Zero For 5,000

That's a pretty sad rate of conviction given all of the time, money and torture we've spent and inflicted under the guise of battling terrorism. In baseball, corporate America or any other entity that matters, the person with that kind of dismal track record would be out of a job. But of course, this is the Bush Administration so John Ashcroft is still being praised.

"Until that reversal, the Detroit case had marked the only terrorist conviction obtained from the Justice Department's detention of more than 5,000 foreign nationals in anti-terrorism sweeps since 9/11. So Ashcroft's record is 0 for 5,000. When the attorney general was locking these men up in the immediate wake of the attacks, he held almost daily press conferences to announce how many 'suspected terrorists' had been detained. No press conference has been forthcoming to announce that exactly none of them have turned out to be actual terrorists.

Meanwhile, despite widespread recognition that Abu Ghraib has done untold damage worldwide to the legitimacy of the fight against terrorism, the military has still not charged any higher-ups in the Pentagon, and the administration has shown no inclination to appoint an independent commission to investigate. It prefers to leave the investigation to the Justice Department and the Pentagon, the two entities that drafted secret legal memos defending torture. "