Wait Until Dark
taken without permission from nytimes.com
November 24, 2001
By FRANK RICH
In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the Arab world was
riveted by the rumor that Israel was somehow behind the
attack on the World Trade Center. Al Jazeera went so far as
to report that 4,000 Jews had been given advance notice not
to go to work at the towers that day. You'd think that no
one in American officialdom would do anything to fan the
flames of such noxious fictions, but if so, you'd be
underestimating John Ashcroft. As part of his mass dragnet
prompted by the attacks on America, our attorney general
has rounded up about 50 Israeli Jews, some of whom have
been detained for nearly a month on the pretext of minor
offenses involving working papers.
Why hold Israelis when there is no evidence linking them to
terrorist activity? "We are taking every step we can to
prevent future terrorist attacks," said a Justice
Department spokesman when queried by Tamar Lewin and Alison
Leigh Cowan, the Times reporters who broke the story of the
Israeli detainees on Wednesday. "We are leaving no stone
unturned." Given that none of Mr. Ashcroft's 1,200 or so
arrests to date, whether of Israeli Jews or anyone else,
have produced a single charge in connection with the mass
murders of Sept. 11, it doesn't seem as if he is even
looking in the right quarry. But in his blundering, he has
now handed radical Islam a propaganda coup in its war
against Israel.
On this bittersweet Thanksgiving weekend, there are many
reasons to feel thankful - from the heroism of the
Americans who sacrificed their lives for others to George
W. Bush's nuanced and so far effective prosecution of the
war. Though there have been boisterous nervous Nellies on
the right attacking the president's strategy, many of them
even angrier at Colin Powell than they are at Bill Maher,
there are no gaping fissures in the country's unity. A Los
Angeles Times poll last week shows that even Democrats
support the president by four to one, no matter how you
read the ballots in Florida. And yet on the domestic front,
as exemplified by the actions of Mr. Ashcroft, the
administration is acting as if America has no inner
strength whatsoever. By working its various end runs around
our laws, the fearful message is clear: American democracy
is too weak to contend with terrorism, and two of the three
branches of government, the judicial and the legislative,
are not to be trusted.
Even as we track down a heinous enemy who operates out of a
cave, we are getting ready to show the world that the
American legal system must retreat to a cave to fight back.
Our government refuses to identify its many detainees, or
explain why they are held, or even give an accurate count.
The next stop on the assembly line for these suspects could
be a military tribunal, which, as decreed by President Bush
in an executive order, is another secret proceeding in
which neither the verdicts, evidence nor punishments ever
have to be revealed to the public. Thus could those
currently in captivity move from interment to execution
without anyone ever learning why or where they disappeared.
If this sounds like old-fashioned American justice, it is -
albeit of such Americas as Cuba and Chile.
If the administration were really proud of how it's
grabbing "emergency" powers that skirt the law, it wouldn't
do so in the dead of night. It wasn't enough for Congress
to enhance Mr. Ashcroft's antiterrorist legal arsenal
legitimately by passing the U.S.A.-Patriot Act before
anyone could read it; now he rewrites more rules without
consulting senators or congressmen of either party at all.
He abridged by decree the Freedom of Information Act, an
essential check on government malfeasance in peace and war
alike, and discreetly slipped his new directive allowing
eavesdropping on conversations between some lawyers and
clients into the Federal Register. He has also refused
repeated requests to explain himself before Congressional
committees, finally relenting to a nominal appearance in
December. At one House briefing, according to Time
magazine, he told congressmen they could call an 800 number
if they had any questions about what Justice is up to.
This kind of high-handedness and secrecy has been a
hallmark of the administration beginning Jan. 20, not Sept.
11. The Cheney energy task force faced a lawsuit from the
General Accounting Office rather than reveal its dealings
with Bush-Cheney campaign contributors like those at the
now imploding Enron Corporation. The president's commission
on Social Security reform also bent the law to meet in
secret. But since the war began, the administration has
gone to unprecedented lengths to restrict news coverage of
not only its own activities but also Osama bin Laden's. A
Bush executive order diminishing access to presidential
papers could restrict a future David McCullough or Michael
Beschloss from reconstructing presidential histories. To
consolidate his own power, Mr. Ashcroft even seized
authority from Mary Jo White, the battle-proven U.S.
attorney who successfully prosecuted both the 1993 World
Trade Center terrorists and the bin Laden accomplices in
the 1998 African embassy bombings. He has similarly shunted
aside state and local law-enforcement officials by keeping
them in the dark before issuing his vague warnings of
imminent terrorist attacks.
Thanks to a journalist, Sara Rimer of The Times, we now
know that one of the attorney general's secret detainees
was in fact a local official: Dr. Irshad Shaikh, a Johns
Hopkins- educated legal immigrant who serves as the city
health commissioner of Chester, Pa. Dr. Shaikh's door was
broken down by federal agents who suspected he might be an
anthrax terrorist. It's all too easy to see why Mr.
Ashcroft wants to hide embarrassing fiascoes like this. But
it's also likely that the attorney general wants to hide
the arrests he is not making along with the errant ones
that he is.
As far as anthrax terrorism goes, evidence like the lethal
letter to Senator Patrick Leahy increasingly suggests that
the culprit is not a Muslim or Israeli immigrant but, as
Mr. Ashcroft's fellow cabinet member Tommy Thompson put it
this week, "a disgruntled American" piggybacking on Islamic
terrorism. The obvious suspects include those on the
Timothy McVeighesque fringes of the Second Amendment cult,
who proudly trade in germ war "cookbooks" at gun shows, and
those in the anti-abortion terrorist movement, who have a
history of wielding anthrax scares as well as explosives in
pursuit of their cause.
But is Mr. Ashcroft pulling in, say, any of America's own
Talibans, like the Army of God, with his dragnet? It seems
unlikely, given that these organizations, which are big on
advertising their own self-martyrdom, haven't reported any
such detentions. A cynic might think that domestic
extremists who share the attorney general's antipathy to
abortion and gun control - and are opposed to the likes of
Mr. Leahy and Tom Daschle - receive a free pass denied to
suspicious-looking immigrants. Yet that cynicism could be
dispelled in a second if Mr. Ashcroft trusted the public,
and for that matter his former colleagues in Congress, to
carry out his brand of law enforcement in daylight.
While Mr. Ashcroft may abhor such openness because he's
pursuing a political agenda of his own, it's also possible
that less malevolently, he's just trying to hide his
failure at getting the job done. There's nothing in the
man's history as either a governor or senator to suggest
that he's the Rudy Giuliani his assignment calls for, and
despite his strong-arm policing since Sept. 11, he has no
visible results. His latest scheme - to spend 30 days
interviewing 5,000 more immigrants who, he says, fit "a set
of generic parameters" - inspires so little confidence that
some local police chiefs are in open revolt against it.
Mr. Ashcroft likens himself to Robert Kennedy, who also at
times warped constitutional protections in ravenous pursuit
of criminality. But among the many differences between the
men is the fact that Kennedy actually busted criminals. If
another 30 days and 5,000 interviews pass with no
breakthroughs, who knows what grandiose new plot Mr.
Ashcroft will devise, and at what civic price, to make
himself look like Dick Tracy. At a time when most Americans
feel confident that the war on terrorism is going as well,
if not better, than could be expected, his every
ineffectual and extralegal move waves an anomalous but
still chilling white flag of defeat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/24/opinion/24RICH.html?ex=1007794520&ei=1&en=2de44a78875abad8
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