In Al Hunt's regular Thursday Wall Street Journal column, he poses some questions for John Ashcroft. Well done.
December 6, 2001
Some Questions for
The Attorney General
By ALBERT R. HUNT
interactive.wsj.com
Sept. 11 has enabled John Ashcroft to be John Ashcroft. That's a scary spectacle.
Gone is the moderate, reasonable, inclusive pose that Mr. Ashcroft struck during the bitter battle over his confirmation. Over the past few weeks, the attorney general has engineered measures that would expose millions of accused terrorists or those suspected of harboring terrorists to secret military tribunals rather than normal criminal trials. He has also detained and refused to divulge the identities of hundreds of people for unknown offenses; launched plans to eavesdrop on terrorist defendants and their lawyers; initiated an open-ended interrogation of 5,000 Arab and/or Muslim men; and threatened to start snooping on religious organizations.
A war inevitably brings the loss of some privacy and curtailment of some liberties. But the problem with the Ashcroft approach is that he has been duplicitous, autocratic and secretive -- in short, disdainful of the judiciary and especially Congress.
After delays he reluctantly is appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning. There are many questions that should be directed at the attorney general, including:
Why didn't you reveal any of these measures to Congress when it was still deliberating on a sweeping anti-terrorist bill this fall?
In a television interview last weekend, Mr. Ashcroft pretended these weren't executive fiats, and that he'd given Congress advance notice -- especially about military tribunals. Not so. In a written question sent to Mr. Ashcroft on Sept. 25, Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D., Vt.), noting that military tribunals had been used before but had serious shortcomings, asked if they were being considered. The attorney general waited almost a month before responding -- until after the Senate had passed the anti-terrorism bill -- and then merely repeated the history cited by Sen. Leahy. There has been no consultation on the other issues.
Have you settled yet on an official reason for not releasing the names of over 500 people detained?
The Justice Department refused to divulge anything on these detainees until the eve of the Senate panel's hearings last week, and then only offered limited information. Initially, Mr. Ashcroft said the law precluded him from releasing these names (again, untrue) and with a straight face insisted he was worried about these detainees ending up on any "blacklist." No one believed that, so then he insisted that releasing the names would benefit Osama bin Laden. It is widely thought that no more than a handful, if that, of these detainees have any link to bin Laden. The real reason for this unacceptable secrecy is Mr. Ashcroft is on a fishing expedition; if actual details, names and faces were made public, it might be embarrassing.
What does your rationale for military tribunals have to do with the threat to deny judicial review?
The presidential order on tribunals plainly states that these defendants shall not be "privileged" to seek a judicial review. The justification for the tribunals -- that a regular trial could jeopardize sensitive intelligence, be used by terrorists for propaganda purposes or turn into a circus -- has little relevance to judges reviewing the legality and fairness of the proceedings. Under criticism, the administration has equivocated on judicial review, but today Mr. Ashcroft should be forced to be definitive.
Will the U.S. still pressure other countries not to use military tribunals?
As Neil King reported in The Wall Street Journal last week, the State Department has long blasted the use of military tribunals in countries like Egypt, claiming that the use of these vehicles -- created a decade ago to combat terrorism -- deprived "hundreds of civilian defendants" of their due rights. And we've been justifiably critical of China for its secret trials of U.S. residents. Indisputably, military tribunals in America would be much fairer than these proceedings. But they'll undercut, if not eliminate, our complaints about abuses elsewhere.
What happens to those who don't cooperate with your "voluntary" interrogation of 5,000 Arab or Muslim men?
Answer: This process is about as "voluntary" as the income tax. Limiting these probes only to men also suggests it's more of a publicity ploy than a serious investigative tool.
Are you considering similar interrogations or detentions for far-right hate groups in the anthrax cases?
All of the evidence suggests the anthrax terrorism was domestic: Most of it has been directed against liberal Democrats like Tom Daschle or Pat Leahy or against the news media despised by these fringe groups. Moreover, anthrax threats have been commonly directed against abortion clinics and feminist organizations. If dragnets and interrogations are in vogue, why not haul in thousands of ultra-right "religious" hate groups?
Whatever the constitutional or legal issues, isn't much of this dumb law enforcement?
In the most important piece yet on the Ashcroft agenda, the Washington Post's Jim McGee last week quoted on the record eight former top FBI officials, including ex-Director William Webster (like Mr. Ashcroft, a Missouri Republican) who assailed the current tactics as short-sighted and lazy law enforcement. They convincingly argue that what Mr. Ashcroft is trying to do is substitute quick hits for the tougher, more painstaking long-term use of surveillance, informants and undercover operations. Mr. Webster even suggested that the current attorney general seems more intent "to jump all over people's private lives" than maintain good and "lawful" investigative techniques.
Will you give a prominent historian or archivist access to everything you're doing?
If a reliable and trustworthy historian were to record everything -- to be released 10 or 20 years from now -- it could serve as a moderating influence on behavior.
Have you read about A. Mitchell Palmer?
The attorney general says he's relying on history during these difficult times and he loves to identify with Robert F. Kennedy. He erroneously claims that RFK's Justice Department was described as one that "would arrest mobsters for spitting on the sidewalk." A more appropriate analogy is Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, Mr. Palmer, who used questionable authority to launch a campaign against radical and left-wing organizations in 1919-20, arresting and holding thousands without trial. Initially popular, this eventually backfired on Mr. Palmer's own political ambitions. History has not been kind either to him or to his young special assistant, John Edgar Hoover. |
