ASHCROFT: THE FAKER AND PUBLICITY STUNT LUST
It is time for a vote of no confidence in Bush and his Right Wing Thought Police Specialist, John Ashcroft...
MR. ASHCROFT:
WHY ARE THERE NO ENRON INDICTMENTS?
WHY IS THE ANTRHAX TERRORIST STILL AT LARGE?
WHY DO YOU WASTE YOUR TIME CHASING HOOKERS?
sunspot.net
Ashcroft's faith, persona inspire split sentiments
Attorney general draws on religion, upbringing to guide his political life
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By Laura Sullivan
Sun National Staff
Originally published July 8, 2002
WASHINGTON - As Attorney General John Ashcroft stood before a camera live from Moscow last month to announce that U.S. officials had foiled a plot to explode a "dirty bomb" in the United States, he began what he thought was a rehearsal.
"We have captured a known terrorist," he began casually as MSNBC inadvertently beamed his image live to America. Then he loudly cleared his throat.
"Let's try that again," he said. An aide brushed off his shoulders. Another applied hair spray. MSNBC took the feed off the air but soon returned with the real announcement, which Ashcroft issued with his usual urgent, even ominous tone.
The mix-up offered a rare glimpse of Ashcroft in an unguarded moment. Since taking over as the nation's chief law enforcement officer, he has carefully cultivated the persona of a man consumed by a mission.
Since the attacks of Sept. 11, Ashcroft has become the most visible and most activist attorney general in decades. He has portrayed himself as the man who will punish anyone associated with the attacks and help shape policy to prevent other acts of terrorism. He has become the shield for some of the Bush administration's most-criticized policies and the voice through which even minor developments in the war on terror are announced.
His regular presence before TV cameras at the Justice Department earned him high ratings from the public in the spring and have helped him eclipse FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge as the nation's No. 1 terrorism fighter.
But those appearances have upset some who say he craves publicity and uses his lectern to infringe on Americans' civil liberties. They note that, among other things, he successfully pushed for looser domestic spying guidelines for the FBI and the indefinite detention of at least two U.S. citizens without criminal charges. His critics also point to the holding of hundreds of Middle Eastern men on minor immigration charges.
Still, for all his televised speeches and news conferences here and abroad, Ashcroft has remained an enigma.
He appears at times single-minded and unyielding, convinced that God has guided him to the forefront of American public life. And yet at other times he seems modest and lighthearted, a man who writes gospel music about eagles on his farm, plays the piano on the Late Show with David Letterman and takes tarantulas home to his wife as a joke.
Ralph Reed, a conservative strategist and former head of the Christian Coalition of America, says Ashcroft is driven by a "powerful personal faith" that has given him the unflinching support of religious conservatives for two decades and helped him ascend to some of the highest political offices.
"He really is at peace with who he is and his calling to public life," Reed said. "And the great message about his faith is that he has put his trust in a power greater than himself. It frees him up to do his job."
His detractors say he has felt a little too free to mix religion with service and to impose a deeply conservative ideology on the Justice Department's enforcement of laws.
Ashcroft barely slipped into office after contentious confirmation hearings in February 2001 in which 42 of 100 senators voted against him - the most ever to oppose a successful nominee for attorney general - based on concerns that his views on issues such as abortion would trump existing laws.
"He has bent the Constitution to fit his right-wing agenda and endangered the rights and freedoms of all Americans," said Ralph G. Neas, one of his chief critics, who heads People for the American Way, a liberal Washington advocacy group.
"You get the sense that Ashcroft relies on John Ashcroft and acts unilaterally," Neas said. "With such a narrow view of the world and his own ideology, he does not get the kind of advice that other attorneys general have gotten. It seems he forgets his role is as the nation's law enforcement officer."
Aggressive style
One of the distinct qualities of Ashcroft's tenure is his highly aggressive style, whereby he often charges after issues and asserts his department's opinion before it is sought. He has tried to stop Oregon from allowing assisted suicides and has ordered raids on medical marijuana distributors approved by voters in California.
Ashcroft has also used his position to advance causes that he valued as a senator. He sent a memo to state attorneys general, instructing them to coordinate cases involving gun possession through the Justice Department. In the memo, Ashcroft added that the correct interpretation of the Second Amendment is that it protects each citizen's right to own a gun.
Over the past year and a half he has also vigorously pursued the use of the death penalty in federal cases, overturning a dozen decisions by prosecutors who had chosen not to seek capital punishment.
Since Sept. 11, Ashcroft pushed for and oversaw the detention of more than 1,200 non-citizens on minor immigration charges, most of whom were jailed for months and later deported without their names or cases becoming public.
Of those, officials are still holding nearly 100 on immigration violations and an unknown number of others on criminal charges unrelated to terrorism.
Ashcroft was one of the most fervent supporters of trying suspected Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in military tribunals, which are closed to the public and grant defendants fewer protections. He also randomly asked more than 6,000 Middle Eastern men in the United States to submit to voluntary questioning - a step that Islamic groups, and some city police chiefs, said was fraught with intimidation and tantamount to racial profiling.
He went one step further in March with a proposal to spend federal money to have civilian "neighborhood watch" groups look for possible terrorists or other "suspicious" people. Civil rights groups charge that this action will allow Americans to pry into their neighbors' lives.
Both Ashcroft's supporters and detractors agree that he decides quickly which side of a debate he - and the Justice Department - is on. He is resolute, they say, about what he believes is right and wrong, what is good and evil, and he rarely wavers between the two.
The attorney general declined to be interviewed for this article. But in a book he published in 1998, John Ashcroft: On My Honor, he said the No. 1 "belief" he lives by is: "Life is a series of choices between noble aspirations and selfish indulgence."
Ashcroft has frequently been faulted for what some critics say is a black-and-white view of the world that fails to recognize shades of gray.
Before John Walker Lindh, an American who fought with the Taliban, even appeared in court, Ashcroft denounced him as someone who "chose to embrace fanatics, and his allegiance to those terrorists never faltered, not even with the knowledge that they had murdered thousands of his countrymen."
Jose Padilla, the man accused of plotting to explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States, was, according to Ashcroft's announcement, part of "an unfolding terrorist plot" to cause "mass death and injury."
Lindh's attorneys and other legal professionals argued that Ashcroft should know that his remarks were inappropriate and could taint the jury pool.
The dirty-bomb statement, meanwhile, earned him a rare rebuke from the White House for overstating what defense officials said was not a plot but "some fairly loose talk."
'Verdict of eternity'
Ashcroft, who doesn't dance, smoke, gamble or drink alcohol or caffeine, comes to a sense of right and wrong based on his religion and upbringing. He was raised in Springfield, Mo., the son of a traveling Pentecostal minister. His grandfather, also a minister, ushered the family toward a strict interpretation of the Assemblies of God doctrine.
In his book, originally titled Lessons from a Father to His Son, Ashcroft extols his father as a stoic yet compassionate man who ministered to the sick and poor and who struggled to educate himself so he could rise in the ministry's leadership.
The book is filled with lessons from his father, such as, "The verdict of history is inconsequential; the verdict of eternity is what counts."
Yet his book is curiously lacking in descriptions of time spent with his father. Ashcroft writes that his father, who could be on the road for months at a time, never came to his Little League games or campfire outings, as his friends' fathers did. Ashcroft says he believes his father was teaching him the lesson that "there are more important things than me."
"Earlier I thought that while working to construct the kingdom of God, my father was ignoring me," he wrote. "It turns out he was building me."
At the same time, Ashcroft seemed grateful for even the faintest signs of fatherly attention. When Ashcroft was about to leave home to attend Yale University, he asked his father to write to him. The older man said he would respond to every letter he received. So Ashcroft wrote him every day.
"The reason was simple; if I ever stopped writing, the day might come when I would go out to the mailbox and not have a letter from my Dad," he wrote.
As a political figure, Ashcroft has made no apologies for blending his public life with the rituals and ideals of his faith. Before taking any office, he anoints himself with oil just as "the ancient kings of Israel, David and Saul" did in the Bible. And although he says he would not impose religion on anyone, he also believes "I need to invite God's presence into whatever I'm doing, including the world of politics."
In February, in a speech steeped in Christianity before the National Broadcasters Convention, Ashcroft quoted the Bible and contrasted the "way of God with the way of terrorists," saying that "the source of freedom is the Creator." During his first year, he held voluntary "morning devotionals" outside his office.
In the past, for the most part, Ashcroft found solid support in Missouri, where many conservative voters share his religious convictions. Yet his political life tended to alternate between embarrassing setbacks and impressive comebacks, leading some in Washington to dub him "the luckiest loser in town."
Public life
He began his public career losing a primary race for a congressional seat in 1972. He was appointed state auditor in 1973 but lost the post in a 1974 election.
In 1975, he was appointed state assistant attorney general and was elected attorney general a year later. He served for eight years and then was elected to two terms as governor.
But while waiting to run for the U.S. Senate in 1994, he suffered a humiliating loss against four relative unknowns in a race for Republican National Committee chairman in 1993.
After serving one term in the Senate, from 1994 to 2000, and making a failed early bid for president in 1998, he endured perhaps his most mortifying defeat: He lost his re-election bid to a dead man.
His Democratic foe, Gov. Mel Carnahan, had died shortly before the election in a plane crash. Yet by a razor-thin margin, Missourians voted for him over Ashcroft. Carnahan's widow, Jean, agreed to serve in her husband's stead, and Ashcroft won bipartisan praise when he declined to seek a recount.
Ashcroft wrote that he believes his setbacks were part of God's divine plan for him, saying that "For every crucifixion there is a resurrection."
Since Sept. 11 and until his recent rebuke from the White House, Ashcroft held almost 10 news conferences a month.
Before the cameras, he sharpens each consonant, his tone somber and intense. He seldom jokes, never lingers and often refers to achievements from his Senate days. He sometimes sounds like a man running for office, though publicly he denies such aspirations.
"One certainly gets the impression just by the sheer number of appearances he makes that he's hoping to keep his candidacy alive for some future office," said Carl Stern, former director of public affairs for the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton.
"He seems eager to stay in the public eye as an active, energetic policy-maker, which is not exactly the same thing as simply conveying information from Justice to the public," Stern said. "There's something added there."
In running the department, Ashcroft relies more heavily on political advisers than some of his predecessors have. He took with him some of his top aides from the Senate and surrounds himself with a tight-knit unit of Justice officials - none of them department careerists.
He still enjoys the fairly wide support of many conservatives, though signs of discontent have been showing recently.
Paul Weyrich, president of the conservative Free Congress Foundation, said some have been troubled by his support for policies that give more power to the government.
"The conservative movement is very divided on him," Weyrich said. "Were it not for that consideration, he would probably be looked at as a possible presidential candidate." |
