Ashcroft, Justice and discrimination

It appears working for John Ashcroft's Justice Department is no bed of roses for minority lawyers. Who would've thunk it? Indeed, the situation is such that the department censored a report it commissioned on employment discrimination in its workplaces. That move has caused additional embarassment. An intrepid Internet sleuth pierced the veil of deletions and posted the full report to the web, where it has been downloaded thousands of times.

The Justice Department earlier this month posted on its Web site a report from an outside contractor on employee diversity within the department. Many of the negative findings in the report, which the department had refused to release publicly for more than a year, were heavily edited. But Russ Kick, a writer and editor in Tucson, who maintains a Web site that archives government documents, found a way around the editing. He said he was able to call up the document in its Adobe Acrobat format and, using software that allows editing of PDF documents, then highlighted the blacked out editing bars and deleted them. The original, unedited text then appeared.

What was the Justice Department trying to hide?

The unedited report, completed in June 2002 by the consulting firm KPMG, found that minority employees at the department, which is responsible for enforcing the country's civil rights laws, perceive their own workplace as biased and unfair.

"The department does face significant diversity issues," the report said. "Whites and minorities as well as men and women perceive differences in many aspects of the work climate. For example, minorities are significantly more likely than whites to cite stereotyping, harassment and racial tension as characteristics of the work climate. Many of these differences are also present between men and women, although to a lesser extent."

Another deleted part said efforts to promote diversity "will take extraordinarily strong leadership" from the attorney general's office and other Justice Department offices.

I doubt that leadership is available. Prior to becoming attorney general, Ashcroft was a rock-ribbed conservative who sometimes flirted with neo-Confederates.

Now Ashcroft has been asked to explain why he met last fall with Thomas Bugel, the president of the militantly racist Council of Conservative Citizens and a veteran leader of segregationist groups in the St. Louis area.

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Article Author: Mac Diva

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