Posted on 09/13/2003 6:01:08 AM PDT by BigWaveBetty
To observe this Sept. 11, 2001, anniversary, I urge critics of Attorney General John Ashcroft - especially the Democratic presidential candidates - to read the article "The Falling Man" in the current Esquire.
A photo on page 176 shows the article's subject plunging headfirst from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Taken by celebrated Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, the picture was printed once in various newspapers - then banned by the U.S. media as too awful for public consumption.
The riveting article, by Tom Junod, chronicles the search to identify the "falling man," but the larger point for today, two years later, is that hundreds of people were driven by heat and smoke to leap to their deaths before the towers collapsed. The article is must-reading because - since the horror of the jumpers has been hushed up - it's a new wake-up call about the menace of terrorism.
Al Qaeda is still out there. Cells may be operating right here in the United States. Osama bin Laden still wants to wreak terror on America. Radical Islamicists have declared that using weapons of mass destruction to kill women and children is part of the holy duty of jihad.
As Bob Woodward reports in his book "Bush At War," President Bush's first order to Ashcroft after 9/11 was that his job no longer was to prosecute terrorists as criminals, but to prevent them from attacking America again. And that's what Ashcroft has tried to do - so far, successfully.
Yet, to listen to Ashcroft's critics, one would think he was a greater threat to American well-being than bin Laden or the terrorist leader's top planner, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
The loudest of the critics is the Democrats' frontrunning candidate, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who has outrageously said that Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in American history, worse than Richard Nixon's AG, John Mitchell. "And he was a criminal," Dean noted.
Dean also declared that "John Ashcroft is not a patriot. John Ashcroft is a descendant of Joe McCarthy."
In the so-called Democratic presidential debates, does anyone besides Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) ever call Dean on the things he says? After all, Mitchell organized a burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters and helped cover it up. McCarthy used anti-Communism to ruin lives and terrorize the entire U.S. political system.
Ashcroft doesn't begin to compare with either scoundrel. And, whatever limited infringements on civil liberties he has presided over, they don't begin to compare with those America has experienced in prior wars - Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus or Franklin Roosevelt's internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans for four years.
Instead of rebutting Dean's overstatements, his rivals are competing with him to ride a wave of Ashcroft-phobia raging semi-hysterically on the American left - and also, to some extent, on the right.
At the Congressional Black Caucus debate Tuesday night in Baltimore, Ashcroft's next-most vociferous critic, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), said that "the last thing we need to do is turn our rights, our freedom and our liberties over to John Ashcroft."
Edwards also repeated the canard, spread by the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association, that Ashcroft has FBI agents "going to our libraries and keeping records of the books we're checking out."
Under the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which Edwards voted for along with 97 other Senators, the government is entitled to search business records - and, yes, library records - in pursuit of potential terrorists. It takes a court order to do so, however, as it does in regular criminal cases. It's a fact that the 9/11 terrorists used computers at public libraries to communicate with one another. Does Edwards seriously think that the FBI is snooping into the check-out records of average citizens, when it fears an al Qaeda attack?
Dean and Edwards are in the lead, but all the Democratic candidates take routine swipes at Ashcroft, rousing crowds by saying that their first act as president would be to fire him. Rep. Richard Gephardt (Mo.) said that, under Ashcroft, "you are losing your rights."
Ashcroft does invite criticism and his activities deserve rigorous Congressional oversight. He once implied that anyone opposing his efforts was, in effect, aiding terrorists. Now, he acknowledges that debates about civil liberties are healthy.
In May, the Justice Department's inspector general reported that, of 762 illegal aliens detained after 9/11, 54 were held for more than three months, 130 were denied counsel and some were harshly treated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York.
Ashcroft pig-headedly refused to apologize for the excesses, but the fact is that it was his department that reported them. Also, we are talking here about ill-treatment of a few hundred people in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, an understandable - but unfortunate - side effect of our zeal to root out the terrorists.
Another legitimate criticism of Bush policy is that, theoretically, a U.S. citizen could be declared an "enemy combatant" and detained permanently, without counsel, or even tried and executed by a military tribunal without appeal. This should be changed to permit court review, but the number of cases involved here will be miniscule.
If Democrats flail Ashcroft now, imagine what they'll say if another terrorist attack occurs and he has somehow failed to "connect the dots." What he's trying to do is find the dots.
Democrats should tone down their Ashcroft-bashing if for no other reason than what he's doing has public support. The latest Gallup poll shows that only 21 percent of Americans think the Bush administration has gone "too far" in restricting civil liberties to fight terrorism. An overwhelming majority, 74 percent, think its efforts are "about right" or don't go far enough.
Most Americans remember what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, and, along with Ashcroft, never want it to happen again.
Mort Kondracke is the Executive Editor of Roll Call.
For anyone who accepts the evening news at face value, (i.e.) idiots, that is an effective strategy. But for the rest of us-there is the public record.
If anyone actually listened to the four hours of the Supreme Court deliberations on campaign finance reform, it was obvious who was swallowing elephants and choking on gnats- and it wasn't Scalia!
Ashcroft's appearance with Peter Jennings, if conducted during any other week of the year, would have been a hatchet job. But what response is there in the face of the success of his agency- two years after 9/11- when the man says words to the effect of, "I have to look in the mirror. Even more than answering to my president, I answer to my God in the discharge of this duty, that has been given to me, in this place and time."
Would decimate the Dean crowd and eliminate 90% of liberals!!
Allow me to repeat your wise statement:
Been to an airport latetly, Morty-boy?
I wonder, was Gen. Ashcroft the first man of integrity Peter ever interviewed? Probably. I also wonder if after the meeting Peter's mind set changed to realize that the men and women of such integrity are a stark contrast to who previously occupied the positions.
Under the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which Edwards voted for along with 97 other Senators, the government is entitled to search business records - and, yes, library records - in pursuit of potential terrorists. It takes a court order to do so, however, as it does in regular criminal cases. It's a fact that the 9/11 terrorists used computers at public libraries to communicate with one another. Does Edwards seriously think that the FBI is snooping into the check-out records of average citizens, when it fears an al Qaeda attack?
Yep, there are thousands, no make that hundreds of thousands of FBI agents with absolutely nothing else to do than to cruise libraries checking lists of book check outs looking to see what cookbook you checked out that week.
Better staple that tin foil to your head, it's coming loose.
No suprize that Congress would want to wack it, they spent years trying to make it easier for bad guys to do us in so they, The Saviour Congress could write more of their stupid laws to "protect" us. The Hate Crime Bill comes to mind.
Shall we punish terrorist twice because when they kill us they do it because they hate us?
Security procedures in airports were only designed to screen for terrorists, we were told, which is why thousands of grandmothers from Des Moines and Omaha were felt up for the cause. The FBI has a long history of snooping into the private affairs of citizens under the flimsiest of excuses, and it betrays a terminal naivete (or a rather fascistic longing for a good dose of "order"), as well as ignorance of history and human nature, to believe that handing the semi-secret police more power will not spill over onto the rights of average Americans.
Funny thing is all the right wing kooks who believe Ashcroft is out to take away their liberties are attached at the hip to the insane lefty Dean and his kooks.
Wonder how that tastes going down their "conservative" gullets?
There are existing legal precedents for this, some going back to the founding of the Republic. Every American passport lists examples which result in the abbrogation of citizenship, including service in a foreign military or government. Active support of a foreign enemy will get you treated just like the enemy, too. The sainted FDR did that in WW2, and the courts rightly sided with him.
Sorry, Mort, but even here, Bush and Ashcroft are merely following established legal precedent.
Is it just me or does Kondracke seem to have a little more sense now days?
Before 9-11, on The Beltway Boys, he almost sounded like Streisand's spokesman. Post 9-11, I think he's starting to straighten out a little instead of bending so far to the left. I think 9-11 affected him more than any other media personality I've seen.
Or is it just me?
1. In the dem's list of terrible AG's, they leave out that paragon of female charm and gentleness, Janet Reno./sarcasm.
One thing about the Patriot Act does concern me. I have no fear of it's powers being misused by the present administration, but the thought of this tool in the hands of the (possibly) 2nd President Clinton is sobering.
Those would be the same agents who were busting whore houses in New Orleans in the weeks immediately following 9/11. Ashcroft never lets a good trampling of the Tenth Amendment go unexercised.
I'm not suggesting that the danger is not there, but the danger is not as great, I think, under this Republican administration as under one as lawless as the last Democratic administration. To use other words, the danger is perhaps in 'suspended animation' for the present.
It's a fact that the 9/11 terrorists used computers at public libraries to communicate with one another.
Yet Charely would have us believe that finding a book checked out by Habib Mohammed on how to make a bomb would be the only reason to nap the SOB. If you wish to be honest with yourself and me, you know that's not the case. No judge, especially the vast majority of liberal ones aren't going to give the FBI a search warrant on such flimsy evidence.
Call me crazy, but if I had a need to go to a library for research on some terrorist plotting, I would expect to catch the attention of someone, maybe even the FBI, as it should be. They check me out and see I'm just a little old lady from FL doing some research. Big deal. I would be grateful that they were at least AWAKE for a change.
In the many years I've lived I've never had an occasion to make a bomb, rob a bank or some other nefarious crime. If I need a bomb to blow up that stubborn tree stump in the yard, I call someone who knows how to do it properly.
Freedom doesn't mean you have the ability to do what ever you please, unless of course you're the last person on earth. And oh, btw, just what is the advantage of the government taking over the American people? It seems to me it would end up being a lot more work for them to keep us all in line, something we know those lazy SOB's don't really want.... more work.
Now on to you airport gripe. I thought it really silly that grandmama were getting frisked as well, then I thought about it. How can we be sure the ONLY terrorists will be 20 to 40 year old Arabs? Could an Arab terrorist have slipped something into grandmama's carry on? Could she be the grandmama of a terrorist who believes that little Habib is right in his fight with America? You and Charley the all knowing, all seeing know this could never happen?
Sure, it's not the best way of dealing with the problem but it's a start and a few years from now, if kooks would help out with good ideas instead of pointing and shrieking at every try at a fix for the problem, we might actually get it right some day soon.
I didn't pay too much attention to Mort because of my distaste for all dems but when I did hear him comment on dem matters, he seemed to be somewhat fair about GWB and that made my ears perk up. Must have been when GWB was just starting his term.
But you're right, he has become much more sober to the facts of life since 9/11.
He is one of the few dems I can listen to but I still poo-poo him when he talks that crazy dem talk. ;-)
Don't Arabs (terrorists) frequent whore houses, a lot? Seems like a plan of action to me.
And excuse me if I'm wrong (not being an aficionado of whore houses), but aren't whore houses illegal?
If sheeple like you would stop bending over for the anal probe and agitate for real border security, as others here have suggested, there would be less excuse for bulding a police state here in the U.S.
It is worrisome. But I don't know enough about how it's written to say for sure there aren't provisions in it so it can't be abused.
One thing's for sure, the Founding Fathers certainly didn't mean when they wrote, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." , that separation of church and state would spring from that.
So no matter who is the next president or the next ten presidents isn't going to keep the Patriot Act as clean as it is today.
The first klinton was doing everything in the Patriot Act, and more, without any enabling legistlation. Only it was aimed at his political "enemies", and the left and media cheered. "Carnivore", "digital tapping ports", roaming wire taps, FBI access to records without court authority, were all done, or announced, without any protest, except for "kook" groups like computer privacy advocates. The accepted reasoning was, "if you have nothing to hide, you have no reason to fear". The klintons (I use plural because Hitlery ran Justice and everything else, while Bill was busy with bribery and blowjobs) also got a record number of "national security" wiretaps, but with nothing to show for them. Whatever they heard, it's either buried inside the CIA, or locked up in grand jury testimony, untouchable forever. A handy way to keep track of political enemies.
A Hitlery presidency wouldn't need to invoke the Patriot Act, since they've already done worse, and gotten away with it.
My friend, I wouldn't hold your breath for that to happen.
Only 1256 things wrong with what I said? I'm intrigued... please do tell, start with the first 100 or so!
Only whoring going on in those whore houses, eh? No reason for the FBI to raid a whore house at all? For any reason? How about addressing my reason, it might have Arab terrorists inside? Never mind federal crimes like racketeering, money laundering, counterfeiting and such.
Nope only whorin' going on in them thar whore houses!
You people are hopeless, there will never be a utopia in this country, so you win. WE'RE ALL GOING TO HELL IN ASHCROFT HANDCUFFS!!!!
While he snickers at how sheep like me were duped. /sarcasm
Would decimate the Dean crowd and eliminate 90% of liberals!!
I'd like to nominate that for the "Quote Of The Day" !!!
Do you know if there is a transcript available online?
They have positioned themselves to benefit from either another attack or the lack thereof.
Sick, sick, sick.
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