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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SeachRE who wrote (456178)	9/10/2003 2:23:23 PM
From: laura_bush	Respond to of 769667

LOL. Too bad. Check this out on Ashcroft's media relations: Is he trying to hide his message? Relying solely on extremely tight local news broadcasts is guaranteed to minimize coverage -- and reach. Ashcroft's methods hurt his own cause 9/9/2003 By DONN ESMONDE I wanted to talk with John Ashcroft, but the door was closed. I wanted to ask a few questions about the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism law taking fire from the left and the right. But the only media allowed a post-speech audience with the attorney general were local TV reporters - one at a time, three minutes apiece. No print journalists. No radio broadcasters. It reportedly has been the same in every city on the Ashcroft Over America tour. The former Missouri governor has hit the road to counter attacks that the Patriot Act is unpatriotic. The speeches are open to media and law enforcement officials. The public is barred, and, afterward, only TV reporters ask questions. After Monday's speech at the downtown Hyatt, a Justice Department official politely but firmly shooed away print and radio journalists. "At this point," she said, "we have to have you out." Dear John: My pen is not a weapon of mass destruction. My notebook is not a suicide bomb. My colleagues and I are We the People, the public's eyes and ears, the carriers of the message. Granted, Ashcroft's 25-minute speech touched all bases. The gist of it is on the Justice Department's www.lifeandliberty.gov Web site. But if you're sure of your ground, confident of your cause, you should be be eager to defend it. Especially to those who depend on sentences and paragraphs, not sound bites. And who work in the same neighborhood as the "Lackawanna Six." The irony is that I want to give Ashcroft the benefit of the doubt. A lot of people condemn the Patriot Act as a goose step toward a police state, a rip in the Constitution. I'm not so sure. I'm no big fan of the president and his men, but I understand the point: This is a different kind of war. A different war calls for different rules. This enemy does not wear a uniform, march in formation, line up on a battlefield. He does not have the power to meet us head-on, to fight face to face. He fights a different way. He infiltrates, waits, strikes. He could be at the next restaurant table, the next row in a college class or the next seat at a flight school. He lives here, learns here, trains here. Then he uses what he knows against us. That is how it was on Sept. 11, 2001. We weren't ready. We didn't know enough. And the people paid to protect us didn't share what they knew with one another. Because of that, thousands of Americans died. Ashcroft says the Patriot Act just lets him use the same weapons against terrorists he already uses against mobsters; what's good enough for John Gotti should be good enough for Mohamed Atta. And any no-tell search warrant has to first get past a federal judge. Democracy has a soft underbelly. It's the nature of our benevolent beast. Our freedoms make us vulnerable. That's the Ashcroft argument: By sacrificing a little freedom, we may save a lot of lives. It is a trade-off that makes many of us uneasy, and it should. We don't want to willingly give up what no nation could forcibly take from us. "Once you give up freedoms," said Buffalo's Martha Russell, who protested outside the Hyatt, "it's tough to get them back." Agreed. We have to be careful about giving more power to those who in the past - from spying on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to McCarthy-era witch hunts - have a history of abusing it. Unless lives are at stake, we don't want police breaking in our doors, prying into our reading lists and peeking at our Internet habits. I'm not real comfortable with it. But I'm not comfortable with planes demolishing skyscrapers, either. Until somebody comes up with something better, or proves that the cure is worse than the disease, I'm willing to live with it. Maybe, just maybe, it's worth tightening the grip - with the abuse meter set on high - if it means stopping those who would harm us. I'm willing, at this point, to give Ashcroft the benefit of the doubt. But I want him to take his case to all comers, to defend it on any ground. I want to believe my belief is an act of faith, not an act of foolishness. Can we talk about it, Mr. Ashcroft? Mr. Ashcroft? buffalonews.com