Not now, for God's sake—can't you see I'm in my pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-Super Bowl warmup? Now this is the kind of tough opening graf that A1 was made for:

DETROIT, Jan. 28 — Eight months after Attorney General John Ashcroft hailed the government's partial victory in a trial against an accused terror cell based in Detroit, the convictions of three men are in doubt amid growing turmoil within the offices of the federal prosecutor and the F.B.I. here.

Except ... oops ... no, they buried Danny Hakim's story on A21.

The story follows up on a piece published Tuesday in the Detroit News detailing multiple allegations of misconduct swirling around a significant Detroit-area terror case. It certainly got my attention: the first prosecution to derive from the 9/11 investigations, a prosecution John Ashcroft contravened a gag order to boost publicly during the trial and crowed about after as evidence of law-enforcement success in the "war on terror," is coming off the rails and prosecutors, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are starting to look like a bunch of guys passing around a really hot potato.

I'll attempt a quick summary of a fairly ugly tangle of charges:

• A Lebanese man, arrested on cocaine-distribution charges, was enlisted as a confidential informant by Richard Convertino, the lead prosecutor on the terrorism case, to (in the man's words) "spy on Muslims who live in my city." Convertino is under investigation for having improperly given this informant and others reduced sentences, on his own authority and without required approval from his office.
• Convertino is also under investigation for having tried to persuade a U.S. District Court employee to provide him with confidential information about a federal prisoner so that Convertino could discredit the man's testimony (alleging that the prosecution's star witness admitted he was perjuring himself) during the terrorism trial.
• The informant, who made claims that an FBI agent asked him to steal mail from Detroit Muslims, subsequently had his name leaked to the Detroit Free Press and has fled the country (with government approval) in fear for his life. Other informants were also outed, and the Times reports that the F.B.I. is investigating the leaks and possible agent misconduct.
• Convertino further withheld potentially exculpatory documents from the defense in the terrorism case. The fact is undisputed, though Convertino claims the documents weren't worth anything (an excuse that the U.S. District Judge on the case, Gerald Rosen, isn't buying).
• As if that weren't enough, Convertino says that he's being targeted by Justice because of testimony he gave to the Senate Finance Committee last summer on terrorism issues, and because he was critical internally of mismanagement and "intense territorial infighting" within the department. The Times notes that "he was removed from the case within days of being subpoenaed" by the Finance Committee, and the committee chairman, Charles Grassley, has "for months" been writing to Ashcroft "seeking assurance that Mr. Convertino would not face retaliation" for his testimony, which lends at least some weight to the allegation.

Or, shorter version: Yeah, folks, this is the Ashcroft Justice Department. Feel safer now?

I don't see much new reporting in the Times article, but I see a very effective synthesis of the current state of play. More to the point, perhaps, it seems to me that this is exactly the kind of service a national Paper of Record is supposed to perform: take up a story like this, that bears on an issue of great public significance (the Justice Department's conduct in its anti-terrorism bailiwick), that's been developed through scattered and moderately obscure regional coverage, render it coherent and make it visible. As opposed, to say, rendering it coherent and then dumping it in the last page before the obits.

But come on, it's four days before the Super Bowl. Much better to use A1 real estate for an article about how the "star-crossed" Carolina Panthers found redemption as a team. Why waste Lynn Zinser's deathless literary prose (the Panthers, after too-early success, "became a modern fable, the team that flew too close to the sun") just on the slobs who read the sports page? Besides, it's not like things won't still be fucked at the Justice Department come Monday.

posted by michael  5:34:29 PM  
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