The Washington Post op-ed that Hammond mentions here got me thinking about this profile of Ashcroft from the Atlantic Monthly a couple of years ago. The jist of the profile is that Ashcroft was never the crazy Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay loving fascist that everyone made him out to be. He may have been an ideologue but unlike Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rove, he was competent and had serious misgivings about a lot of the shadier stuff going on at the White House (that people like Gonzalez–our present AG–and Yoo were engineering).