We found a section on the Justice Department's new Life and Liberty website that brags about the legal challenges the Government has won in its war on terror:

• Enemy combatant detention authority: SUSTAINED
• Guantanamo Bay detention authority: SUSTAINED
• FISA information sharing authority: SUSTAINED
• Withholding names of sensitive immigration detainees: SUSTAINED
• President’s authority to freeze assets of purported charities that fund terrorists: SUSTAINED
• No provision of the Patriot Act has been held unconstitutional by any court.

Then we found this list of civil liberties abuses on the ACLU website.

• The June DOJ Inspector General report detailing widespread and systematic abuses of the hundreds of Arab, Muslim and South Asian men detained in the weeks after 9/11. The report showed that, even though the men were found to have no connection whatsoever to the attacks on September 11, they were held for extreme amounts of time - in some cases for several months - under a quasi-official "no-bond, no-lawyers" policy. Although the Justice Department’s response has been a pat "we did nothing illegal," it’s clear that most of the detainees were held on pretextual immigration violations such as an expired visa or incomplete paperwork.
• The proposed neighbor-spying-on-neighbor program called Operation TIPS, which would have recruited Americans whose jobs - such as cable repair persons and postal workers - grant them easy access to our homes as government informers, charged with reporting "suspicious activity" to a dedicated tips hotline.
• The plan to base the number of investigations in any given FBI jurisdiction on demographic criteria, including the number of mosques in the area.
• The initiative at the DOJ to force local and state police to enforce immigration laws, a plan opposed not only by immigrants’ advocates but also by law enforcement officials themselves.

We think the lists should be combined. The Justice Department's legal "wins" are nothing more than civil liberties abuses, masquerading as accomplishments. Not one of the legal wins make us feel any safer. All of them make us feel less free.

Add the two lists together, and you have a picture of where this country is headed under Bush and Ashcroft. Protest now, while you still can.