By David Bloviator
Washington Bureau Chief

   A grateful nation has once more turned its sin-wearied souls to its shepherd, Attorney General John Ashcroft. The good news for modern Americans: their prayers have been answered and John will smiteth our enemies with a mighty, if rather secretive, hand and a (privately) outstretched arm.

Building upon his success in apprehending some creep who couldn't even interest Al-Qaeda in his nutball scheme to irradiate Washington as soon as he could get his hands on 20 pounds of plutonium, John has announced a new miracle, which he said came to him in a vision from Jesus Christ Himself.

At a recent press conference before the robed (and presumably blindfolded) goddess of Justice, he outlined his plan to deliver us from evil. He addressed the press after a private glossolalia session with his aides, who assured a restless Justice Department bureaucracy that all were welcomed at John's prayer meetings and that the snakes would not sink their fangs into those whose faith was true.

He told the heathen press corps that he had found another Supreme Court precedent from the Second World War applicable to the current war: Korematsu v. United States. He announced that the Justice Department was reopening the detention camps at Manzanar and Tanforan that had performed yeoman service in protecting the homeland from potential sabotage at the hands of possibly treasonous Japanese-Americans.

"These detention centers will used to hold those who seek to unleash the weapons of Satan against God-fearing Americans," said John, his eyes closed in divine ecstasy. "No innocent Christian should be in fear. These camps will be used only to detain those who wage war against the United States. Make no mistake, my good flock: the entire United States is a war zone. Even the Jew Lippmann has said that no person has a right to remain in a war zone."

Asked how citizens would be selected for permanent incarceration, Ashcroft first accused a reporter of speaking the words of the devil. "I have a vision of which sinners have tried to do evil. Lord Jesus our savior will come to me in a revelation and tell me who to arrest," he explained.

In response to whines from Democrats about Constitutional rights and procedures, Vice President Dick Cheney snarled, "That's exactly the kind of unpatriotic carping that gives aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden." Whereupon, the Congress immediately appropriated $2 billion for the detention camps, and the construction of a new camp in West Virginia, at the request of Senator Robert Byrd (D – The Trough).

Reaction from Washington insiders was generally positive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "I only wish I thought of it. Of course, I've still got my own down at Gitmo." Pundits noted that there was no difference between detaining American citizens without trial in jails and sending them en masse to desert relocation centers.

But some worried about the precedent of indefinitely detaining American citizens in what are effectively prisons without trial or evidence. In response to one reporter who asked if detainees could expect to be jailed forever, the Attorney General smiled and said that Judgment Day would arrive long before then. "And then they will burn in Hell for all eternity. Amen," he concluded.