In tonight's televised presidential debate on foreign policy, John Kerry should be asking George Bush why he is preaching democracy abroad while breaching its basic precepts at home.

The senator should also be grilling the president on why security-conscious Americans should trust an administration whose incompetence is not confined to Iraq but extends to almost every facet of homeland security.

Under Attorney-General John Ashcroft's watch, terrorism-related cases are collapsing for want of evidence or proper judicial conduct.

• In the Detroit "sleeper cell" case, in which two people were acquitted last year, a judge has just overturned the conviction of the other two. The ruling follows a Justice Department admission that several pieces of evidence should have been given to the defence before trial.
• Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th bomber of 9/11, has won his argument in court that the administration cannot deny him access to the statements of others in American custody who implicated him.
• Yasser Esam Hamdi, the "enemy combatant" American, is to be, or already has been, sent to his ancestral Saudi Arabia. The administration chose to pack him off, rather than justify his detention, as ordered by the Supreme Court.
• An Oregon attorney, a convert to Islam, implicated by Washington in the Madrid bombing in March, had to be freed after the FBI falsely linked his fingerprints to someone else's.
• A jury has acquitted a Saudi student at Idaho University after 16 months in detention. He was charged with providing material support to terrorists for hosting a website on which other people had posted controversial speeches, including calls for jihad. "This was a radical position for the government to take," Jameel Jaffer, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, told me. "They'd never do that with a mainstream website, like Salon or the New York Times."
• All criminal charges against a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, including espionage, which carries the death penalty, have been dropped. He now stands charged only with adultery. (Ironic, given how we have just excoriated Turkey over the issue!)
• A charge of spying for Syria against a Syrian American interpreter at Guantanamo has also been dropped.

Guantanamo Bay remains a legal black hole and a pit of possible war crimes by Americans.

Of the 600 or so foreigners detained there, 77 have so far been sent back to their native lands. These include teenagers as well as a 100-year-old Afghan. There is no knowing why they had been picked up in the first place and wrongfully held.

Meanwhile, the first military tribunal — kick-started by the Supreme Court, which said detainees have the right to challenge their detention — is bogged down in bureaucratic ineptitude. No sooner had the preliminary proceedings begun than the Arabic translations were deemed inaccurate and the chair of the panel was accused of conflict.

He is a friend of the person in the Pentagon in charge of the proceedings. He had also made a statement that the detainees don't deserve speedy trials, a statement he denied — until told he had been recorded on tape, at which point he buried his face in his hands.

Not one of the thousands of poor illegal immigrants detained under security checks, or the tens of thousands of young men hauled in for questioning, has been charged with a terrorism-related crime.

No one knows the number of people detained. Ashcroft stopped releasing the count after 1,100.

The ACLU has filed a brief with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. It accuses the Bush administration of indiscriminate, haphazard, arbitrary and selective detention of Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia, principally Pakistan, and denying them due process.

The brief lists some cases involving government tactics that are all too familiar: Any Muslim or Arab videotaping or photographing tourist sites risks being arrested for scoping potential terrorists targets.

Lest we in Canada feel smug, some of the 23 Pakistani and Indian young men arrested last year for terrorist intent had been picked up precisely for such activities, only to see all terrorism-related charges dropped later.

Part of the U.S. Patriot Act was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge yesterday. The ACLU had challenged the FBI's power to demand confidential financial records from companies as part of terrorism investigations.

All of the above paints a clear picture.

The Bush administration wants to be seen to be doing something about terrorism. It misuses the executive power it has grabbed. It arrests people who look different. It resists bringing cases to the court. When it does, it often lacks the evidence to back up its wild claims. Its prosecutorial clumsiness is stunning.

But it is adept at fanning fear and paranoia.

In the same week that British singer Yusuf Islam, a.k.a. Cat Stevens, was turned back, a Midwest Airlines flight cleared for takeoff from Milwaukee was turned back after a passenger found something written in Farsi, a.k.a. Persian.

It turned out to have been "something of a contemplative nature." But in Bush's America, anything in a language other than English could be deemed a weapon of mass destruction.

Citizens may be excused their suspicions, given the government's modus operandi — from Guantanamo Bay to mainland U.S.A. to Abu Ghraib in Baghdad to the secret detention centres in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

All this constitutes a dark chapter in American history. It is also the worst way to fight terrorism.

Kerry should be saying so, starting tonight.

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited

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