``After 40 years of trade and travel sanctions, Fidel Castro is still as brutal and undemocratic as ever,'' said Rep. Jeff Flake, a House leader in the drive to open Cuba. ``At some point we need to concede that our current policy is a failure. Let's try a new approach.''
But the Homeland Security Department announced this month that it was stepping up embargo enforcements, using ``intelligence and investigative resources to identify travelers or businesses engaged in activities that circumvent the embargo.''

"The role of the attorney general has changed dramatically," said Laura Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office. "The attorney general is supposed to be the chief enforcer of the Bill of Rights in the executive branch. [Ashcroft] does not play that role as much as he plays the role of trying to test the limits of the constitutional guarantees."

Experts inside and outside the Justice Department say that some of the heat that Ashcroft takes may be intentional -- he deflects attention away from the president on controversial issues such as detaining hundreds of foreigners on minor immigration violations for long periods of time, designating a U.S. citizen as an "enemy combatant" and the proposed use of military tribunals for suspected terrorists.

"I do not believe that we should retreat to the kind of vulnerability which we had prior to September the 11th," Ashcroft told reporters. "I know of no provision of the Patriot Act which offends the liberties of America."
mr ed - john, u cant have it both ways baby.
Ashcroft also kept media interviews limited to local TV reporters, not the national or local print press. His aides say he did not want his message filtered through the national press corps.

But, who was it that fixed the cases? How could these guys operate for more than a decade immune from prosecution? And, the answer is coming out in a very strange place. What Alamoudi and al-Arian have in common is a guy named Grover Norquist. He’s the super lobbyist. Newt Gingrich's guy, the one the NRA calls on, head of American taxpayers. He is the guy that was hired by Alamoudi to head up the Islamic institute and he's the registered agent for Alamoudi, personally, and for the Islamic Institute.
Grover Norquist's best friend is Karl Rove, the White House chief of staff, and apparently Norquist was able to fix things. He got extreme right wing Muslim people to be the gatekeepers in the White House. That's why moderate Americans couldn't speak out after 9/11. Moderate Muslims couldn't get into the White House because Norquist's friends were blocking their access.

"The men we are being attacked by," he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But that's what Captain Cirino called them - and rightly so.
Here's the reason. All American soldiers are supposed to believe - indeed have to believe, along with their President and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld - that Osama bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring over Iraq's borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close allies and neighbours of Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey are always left out of the equation)

ROBERT FISK: U.S. Troop morale low. Troops still gunning down Iraqi civilians with abandon

Mr Cheney, he said, "insisted that desk analysts were not looking hard enough for the evidence".


The news is out that the same company that was used in Florida to purge voter rolls of millions of African American votes is now being hired by other states across the country for the same job.

Another notable Votescam criminal can now be found sitting on the bench of the highest court in the nation. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, while still a Federal Appeals Judge, single handedly destroyed what would have been an historic lawsuit filed against Justice Department lawyer Craig Donsanto, who had refused to prosecute the extensive vote fraud evidence brought to him by the Colliers.