Crusade Against Due Process

By: Ellis Henican

Religious zeal, it turns out, is a mighty wobbly touchstone for balanced political leadership.

Osama bin Laden has been proving that principle quite convincingly, you'd have to say. So has Mullah Mohammed Omar, his seemingly cornered host. Yesterday in Washington, to a lesser though still rattling extent, John Ashcroft proved it too.

The Attorney General of the United States is no Muslim fundamentalist. His own spiritual allegiance lies with the fundamental wing of American Christianity - Pentecostalism, to be precise. Which is his right, of course. And on issue after issue, from Missouri politics to the U.S. Senate and now to the Justice Department, Ashcroft has fashioned his personal beliefs into a staunch political agenda, becoming a true stalwart of the American religious right.

But zeal is zeal, and good luck convincing this zealot the meaning of civic restraint.

God knows Ashcroft's old Senate colleagues tried yesterday (12/6/01).

Here he was, summoned to the Judiciary Committee. In that hushed, high-ceilinged chamber, he faced some gentle prodding from the committee's majority Democrats. As usual, he gave no quarter to the infidels, delivering up the argument that zealots always do: In the battle of good and evil, anything in the service of good is good.

Even bad ideas.

Like suspending big sections of the Bill of Rights.

Ashcroft's mission yesterday was to defend his administration's trashing of civil rights in the name of fighting terrorism, as laid out in various executive orders from President George W. Bush. Top of the list: establishing secret military tribunals to try unspecified terror suspects, in unspecified circumstances, operating by unspecified rules.

"The president's authority to establish war-crimes commissions arises out of his power as commander-in-chief", Ashcroft said without a hint of equivocation in his voice.

And from that simple assertion, it seems, a zealous Attorney General can justify almost anything.

Suspending various rules of criminal evidence.

Shrugging off the right to counsel.

Convicting defendants without a unanimous verdict.

Abandoning the whole idea of a public trial.

Putting habeas corpus into sudden abeyance.

Dumping the whole principle of independent appeal.

Permitting an alleged terrorist - or terror helper or terror sympathizer - to be convicted of even a capital crime entirely on hearsay evidence, by an uncertain standard of proof, on a two-thirds vote of military officers appointed by the same people who brought the charges in the first place - and then putting this defendant to death without any opportunity of judicial appeal.

You have a problem with that? John Ashcroft didn't yesterday.

Oh, yeah, and while we're at it, America's chief law-enforcement official said, let's keep hundreds of people secretly in U.S. prisons without releasing their names to the public and without charging them with anything more than technical immigration violations. We'll hold an unknown number of others as "material witnesses" without any charges at all. We'll eavesdrop on lawyer-client conversations. And we'll "invite" 5,000 foreign-born men in for "voluntary" interrogations, for no reason besides their origin in the nations they left behind.

This is the face of freedom we now will show to the world?

And an even more immediate question: Without the precious due process we've honed for 200 years, how exactly are we supposed to know we've arrested the right guys?

Ashcroft didn't seem too bothered by that. In fact, he had a glib answer prepared in advance.

"Are we supposed to read them the Miranda rights, hire a flamboyant defense lawyer, bring them back to the United States to create a new cable network of Osama TV or what have you, provide a worldwide platform from which propaganda can be developed?" Ashcroft said.

No, the American justice system isn't always pretty.

But until this current crowd came to Washington, we used to say it was the best one in the world.

At the core of that system was the belief that the rules of fairness and openness didn't only protect the accused. They protected the rest of us as well.

They protected us from false accusations. They gave a genuine sense of authority to all the convictions that were fairly achieved.

If a defendant was found guilty after a process everyone saw as fair, that conviction would more likely be accepted as justice - even by the defendant, now heading off to jail.

The American way, that was called.

At a less zealous moment, it was admired and emulated around the world.

Yes, it was.