Hold Ashcroft Accountable
Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a "paradigm of prevention," by which the Justice Department would aggressively use federal law to take "suspected terrorists" off the streets. As he later admitted in his book Never Again, however, Ashcroft and those he oversaw had no idea where the next terrorist threat might lie. So the government locked up more than 5,000 foreign nationals in anti-terrorism preventive detention in the first two years after 9/11--not one of whom stands convicted of a terrorist offense today.
Most were locked up using immigration law. But when the government suspected a US citizen, immigration law was no help. So the Ashcroft Justice Department turned to the "material witness" law, which applies to citizens, and twisted it for ends it was never designed to serve--to lock up people "for investigation" even where the government lacked probable cause to believe they had engaged in criminal activity.
Abdullah al-Kidd was one of the many locked up under this law. A US citizen born in Wichita and once a star running back for the University of Idaho, al-Kidd was arrested as a material witness in 2003 and spent more than a year living under strict, parole-like conditions. He was never called to testify in any proceeding. Like many others, he was never charged with criminal conduct. He was a victim of Ashcroft's "paradigm of prevention."
Al-Kidd sued, and in September the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ruled that Ashcroft could be held personally responsible for this policy. This is a landmark decision for two reasons: it declares a central aspect of Ashcroft's policy clearly illegal, and it insists that accountability extends to those who authorize illegal policies, not just to the foot soldiers who carry them out.
Al-Kidd was subjected to an FBI investigation after 9/11; he was, after all, a Muslim. But the FBI found no evidence that he had engaged in criminal activity...
Rep. Joe ("You Lie") Wilson Authored Bill To Let Illegal Immigrant Stay In U.S.
Slide Show: The Far-Right Fringe
"[Right-wing extremists] live in a politically parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do. They don't like established facts so they come armed with their own."— Gary Younge
