One of my least favorite abuses of power is the government’s use of material witness warrants as all-purpose excuses for detaining people when they have no actual evidence of any wrongdoing. So I’m very pleased to hear that the 9th Circuit Court has not only ruled that such 
behavior is reprehensible and obviously unconstitutional, but that former Attorney General John Ashcroft can be held personally responsible for it:
Members of the panel, all appointees of Republican presidents, characterized Ashcroft’s detention policy as “repugnant to the Constitution, and a painful reminder of some of the most ignominious chapters of our national history.”
….[Abdullah] Kidd, a former University of Idaho running back…was handcuffed, strip-searched and shuttled among interrogations in Virginia, Oklahoma and Idaho before being released 16 days later and ordered to surrender his passport and live with his wife and in-laws in Nevada. The arrest led to Kidd being denied a security clearance and losing his job with a government contractor.
….Georgetown Law professor David Cole said that Ashcroft adopted an aggressive “preventive paradigm” after Sept. 11 designed “to incapacitate people who government officials thought suspicious but lacked evidence of any wrongdoing. They were locked up and then investigated, rather than the other way around.” Virtually all of the targets had nothing to do with terrorism, Cole said.
….The judges, alluding to the George W. Bush administration, said that although “some confidently assert that the government has the power to arrest and detain” suspects without evidence of wrongdoing, the panel considered such preemptive detentions “an engine of political tyranny.”
Yep, boys and girls, that’s what the seeds of real political tyranny look like. Somebody please tell Glenn Beck and the rest of the fever swamp crowd.
