Congress Should Demand Answers from Attorney General

WASHINGTON - July 23 - The American Civil Liberties Union urges the House Judiciary Committee to demand accountability from Attorney General Michael Mukasey during the Department of Justice oversight hearing scheduled for today.

“Mukasey was supposed to come in and clean up the Justice Department, but instead he seems to be intent on burying any evidence of wrongdoing by the Bush administration,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, “In addition to asking Congress to rubberstamp failed administration policies on torture and wiretapping, he’s offered at least one new bad policy of his own by paving the way for the FBI to use racial and ethnic profiling as a factor in deciding whether to open up investigations,” she said.

The Associated Press revealed that new FBI guidelines allowing racial profiling are scheduled to be implemented later this summer. The ACLU has urged that Congress ask Mukasey for more information including a copy of the proposed guidelines. The ACLU urges members to ask Mukasey how new guidelines would help, not hurt, intelligence gathering when it would damage trust with Arab and Muslim communities?

The oversight hearing also comes days after Attorney General Mukasey called on Congress to enact the Bush Administration’s scheme for undermining the recent Supreme Court decision restoring constitutional habeas corpus protections to the detainees at Guantanamo.

Fredrickson noted that the clock is ticking for the administration. She said, “with only 180 days left of the Bush Administration and less than five weeks left in the congressional calendar, Mukasey is asking Congress to give the president power to declare anyone a terrorist and hold the person without ever charging him or her with a crime. He should be working to defend the Constitution, not gut it.”

more:http://www.commondreams.org/news2008/0723-...