Sept. 02, 2004 - 20:20 MDT

THE WONDERING JEW

Official Style

A very short editorial in the Rocky Mountain News today, in part:

"Seeing its first post-9/11 terrorism case collapse had to be horribly embarrassing to the Justice Department, but to its credit the department took the right and honorable course."

"On Tuesday, the department agreed that terror charges against two Arab immigrants, once said by Attorney General John Ashcroft to be members of an Al Qaida sleeper cell, should be thrown out, their convictions vacated. The two will receive a new trial on lesser charges of document fraud, a substantial comedown from what was once hailed as a victory in the war on terror."

"The department was prodded into that course by U.S. District JudgeGerald Rosen in Detroit and by the defense attorneys for the two immigrants, who were bagged in a raid by federal agents looking for someone else. The department investigated defense charges that assistant U.S. attorneys withheld and misrepresented evidence, and indeed found evidence of prosecutorial misconduct fatal to the case."

"Potentially exculpatory evidence by an ex-CIA agent was withheld from the defense."

"So instead of what the department insisted was "a sleeper combat cell" seeking weapons and terror targets, "we don't know what we have -- maybe just a couple of grifters supplying bogus documents to illegal immigrants, practically a cottage industry in this country."

"Indeed, the judge admonished Ashcroft for a"distressing lack of care" in his public comments on the Detroit case."

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Just passed the TV after reading the foregoing article and heard someone on the podium waving the flag, mother and apple pie saying something on the order of, "We gotta fight them over there rather than fight them here." Sort of like "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming," that was being pushed a few years ago.

So here we have the convention as we did a bit ago for the other side, and in the course of and in between they keep hurling blivets at each other. Blivets containing ten pounds of stinky baloney in one pound paper bags. That is perhaps the way to campaign nowadays, hasn't got any better since politics of the old days -- when the title of muckracker was coined I think.

This case I feel is Cops and Robbers a la Official Style . . . . . . . .

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