Chasing Terrorists or Fears?
Court rulings call the attorney general's claims of homefront success into question.
By Kevin Sack, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Almost immediately after Sept. 11, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft committed his department to a preemptive anti-terrorism strategy modeled after Robert F. Kennedy's zealous harassment of organized crime bosses in the 1960s. And, like the mob-busting prosecutors of the 1930s who put Al Capone away for tax evasion, Ashcroft pledged to use the entirety of the criminal code to disrupt terrorist plots before they matured....
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But three years later, it is difficult to gauge how successful the approach has been, and whether its victories have outweighed its costs in botched prosecutions, the detention of innocent people, the alienation of Arab Americans, the fomenting of anti-American sentiment and, in the eyes of some, the compromise of civil liberties.
There have been no subsequent terrorist attacks on American soil, a fact that Ashcroft cites as primary evidence of his strategy's success.
But many legal analysts say the absence of terrorism does not alone prove that preemptive law enforcement is working. There is, they say, a significant difference between fighting the flamboyant crime bosses of the past and pursuing the shadowy terrorists of today....
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"There have really been very few real victories in cases that have brought terrorism charges since Sept. 11," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in September. "And those seem to have been overshadowed by seemingly half-hearted prosecutions."...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-terror24oct24,1,3895690.story?coll=la-home-headlines 
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