Abstract

Ashcroft: 0 for 5,000

The article discusses the failure of Attorney General John Ashcroft to convict even one out of 5,000 detained foreign nationals as alleged terrorists in the War on Terrorism. On September 2, 2004, a federal judge in Detroit threw out the only jury conviction the Justice Department has obtained on a terrorism charge since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In October 2001, shortly after the men were initially arrested, Ashcroft heralded the case in a national press conference as evidence of the success of his anti-terror campaign. It now turns out that the prosecution failed to disclose to the defense evidence that other government experts did not consider the sketches and videotape to be terrorist casing materials at all and that the government's key witness had admitted to lying. Meanwhile, despite widespread recognition that the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison has done untold damage worldwide to the legitimacy of the fight against terrorism, the military has still not charged any higher-ups in the Pentagon, and the President George W. Bush Administration has shown no inclination to appoint an independent commission to investigate. And in late July, resurrecting the ideological-exclusion practices so familiar from the cold war, the Department of Homeland Security revoked a work visa for a prominent Swiss Islamic scholar, Tariq Ramadan, who had been hired by Notre Dame University for an endowed chair in its International Peace Studies Institute. The barring of Ramadan reinforces the sense that the Bush Administration cannot or will not distinguish between moderates and extremists and is simply anti-Muslim.