Monday, June 14, 2004

Ashcroft saves Ohio ... sort of In a shocking televised announcement today, Attorney General John Ashcroft said that an al Qaeda plot to blow up an Ohio mall had been thwarted. The American heartland was targeted for death and destruction by an al Qaeda cell which allegedly included a Somali immigrant who will now face justice. Pretty scary stuff. But as in the Padilla case, the devil is in the details: The accused, thirty-two-year-old Nuradin Abdi, was arrested in November 2003 on immigration charges. Although he was slated for deportation, he remained in custody for national security reasons. His principal co-conspirator, Iyman Faris, was arrested in March 2003, pled guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in jail for plotting to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge and for giving material support to al Qaeda. According to the AP report, "The alleged conspiracy began shortly after Abdi, 32, returned in March 2000 from training camps in Ethiopia." FBI officials and Ohio prosecutors said that no specific mall was targeted and there was no imminent threat of an attack when Mr. Abdi was arrested. According to U.S. Attorney Bill Hunt, "The point here is that this plot was foiled while it was still in the planning stages." The indictment was made on Thursday, but held secret until today. So it turns out Ashcroft foiled a conspiracy that began over four years ago around March 2000 (note: under Clinton's watch), that still hadn't managed in all that time to find a specific target and whose principal conspirators had been arrested in March and November 2003. Gee, I dunno ... what reason would Ashcroft and the Bush Administration have for pushing the announcement from Thursday to today? And what reason would Ashcroft himself have for yet again playing up the "thwarting" of another terrorist attack? No reason. None at all. Postscript: Krugman has more: For an example of changing the subject, consider the origins of the Jose Padilla case. There was no publicity when Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002. But on June 6, 2002, Coleen Rowley gave devastating Congressional testimony about failures at the F.B.I. (which reports to Mr. Ashcroft) before 9/11. Four days later, Mr. Ashcroft held a dramatic press conference and announced that Mr. Padilla was involved in a terrifying plot. Instead of featuring Ms. Rowley, news magazine covers ended up featuring the "dirty bomber" who Mr. Ashcroft said was plotting to kill thousands with deadly radiation. Since then Mr. Padilla has been held as an "enemy combatant" with no legal rights. But Newsweek reports that "administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention -- that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological "dirty bomb" -- has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used in court." But most important is the memo. Last week Mr. Ashcroft, apparently in contempt of Congress, refused to release a memo on torture his department prepared for the White House almost two years ago. Fortunately, his stonewalling didn't work: The Washington Post has acquired a copy of the memo and put it on its Web site. Much of the memo is concerned with defining torture down: if the pain inflicted on a prisoner is less than the pain that accompanies "serious physical injury, such as organ failure," it's not torture. Anyway, the memo declares that the federal law against torture doesn't apply to interrogations of enemy combatants "pursuant to [the president's] commander-in-chief authority." In other words, the president is above the law. The memo came out late Sunday. Mr. Ashcroft called a press conference yesterday -- to announce an indictment against a man accused of plotting to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio. The timing was, I'm sure, purely coincidental. Yes, surely. 11:53:38 PM    comment [] Rummy may be watching you Michael Isikoff is reporting that, if a bill currently before Congress passes, military intelligence agents will be free to spy domestically on citizens without disclosing their identity. Without any public hearing or debate, NEWSWEEK has learned, Defense officials recently slipped a provision into a bill before Congress that could vastly expand the Pentagon's ability to gather intelligence inside the United States, including recruiting citizens as informants. Ever since the 1970s, when Army intel agents were caught snooping on antiwar protesters, military intel agencies have operated under tight restrictions inside the United States. But the new provision, approved in closed session last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee, would eliminate one big restriction: that they comply with the Privacy Act, a Watergate-era law that requires government officials seeking information from a resident to disclose who they are and what they want the information for. The CIA always has been exempt -- although by law it isn't supposed to operate inside the United States. The new provision would now extend the same exemption to Pentagon agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency -- so they can help track terrorists. A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee says the provision would allow military intel agents to "approach potential sources and collect personal information from them" without disclosing they work for the government. So we have extra-constitutional gulags where the President may send you to be tortured simply on his say so, and we may soon have the Pentagon spying secretly on citizens. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said? Radio Free Albemuth? No. Try Newsweek and the Washington Post. [n.b. The first paragraph has been edited to correct a mistake.] 12:29:41 AM    comment []

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