Ashcroft's missteps mount

Ashcroft's missteps mount
Los Angeles Times: Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft has touted his efforts to nab "sleeper cells" inside the United States. But Ashcroft and his associates too often have sleepwalked. The Justice Department's admission Wednesday of potentially criminal prosecutorial misconduct in a prominent Detroit terrorism case does good for the cause of trampled civil liberties but doesn't inspire much confidence about efforts to find real terrorists lurking in the U.S.
Federal prosecutors arrested four defendants in Detroit a week after Sept. 11, 2001, accusing them of conspiring to launch attacks on targets such as the U.S.' Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. In June 2003, a jury convicted two of aiding terrorists and one of document fraud alone. One was acquitted.
Convictions thrown out
On Thursday, a federal judge threw out the convictions because, among other things, prosecutors withheld a jailhouse letter discrediting the government's star witness and mischaracterized doodles in a sketchbook as drawings of likely terror targets.
If this were an isolated instance, it would be one thing. But other cases have gone belly-up. In May, Ashcroft and the FBI targeted Brandon Mayfield, a 37-year-old Oregon lawyer, as being linked to the Madrid bombings. Defying the findings of Spanish investigators, they insisted that his fingerprints matched those on a plastic bag connected to the bombings. They didn't. Most recently, the Justice Department lost a case against a computer student in Boise, Idaho, who was acquitted of charges that he was raising money for terrorist causes.