroft’s Justice Department. (But don’t worry…they’ll only use it on the bad people.) In loosely related news, the Dems are discovering a filibuster won’t work in stopping much of the GOP’s desired legislation, including oil and gas drilling of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Looks like things’ll be getting worse before they get better.

Speaking of big oil, I was doing some reading between classes in what passes for a student center here at Columbia and ended up sitting next to the undergraduate pro-war-in-Iraq table. (To be honest, I’m always a bit startled by the conservatism of today’s undergraduate community, although I suppose it wasn’t much different in my day – I still remember the drunken revelries all over campus that accompanied the 1994 midterms.) At any rate, I noticed the organization’s name was Students United for Victory, which would make their acronym SUV. Ah well, I presume the irony was lost on these earnest young hawks.

FISA fights back.

The secret court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) rebuff Ashcroft’s plea for increased wiretap powers, and declares the FBI has misled the court over 75 times. Never thought I’d be on the side of a secret court, but there you go. It must be getting really ugly over at Justice if somebody’s leaking this bad boy.

Ashcroft’s “Hellish Vision.”

Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law professor at GW and television staple during l’affaire Lewinsky, lashes into John Ashcroft for his recent plan to create extraconstitutional internment camps of “enemy combatants” (re: US citizens) in and around the country. (Via Caught in Between.) Y’know, I do believe John Ashcroft is the scariest man in the country right now.