Newspaper articles are usually pretty boring stuff, but this one uses Batman (the T.V. series) style sound effects to describe a … book signing party:
Cole is warmed up now. He starts throwing his famous left hooks, pummeling the Bush administration, accusing it of violating the rights of the estimated 5,000 Muslim immigrants rounded up in the post-9/11 anti-terrorist dragnet.
Pow! “I consider it the most extensive campaign of ethnic profiling since the roundup of Japanese Americans in World War II.” Whap! “They will not tell us the total number of people who have been locked up!” Bam! “Their arrests were secret” and thus the wife of a detainee “has no opportunity to attend the hearing that will decide his fate.” Sock! Of the 5,000 detainees, just four were charged with terrorism-related crimes, he says, and only two of those were convicted. “If the attorney general had locked up 5,000 citizens and got just two convictions out of it, I think he’d be out of a job.” Pow! Pow! Pow! Cole pummels the Bush administration for 20 minutes, then sits down.
The end is a bit of a letdown, but the fact is that the administration’s “political pit bull,” Viet Dinh, doesn’t really have any plausible defense against such charges.
(Via Marstonalia.)
