Ashcroft and Ustinov - top cops with soft spots for God

Former [somehow I missed his departure so this was wrong in the initial post] US Attorney General John Ashcroft's eccentric religiosity and proclivity toward prayer in the workplace is well known, but I was surprised to see that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Ustinov has similar tendencies. The following article (translated by me) provides details:

Everybody Get Down on Your Knees
Russia's Prosecutor-General Calls His Underlings to Prayer
Novye Izvestiia, April 14, 2005, By Shagen Ogandzhanian

Yesterday the senators in the Federation Council confirmed Vladimir Ustinov's nomination to a new 5-year term as prosecutor-general with 149 votes to confirm, one abstention, and none against, and gave him a bouquet of roses. And the man of the day himself once again made several statements which sound strange coming from a prosecutor, especially the nation's number-one prosecutor.

The fact that Vladimir Ustinov, whose term was to expire on May 17th, was confirmed for another term, was no surprise. Vladimir Putin nominated him, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov commended the prosecutor-general for his "civic position and professionalism," and the other senators are in general famous for their corporate solidarity and frequently, very frequently, vote along with Mr. Mironov. Nevertheless Mr. Ustinov was able to make a sweet news story ["informatsionnaia konfetka" in the original] out of the more or less routine procedure of his technical confirmation. In order to accomplish this, all he had to do was address the upper chamber.

Mr. Ustinov turned out to be very much inclined to self-criticism, and he told the senators, "We haven't been able at this time to stop crime once and for all. I don't mean in statistical representations, because you can do anything you want with statistics. I mean the feelings of our citizens about security issues. I think that if citizens are able to say in a survey whether they are safe or not, that represents a positive assessment of law enforcement agencies." The prosecutor-general considers other criteria to be "more deceptive," because he is sure that "behind numbers you can always find those who manipulate the numbers."

In addition to the battle for public opinion, Mr. Ustinov also touched on the topic of corruption within the prosecutorial system. "Within the prosecutor's office we are working on getting rid of negligent workers, and sometimes even traitors. On this point there can be no compromises," said the prosecutor-general menacingly, but he did not specify what he meant by "getting rid of." [...]

Some of the senators had practical questions for Mr. Ustinov. For example, Senator Gennadii Burbulis asked about the state of spirituality among prosecutor's office employees. Mr. Ustinov replied that significant attention is paid to the spirituality of employees, and that designating special rooms for conducting religious ceremonies in various prosecutor's office buildings is encouraged. And in general, Mr. Ustinov reported, he thinks that "religiosity should be of primary importance in the formation and cultivation of people's spirituality" and that "all religious trends which are being observed in our country are wonderful. They maintain the spirituality of people at a high level." This is not the first time that Mr. Ustinov has touched upon this lofty theme. Last winter at a prosecutor-general's office meeting he told his colleagues that "society has lost the concept of sin and shame."

After being confirmed, Mr. Ustinov promised to improve the work of the prosecutor-general's office. He refrained from troubling the senators with talk about Beslan, for example, although formally there was good reason to do so. The head of the parliamentary committee investigating the tragedy in the North Ossetian city, Alexander Torshin, just announced that the terrorists had placed weapons in the school ahead of time, while the prosecutor-general's office in the Southern Federal District has stated on more than one occasion that there was no weapons cache in the school. On the other hand, this [omission] was understandable, after all Mr. Ustinov's remarks were not devoted to specific cases but to the system as a whole. And first and foremost, of course, to spirituality.