John Ashcroft: Slayer of Civil Liberties
John Ashcroft is a rabid right-winger. His steadfast faith in the USA Patriot Act has imprisoned innocent people, done away with due process and sent legal, law-abiding immigrants high-tailing it for Canada. All in the name of national security and a self-righteous belief that conservative Christianity is (or should be) the law of the land.
Now the inspector general at Ashcroft’s own Justice Department has released a report identifying dozens of cases where the Department’s personnel have violated the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants swept up in the terrorism investigations allowed by the Patriot Act.
As reported by the New York Times, employees from the Bureau of Prisons, the FBI, the DEA and the INS are accused of beating suspects, verbally taunting them and, in one case, “ordering a Muslim inmate to remove his shirt so [an] officer could use it to shine his shoes."
The report is the second in recent weeks from the inspector general to focus on the way the Justice Department is carrying out the broad new surveillance and detention powers it gained under the Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress a month after the 9/11 attacks.In the first report, which was made public on June 2, [the inspector general] found that hundreds of illegal immigrants had been mistreated after they were detained following the attacks.
That report found that many inmates languished in unduly harsh conditions for months, and that the department had made little effort to distinguish legitimate terrorist suspects from others picked up in roundups of illegal immigrants.
The first report brought widespread, bipartisan criticism of the Justice Department, which defended its conduct at the time, saying that it "made no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further attacks."
No doubt Ashcroft will say that the Justice Department does not condone these types of abuses. But it is Ashcroft himself who sets the tone for the agency, and the actions of these abusive employees are clear manifestations of the Attorney General’s own attitudes toward immigrants, civil rights and legal due process.
