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Ashcroft's Shadowy Disciple
Nat Hentoff - The Village Voice - November 15th, 2002
The government [under the USA Patriot Act] can use [its powers] on people who aren't suspected of committing a crime. Innocent people can be deprived of any clue that they are being watched and that they may need to defend themselves. �Lincoln Caplan, editor, Legal Affairs ("A Magazine of Yale Law School"), November-December 2002

In covering the highly visible and contentious midterm national elections, the press, in all its manifestations, totally ignored the Bush administration's ceaseless attacks on the Bill of Rights, orchestrated by Attorney General John Ashcroft. So did the candidates, editorial writers, and commentators. This silence on the deterioration of the liberties we are fighting to protect gives Ashcroft all the more encouragement to pursue his plans, as reported in the October 21 Legal Times, to prepare "a second round of counterterrorism legislation. . . . Lawmakers could see a draft bill in January, after the new Congress convenes"�with the Republicans in control, and most Democratic leaders silent accomplices of Ashcroft. Across the country, the 94 United States Attorneys were charged in an October 1 speech by the attorney general to vigorously enforce the USA Patriot Act and others of his sorties against civil liberties. In front of his troops, Ashcroft accused his critics of "capitulating before freedom's enemies�the terrorists." These dissenters, he added indignantly, have been subjecting his methods to "disdain and ridicule." By contrast, a staunch patriot, by Ashcroft's definition, is George Pataki.

How many New Yorkers know that on September 16, the governor took time from campaigning to announce, by executive order, the start of a new toll-free Statewide Public Security Tips Hot Line that, Pataki assures us, "will enable citizens from throughout the state to report information about suspected terrorist activity." This is Pataki's version of John Ashcroft's Operation TIPS, which House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a conservative Republican libertarian, struck out of the still-pending bill to create a Department of Homeland Security. Armey insisted that the government should not be encouraging Americans to spy on one another. Pataki, who has been tone-deaf to civil liberties throughout his terms as governor, has no such compunctions�a point Carl McCall might have mentioned. Because press coverage of this state's very own Operation Tips has been minimal, I am grateful to Bob Perry, legislative counsel for the New York Civil Liberties Union, for information on the scope of this dangerous Ashcroftean plan to create watch committees, in neighborhoods and elsewhere, that will report their suspicions not only to the state hot line but also to the New York Police Department's hot line. Keep in mind that all these tips on "suspicious or unusual activity . . . will be cross-referenced through federal, state and local databases," says the Pataki press release. There is no indication that false tips will eventually be erased from those multiple, intersecting databases.

In 1984, George Orwell predicted the Ashcrofts and Patakis to come: "There of course was no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment."

posted by A Curmudgeon 7:14 AM