Word: ashcrofts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...terrorism may be launching a legal revolution in America. The changes pose these questions: How necessary are some of the reforms? Have John Ashcroft and the Justice Department unraveled constitutional protections in trying to ensure our safety? "There is a significant civil-liberties price to be paid as we adopt various national-security initiatives," says Mary Jo White, a former U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, whose office pursued some of the biggest terrorism cases of the 1990s. "For the most part, I think that price is necessary. But what I worry about is government officials...
Three weeks ago, Ashcroft made an even more sweeping decision in a case involving David Joseph, 18, a Haitian who arrived in the U.S. illegally last October. He and 215 other undocumented immigrants from Haiti and the Dominican Republic scrambled ashore in Biscayne Bay, Fla. On arrival, Joseph petitioned for asylum as a political refugee. An immigration judge okayed his request, and an appeals board supported the judge, ruling that Joseph was neither a danger to the community nor a flight risk. But Ashcroft, who has the final say in all immigration cases, stepped in to demand that Joseph...
...Ashcroft did not argue that Joseph was in any way linked to terrorism. Instead, Ashcroft insisted that granting Joseph bond "would tend to encourage further surges of mass migration from Haiti by sea, with attendant strains on national and homeland-security resources." In other words, patrolling the U.S. coastline to keep out illegal aliens diverts Coast Guard and immigration officials from other duties. Ashcroft also argued that Haiti was a route through which Pakistanis and Palestinians might try to enter the U.S. illegally...
Aides to Attorney General John Ashcroft have quietly sidetracked a White House--promised study of ballistics fingerprinting, a forensic technique hotly opposed by the gun lobby. Last October, during the Washington sniper shootings, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer dismissed calls for a national ballistics fingerprint database that would link possible criminals to the unique markings left on spent bullets. But after critics accused the White House of being too beholden to the National Rifle Association, President Bush reversed course and ordered the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to conduct a scientific study of the technique, in which microscopic markings...
...months later, the study hasn't even begun. ATF officials were about to get started when the agency was transferred by the Homeland Security reorganization from the Treasury Department to Justice. Aides to Ashcroft, a dependable ally of the pro-gun lobby, then raised concerns about a January 2003 California state government report suggesting that wear and tear may alter a gun's ballistic signature. ATF firearms experts challenged the California findings, but Ashcroft's advisers decided to take the White House study away from ATF and hand it to an outside, presumably more objective, agency. "We wanted to have...