Word: ashcroft
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Sixty-two years later, Attorney General John Ashcroft has just unveiled a similar proposal tailored to this equally jittery but higher-tech moment. Set to take effect in the fall, the new program will fingerprint and photograph some 100,000 visitors from as many as two dozen nations deemed to pose an "elevated national security risk"; some visa holders already living here will also be questioned and printed. In a matter of seconds, the prints will be matched against an FBI database stocked with thousands of fingerprints lifted from locales as varied as al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan...
...Though Ashcroft was intentionally vague about who will be registered, civil libertarians get the point. "This is clearly tarring a whole community with indelible ink," says Angela Kelley of the National Immigration Forum, "and it will make them much less likely to come forward with intelligence information we need from them." The Council on American-Islamic Relations likened the move to asking Muslims to don star-and-crescent armbands, just as the Nazis required Jews to wear Stars of David during World...
...White House backed off from its initial alarm over an alleged plot to explode a "dirty bomb," a conventional explosive laced with a radioactive element. The U.S. government said that the threat of such an attack on an American city was minimal. The clarification followed U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's announcement of the arrest in May of José Padilla, an American citizen who converted to Islam and calls himself Abdullah al-Muhajir, and his incarceration in military custody as an "enemy combatant." 55 CANCRI Homely Star Planet hunters at the University of California have found the first solar...
...quite radioactive) dust settled on Ashcroft's dramatic announcement, some began asking not only why Mr. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was being held in a Navy brig as an "enemy combatant," but also why he was dominating America's headlines - and its nightmares. Within hours of Ashcroft's announcement, administration officials were pointing out that Padilla had no radioactive material or any other bomb-making equipment. Nor had he chosen a target, or formulated a plan. And while his connections with al-Qaeda operatives were never in doubt, he suddenly began to look a lot more like the accused shoe...
...Padilla entered public life via an announcement from Moscow on Monday, by Attorney General John Ashcroft, that an al-Qaeda operative had been captured at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, en route to contaminate a U.S. city with a radiological bomb. Within minutes panicky cable news channels were running file footage of mushroom clouds. They then spent much of the next two days atoning via a more sober explanation of dirty-bomb scenarios - and why they're not nearly as scary as they sound...