Word: chertoff
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Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff is the Dick Cheney of the Justice Department. Brainy, intense and well connected, the former federal prosecutor can usually be found at Attorney General John Ashcroft's elbow as the department's top counterterrorism tactician. And last week Chertoff vanished to an undisclosed location...
With no deputies along and no publicity, Chertoff was on a stealthy swing through France, Belgium and the Netherlands. His mission: sell Western European governments on a new Bush Administration plan to post U.S. Justice Department prosecutors overseas in unprecedented numbers. "The sinews that hold a terrorist network together are money, communications and transportation," Chertoff told TIME before his trip. To help sever those sinews, Chertoff wants to have American prosecutors stationed in key capitals, where they can work behind the scenes with their counterparts to overcome the legal and cultural obstacles to shipping evidence...
...most tension-packed moment of Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week came, not surprisingly, when he was forced to defend the Bush Administration's embrace of military tribunals. How could the U.S. hold trials in which the judges are military officers, just a two-thirds vote is sufficient to convict, and there is no need for proof beyond a reasonable doubt? How could the Administration support legal proceedings that are held in secret--meaning a defendant can go from being charged to being put to death without the public ever finding...
...Justice Department has tried to justify the intrusion as necessary to prevent terrorists from using their counsel, in the tradition of mob consiglieres and drug-kingpin lawyers, to convey information to co-conspirators on the outside. At last week's Senate hearing, Chertoff quoted from an al-Qaeda terrorism manual obtained overseas that urged members to take advantage of prison visits to communicate useful information...
...Chertoff?s inquisitors had a lot of material: Tuesday, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the U.S. government is currently detaining 603 people as part of its ongoing terrorism investigation. One hundred and four of them have been charged with federal crimes, according to the Justice Department - which leaves 499 people being held on relatively minor charges, including immigration violations. The detentions are necessary, the Attorney General insists, in light of the country?s battle against lingering "sleeper" terror cells and networks...