# Ashcroft, are you listening?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ashcroft-are-you-listening/106658>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [May 1, 2002, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ashcroft-are-you-listening/106658 "2002-05-01T10:08:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![december](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/838e76/32.png) [@december](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/december)\
**Post date:** [May 7, 2002, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ashcroft-are-you-listening/106658/61 "2002-05-07T03:04:10Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by sailor \*  
> \>\>at the very least it was plausibly legal
> 
> An English judge disagrees with you. He could not find the plausibility anywhere.

This is word play. The law is ambiguous. We all understand that ultimately the law means what the courts say it does.

Ashcroft’s interpretation was automatically reasonable, because, when he took his action, a court had held the law to mean what he thought it did, and no court had ruled otherwise.

**Guinastasia** , the sorry history of the Japanese internment camps helps demonstrate my point: just because civil rights are taken away during a time of emergency, it doesn’t follow that those rights are gone forever.

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**Author:** ![december](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/838e76/32.png) [@december](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/december)\
**Post date:** [May 7, 2002, 3:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ashcroft-are-you-listening/106658/62 "2002-05-07T03:10:14Z")

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From [Opinionjournal.com](http://Opinionjournal.com)

> [@](#):
>
> Last week, U.S. district judge Shira Scheindlin dismissed perjury charges against Osama Awadallah, who was detained as a material witness on Sept. 21. Federal officials had found his phone number in the car of one of the hijackers. He told a grand jury that he knew only one of the hijackers by name, but later conceded he knew two of them. Federal officials then charged him with perjury.
> 
> Judge Scheindlin ruled that the Justice Department had wrongly interpreted the federal statute allowing detention of material witnesses. Such witnesses, she held, can’t be detained until someone has actually been charged with a crime. She used her 120-page ruling to lecture prosecutors, saying this was the sort of thing that drove American patriots to rebel against the king of England in 1776.
> 
> Attorney General John Ashcroft called the ruling an “anomaly” and said such detentions were perfectly appropriate. We’d better hope so, for Mr. Awadallah is only one of about two dozen people detained in such a way in connection with Sept. 11. If Judge Scheindlin is right and Mr. Ashcroft has misread the law, it would be a major blow to the legal war on terrorism. If that happens, the lawyers truly will have won.

[http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bminiter/?id=110001669](http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bminiter/?id=110001669)

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