Dozens of peace activists picketed the Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago this afternoon -- and then took their criticism of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft upstairs to a press conference Ashcroft was convening with local U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

The rally and intervention was organized in less than two hours when news of Ashcroft’s Chicago appearance was made public in the corporate press.

Ashcroft was in Chicago this afternoon to announce new indictments against Enam Arnout of the Benevolence International Foundation, who the feds have said has used his charity to support terrorism – charges Arnout and Benevolence have flatly denied. The courts recently threw out the Justice Department’s previous charges against Arnout, who has been jailed since April, saying Arnout had committed no crime. Today Ashcroft announced that Arnout would be recharged under racketeering laws for working with Benevolence to provide an x-ray machine and anti-landmine boots – worn to prevent people’s legs from being blown off during landmine removal efforts – to agencies in Afghanistan with ties to terrorists. After more than two decades of conflict, Afghanistan is riddled with tens of thousands of unexploded land mines that routinely kill and maim Afghani civilians as they work their fields or travel along the country’s devastated road system.

But in what should have been an uneventful media event for Ashcroft, protesters instead raised their concerns at the door of the press conference, charging Ashcroft with a range of attacks on civil liberties – from scapegoating Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. to fabricating charges against people like Arnout as a tool to ratchet up the Bush administration’s push to war on Iraq. In a crush of television cameras and reporters, they argued that Ashcroft and the Justice Department are condemning people like Arnout for alleged associations that the Bush administration itself has maintained.

“The Bush administration gave tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban the summer before September 11,” charged Andy Thayer of the Chicago Coalition Against War & Racism. “The CIA has publicly admitted that it’s operatives met with Al Qaida representatives shortly before 9-11. Their hypocrisy is boundless – and they should instead be challenged relentlessly for seeking to undue a sweeping range of civil liberties in this country under the pretext of the so-called war on terrorism.”

No protesters were arrested at the action.