Politics: Rule of Law

Jonathan Turley in today's LA Times lays out another sound argument in the compelling and growing case that Attorney General John Ashcroft has something other than the country's best interests at heart. In fact, Ashcroft's behavior is much more analogous, Turley points out, to a recently State Department decried action by China against an accused terrorist of its own.

As Turley explains, Ashcroft has moved the trial of Zaccarias Moussouai to Virginia to ensure both a death penalty and that penalty's speedy application. It proceeded with the case against Moussouai, inserting their allegations that much-closer-to-real-life Al Queda bigwig Ramzi bin Al-Shibh was the puppet master for 9/11 and Moussouai.

There's only one problem: Moussaoui's crazy, and when we caught bin Al-Shibh, he told us as much.

Here's a good bit:

From the beginning, however, there was doubt that Moussaoui was ever a part of the conspiracy, and there is growing agreement that he is a barking lunatic. Now the Justice Department is facing the prospect of losing all or part of its high-profile case to a hate-spewing, rug-chewing maniac. Worse still, the government's growing disaster is of its own making.

Lacking any meaningful evidence linking Moussaoui to the 9/11 plot, the government wrote an indictment that reads like a bad dime-store novel, describing shadowy figures and loosely imputing their actions to Moussaoui. A central character in this criminal novelette is alleged 9/11 mastermind Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who figures so prominently in the indictment that the government named him an unindicted co-conspirator.

That made Bin al-Shibh a material witness in the case, but the Justice Department was not concerned about his being called to confirm these facts because Bin al-Shibh was at large and believed to be possibly dead. That changed last September when a very much alive Bin al-Shibh was arrested in Pakistan.

Under interrogation, Bin al-Shibh has reportedly given the CIA some valuable information, but also one highly unwelcome tidbit: Al Qaeda thinks Moussaoui is as crazy as we do.

Now the judge in the case, Leonie Brinkema -- who has been going nose to nose with this whack-job since day one -- has granted Moussaoui permission to cross-examine bin Al-Shibh, since the Justice Department has leaned so heavily on Mr. Al-Shibh for their prosecution of Moussaoui. (She, unlike Mr. Ashcroft, hasn't forgotten the sixth amendment which includes "...to be confronted with the witnesses against him...") Ashcroft is now threatening to take his terrorist trial out of the civilian court and into a military tribunal where he can get the lethal justice he's so excited about, without having jump through all these hoops. That's what the Constitution really is for him, isn't it? Just hoops to jump through.