And, of course, the news that Bush & Company totally undercut the war on terror by revealing the name of our Al Qaeda mole is nowhere to be seen in today's Washington Post. Anyway, this story is yet another shocker of how incompetent, and frankly uncaring about the war on terror, Mr. Ashcroft's Justice Dept. really is.
The guy who was playing basketball rather than helping the terror trial (read the end of the story) should be fired.
Prosecutors in the first major terror trial after Sept. 11 were hindered by superiors from presenting some of their most powerful evidence, including testimony from an al-Qaida leader and video footage showing Osama bin Laden's European operatives casing American landmarks, Justice Department memos show.
The department's terrorism unit "provided no help of any kind in this prosecution," the U.S. Attorney's office in Detroit wrote in one of the memos, which detail bitter divisions between front-line prosecutors and their superiors in Washington....
Whatever the outcome, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and more than three dozen interviews with current and former officials detail how the differences between Washington and the field office kept important evidence from being shown to jurors.
"We were butting heads vigorously with narrow-shouldered bureaucrats in Washington," Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino told AP in an interview. He is the lead Detroit prosecutor who is now under investigation in Washington.
"There was a series of evidence, pieces of evidence, that we wanted to get into our trial that we were unable to do. Things that would have strengthened the case immeasurably, and made the case much stronger, exponentially," Convertino said....
The lone Justice lawyer sent from Washington to help told his Detroit colleagues "he had no intention of participating in the trial" and refused to assist when an urgent issue arose involving a witness and the State Department, the Detroit office wrote.
The Washington lawyer "spent the same 10 (trial) weeks in a hotel at taxpayers' expense when he was not playing basketball in the evenings," the memo stated.
