Confessions of a Traitor
" John Ashcroft, testifying before the Senate on Thursday, declared that those
who challenge his wisdom "only aid terrorists" and will "give ammunition to
America's enemies." Tough words. They make you wonder what the guy
who's charged with helping us whip Al Qaeda is afraid of."
By FRANK RICH
It's no longer just politically incorrect to
criticize George W. Bush or anyone in his
administration these days - now it's
treason.
John Ashcroft, testifying before the Senate on Thursday, declared that those
who challenge his wisdom "only aid terrorists" and will "give ammunition to
America's enemies." Tough words. They make you wonder what the guy
who's charged with helping us whip Al Qaeda is afraid of. The only
prominent traitors in sight are the usual civil- liberties watchdogs and a
milque- toast senator or two barely known beyond the Beltway and their
own constituencies. Polls find the public squarely on the attorney general's
side, and even the few pundits who knock him are ridiculed by their
journalistic colleagues as hysterics so busy fussing about civil liberties that
they forget "there's a war going on."
Well, with the smell of victory over the Taliban crowding out the scent of
mass murder from the World Trade Center, the Ashcroft defenders have half
a point: some people are indeed forgetting that a war is still going on. But it is
not those questioning the administration who are slipping into this amnesia so
much as those who rubber stamp its every whim.
While I wouldn't dare call it treason, it hardly serves the country to look the
other way when the Ashcroft-Ridge-Thompson-Mineta team proves as inept
at home as the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Powell-Rice team has proved adept
abroad. In the Afghan aftermath, the home front is just as likely to be the
next theater of war as Somalia or Iraq. Giving a free pass to Mr. Ashcroft
and the other slackers in the Bush administration isn't patriotism - it's
complacency, which sometimes comes with a stiff price.
Just how deep that complacency runs could be seen on Monday, when Tom
Ridge issued the administration's third urgent announcement to date of a
heightened terror alert. Why even bother? His vague doomsday warning
didn't lead every newscast and didn't rouse the public or even law
enforcement. On ABC, John Miller reported that the three F.B.I. field offices
he canvassed had neither been advised of the threat nor "told to batten down
the hatches any more than they were." What's that about? Under Mr.
Ashcroft's dictum, asking such follow-up questions is aiding and abetting the
enemy. In any event, no one did.
Surely it's also treason to indulge in blunt talk about airline security. Norman
Mineta, the transportation secretary, waited only one week after President
Bush signed the security bill to abandon all hope of meeting its 60-day
deadline for screening checked baggage for explosives. Nor did he call for
any stopgap measures to help in the meantime (like enlisting the cosmetically
deployed airport national guardsmen to do at least some such screening).
Give Mr. Mineta credit for candor, but he might as well have just painted a
big target on the back of the nation's commercial airline system as we segue
from Ramadan into Christmas. Of course it would be un-American to say so.
I asked Allan Gerson, the George Washington University professor who
co-wrote the new and definitive book on Pan Am Flight 103, "The Price of
Terror," if our approach to airline security is still preposterous all these
weeks after Sept. 11. His answer: "It's preposterous that we're stupid
enough to fly. It's sick." On the vast majority of America's domestic flights,
he noted, a suitcase containing a bomb (perhaps a bomb planted in an
innocent passenger's bag while it lingered at a hotel's bell desk) can be
checked curbside with little fear of detection as long as you give the correct
answer to the skycap's two security questions while handing over a tip. Paul
Hudson, executive director of the Aviation Consumer Action Project, adds
that even when the new law goes into effect (or is purported to go into
effect), it polices only the country's airlines, not the 240,000 private, charter
and corporate planes that terrorists can turn into missiles.
As for the screening of passengers, Mr. Mineta proudly said in answer to a
question from Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes" last Sunday that he wanted to
give the same level of scrutiny to a 70-year-old white woman from Vero
Beach as he would to a young Muslim man from Jersey City. (And based on
my own air security experiences, he's getting what he wants.) To use Mr.
Gerson's language, it's sick that amid a Justice Department crackdown that
indiscriminately (and often pointlessly) rounds up young men for questioning
on the basis of their ethnicity, the administration is not practicing such
profiling at the venue where the strongest case can be made for it - the
airports where 19 hijackers jump-started their crime. Such inconsistency of
law enforcement is beyond the Keystone Kops - it's absurdity worthy of
the Marx Brothers.
That would make our attorney general the bumbling Chico of the outfit. But
don't count me among those who quake that Mr. Ashcroft is shredding the
Constitution. He does respect some rights, after all, like that of illegal
immigrants and terrorists to buy guns in the U.S. without fear of government
intrusion. And he just doesn't seem clever enough to undo the Bill of Rights,
even with the president's backing. You have to have more command of the
law than he does to subvert it.
Mr. Ashcroft said that he wouldn't release the names of the hundreds of
people he's detained since Sept. 11 because the law forbade it, even though,
as his own deputy later pointed out, the detainees have the right to publicize
their names on their own through their family or counsel. His other excuse for
keeping the names secret was to prevent Al Qaeda from learning if any of its
operatives might be locked up, as if our enemy were not cunning enough to
figure out on its own which members he might have apprehended (if any).
Then, when he couldn't take the heat, he released some of the names
anyway. Mr. Ashcroft doesn't even have the courage of his own wrong
convictions.
What's more chilling than the potential threats to civil liberties posed by the
emergency powers he is grabbing on behalf of the president are the
immediate practical threats these quick-fix legal schemes pose to the war
effort. The mere prospect of military tribunals is already hobbling our battle
against Al Qaeda. Spain, which, unlike Mr. Ashcroft, has actually charged
men said to have helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks, is balking at extraditing
them to the U.S. if a military trial is in store. Floyd Abrams, the constitutional
lawyer, says this could have a "multiplying effect" as other European Union
countries with similarly valuable Al Qaeda quarry, like Germany and Britain,
follow Spain's example, whether because of their aversion to military
tribunals or to capital punishment.
While we bog down in negotiating these roadblocks, our lack of easy access
to crucial suspects could slow our intelligence gathering. Meanwhile, says
Mr. Abrams, "the practical effect could well be that we may not be able to
try the people we want to try the most, and the countries that do try them
could lose the case."
Mr. Ashcroft's detentions and roundups may backfire as well. Eight former
F.B.I. officials, including a former director, William Webster, went on the
record to The Washington Post to criticize the blanket arrests - not
because they compromise the Bill of Rights but because they defy
law-enforcement common sense. By nabbing possible terrorists prematurely,
the government loses the ability to track them as they implicate the rest of
their cells. The F.B.I. veterans also scoffed at the attorney general's
attempted 5,000 interviews of Middle Eastern men. Kenneth Walton, who
established the bureau's first Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, said:
"It's the Perry Mason school of law enforcement, where you get them in
there and they confess. . . . It is ridiculous." Already early reports tell us that
most of the invited interviewees aren't turning up anyway, and that those who
do need only reply by rote to yes or no questions from a four-page script.
The attorney general keeps boasting that he is winning the war on terrorism
at home and keeping us safe. But he provides no evidence to support his
claim, even as there's much evidence that he's antagonizing his own troops
(the F.B.I., local police departments) and wasting their finite time and
resources on wild goose chases that have pumped up arrest numbers without
yielding many (or any) terrorists.
If questioning our leaders' competence at a time of war is treason, take me to
the nearest military tribunal. But the one thing we learned on that Tuesday
morning, I had thought, is that it's better to raise these questions today than
the morning after.
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