Because preventive law enforcement is directed at future crimes, law enforcement authorities often run up against legal protections and safeguards . Ashcroft did an end run around these protections. In the criminal justice system, individuals cannot be arrested and tried in secret. Using immigration law, Ashcroft did just that with hundreds of Sept. 11 detainees. In the criminal justice system, a person must be brought before a magistrate on criminal charges within 48 hours of his arrest. So Ashcroft turned to immigration law again to arrest people on no charges at all, and to hold them for many weeks before they were charged and given any hearing before a judge.

....a young J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the Justice Department's "Alien Radical" Division -- spent the rest of his career seeking to wield against U.S. citizens the questionable preventive tactics of guilt by association, political spying and administrative shortcuts on due process that he had employed against foreign nationals in his first job. In the McCarthy era, he succeeded. Perhaps he, not Robert Kennedy, is Ashcroft's actual role model.

On a lighter note, Bob Harris, who is posting over at Tom Tomorrow, says, "Our Attorney General wants to make terrorist attacks against military bases or nuclear plants a capital offense. Obviously. Nothing deters a suicide bomber quite like the death penalty."