Robyn Blumner: An unaccountable Ashcroft endangers the safety of the nation

"This week, I turn my column over to U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose opening remarks during the oversight hearing with Attorney General John Ashcroft on June 8 succinctly lays out the case as to why Ashcroft is among the worst attorney generals in modern history. The statement below is substantially abridged. My comments are in italic.
   
    Welcome, Mr. Attorney General. It is good to have you back before the committee. . . . It has been a long time since our last oversight hearing with you. Fifteen months have passed since your last, brief appearance in March last year.
    Mr. Attorney General, I must speak frankly about an issue that has emerged as a basic problem during your tenure. There are two words that succinctly sum up the Justice Department's accountability and its cooperation with congressional oversight on your watch. Those two words are "sparse," and "grudging." Even those of us who have served through several presidents cannot recall a worse performance record when it comes to responsiveness.
    Just days ago we learned of Justice Department involvement in devising legal arguments to minimize our obligations under such U.S. laws and international agreements as the convention on torture. Yet a letter I wrote to you last November, well before most of these abuses came to light, went unanswered for months, and when we are lucky enough to get responses, the premium is on unresponsiveness. Few of the answers we get are worth much more than the paper they are printed on. We often learn more about what's really happening in the Justice Department in the press than we do from you.
    In the 1,000 days since the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, we have learned little from our Justice Department. We know this:
    * The Moussaoui prosecution has bogged down because the prosecution refuses to let the defense interview witnesses in U.S. custody.
    * A German court acquitted two 9-11 co-conspirators, in part because the U.S. government refused to provide evidence for the cases.
    * Three defendants who you said had knowledge of the 9-11 attacks did not have such knowledge; the Department retracted your statement, and then you had to apologize to the court for violating a gag order in the case.
    * The man you claimed was about to explode a "dirty bomb" in the United States had no such intention or capability, and because he has been held for two years without access to counsel, any crimes he did commit might never be prosecuted.
    * U.S. citizens with no connection to terrorism have been imprisoned as material witnesses for chunks of time -- with an "Oops, I'm sorry" when a "100 percent positive" fingerprint match turns out to be 100 percent wrong.
    * Noncitizens with no connection to terrorism have been rounded up on the basis of their religion or ethnicity, held for months without charges and, in some cases, physically abused.
    * Interrogation techniques approved by the Department of Justice have led to abuses that have tarnished our nation's reputation and likely given strength and driven hundreds, if not thousands, of new recruits to our enemies.
    * Your department turned a Canadian citizen over to Syria, who was tortured.
    * Documents have been classified, unclassified and reclassified to score political points rather than for legitimate national security reasons.
    * Statistics have been manipulated to exaggerate the department's success in fighting terrorism.
    * The threat of another attack on U.S. soil remains high, although how high depends on who, in the administration, is talking and what audience they are addressing.
    We need checks and balances. There is much that has gone wrong that your administration stubbornly refuses to admit. For this democratic republic to work, we need openness and accountability.
    During Ashcroft's testimony, he was asked to provide the committee with copies of the memorandums that had just emerged providing legal justifications for the use of torture. Ashcroft refused, even though they were widely available on the Internet.
    Here is part of Leahy's response:
    If government agencies have rationalized the use of torture, that would seem to go to the heart of what we are investigating. It is inexcusable to read about such memos in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times and then to have them denied to the Senate by the executive branch.
    Hiding these documents from view is the sign of a cover-up, not of cooper- ation.
    For years, Ashcroft's Justice Department has refused to answer many of the questions put to it by Congress relative to the way the USA Patriot Act has been implemented and other potential areas of abuse. Leahy's withering assessment was not just partisan jockeying, it was an evaluation born of frustration over the way the department's functioning has been distorted by an unresponsive, unaccountable and irresponsible leader."