First of all, the Ashcroft reference tipped me off. The liberals hate Ashcroft. He is their lightning rod, their focus of evil. The military tribunal stuff is in the pervue of the DoD, not DoJ. Second, there are very few actual quotes from the judge himself -- and none about Ashcroft -- but the author goes off on his own tangents.
You know, I'm going to do a search on this judge. Reagan-appointed or not, I suspect that his affinity for the Democratic party is not newly-minted.
Well, the judge might be a corrupted Dem who thinks he can rewrite the Founders' Constitution to put the Judiciary Branch in charge of unlawful combatants.
However it's more likely that he gave a speech defending the role of the Judiciary in times of crisis and the author picked out a very few excerpts that he could twist to make the judge sound that way.
The big clue, to me, is the paucity of actual quotes.
Here's a Real Audio of the speech, I couldn't find a transcript: HERE