Word: ashcrofts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When attorney general John Ashcroft suggested that the American public form a giant neighborhood-watch service after last year's terrorist attacks, people in the Portland, Ore., area must have been paying attention. The arrest last week of four U.S. citizens accused of conspiring to join al-Qaeda was the culmination of yearlong cooperation among a clutch of curious neighbors, more than 100 fbi agents and an alert deputy sheriff. Officials have accused Jeffrey Leon Battle, 32; Patrice Lumumba Ford, 31; and Muhammad Ibrahim Bilal, 22, of trying to travel to Afghanistan late last year to support al-Qaeda. (They...
With the arrests, Ashcroft proclaimed that the government has "neutralized a suspected terrorist cell." It remains to be seen whether that is true or whether local vigilance has gone overboard. Just a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks last year, a deputy sheriff in Skamania County, Wash., responded to a complaint about gunshots at a rural gravel pit. Six men in Muslim caps were testing out an arsenal of weaponry, including an assault rifle and semiautomatic pistols. The deputy took their names. A month later, when one was arrested for carrying illegal weapons, the officer recognized him and called...
...John Ashcroft's aggressive pursuit of the death penalty may be backfiring. A U.S. district judge in Vermont last week ruled the federal death penalty unconstitutional, arguing that the law violates defendants' due-process rights because it allows looser procedures and standards of evidence in sentencing than are allowed at trial. The ruling in U.S. v. Fell followed a similar one by a New York judge in July. The irony is that in both cases the Attorney General ordered the local federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty even though they wanted to ask for lesser sentences. Since taking office...
...John Ashcroft’s message to critics of the Bush administration’s domestic anti-terrorism measures delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee last December. “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this,” Ashcroft said. “Your tactics only aid terrorists—for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends.” Ashcroft’s attempt to associate dissent with...
...many argue, they died for freedom. They died for the American way of life. There are two problems with this argument. First, American freedom has been weakened since the attacks by Attorney General John Ashcroft and his lackeys. Citizens were prepared to give up some liberties for the sake of safety, but those few liberties have turned out to be the most sacred. American citizens have been arrested and held in isolation by the government as “enemy combatants,” a legal fiction that has somehow trumped the Constitution. Other Americans have been singled...