The Los Angeles Times brings us the following information today:
Students, Nuns and Sailor-Mongers, Beware
By Jonathan Turley
It has lain dormant in the darkest recesses of American law for 125 years, but this month Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft introduced critics of the administration to his latest weapon in law enforcement.
In a Miami federal court, the attorney general charged the environmental group Greenpeace under an obscure 1872 law originally intended to end the practice of "sailor-mongering," or the luring of sailors with liquor and prostitutes from their ships. Ashcroft plucked the law from obscurity to punish Greenpeace for boarding a vessel near port in Miami.
The Reverend Attorney General has perverse idea of law enforcement.
It would appear that only a couple of prosecutions have arisen from the ongoing concentration camp detentions in Guantanamo Bay:
all US military personnel. Despite the invocation of the
ominous "military tribunal" order signed by Bush in 6 cases,
absolutely no criminal prosecutions of detainees in GTMO have been initiated despite detentions as long as 2 years.
At home, we have the well-known "Patriot" Act, which needs no further description here, and this new move to prosecute political activists on obscure laws.
I know its been written about and written about, but I can't help but wonder what dark road Ashcroft has steered us on to. I am getting the impression that the man makes J. Edgar Hoover look good.