War on Terror or War on Freedom?

By: Gene Lyons

Meeting with with congressional leaders from both parties shortly after the Supreme Court appointed him president, George W. Bush joshed that, "If this were a dictatorship, this would be a heck of a lot easier". Chortling at his own wit, he added, "Just so long as I'm dictator". In the wake of several new laws and decrees granting himself and Attorney General John Ashcroft the authority to serve as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner over anything they choose to call "terrorism", some skeptics have begun to wonder if Bush isn't one of those people who only says what he means when he pretends to be joking.

Could be. As Mark Crispin Miller points out in his book "The Bush Dyslexicon", the only time Bush doesn't sound like somebody speaking a foreign language he learned in high school is when he's angry or teasing somebody. But what's important is that Bush and Ashcroft have used the September 11 outrage as a pretext to turn America into a country where government agents can monitor your communications and/or break into your home without a warrant. They can seize (or create) evidence of loosely defined subversive activity, arrest you without probable cause, imprison you indefinitely without notifying anybody, covertly monitor your conversations with your attorney (if you're allowed one), try you before a military tribunal, admit hearsay (what an enemy says you said), deny you the right to see the evidence against you or to confront your accusers, find you guilty and put you to death.

All in complete secrecy and with no right of appeal. At a recent press conference, Ashcroft actually said the government's motive for concealing the identities of the 1000 foreigners being held in federal prisons is to protect their "rights and privacy". Sort of the way they did it in Buenos Aires and Moscow in the bad old days. Your reputation is always safe with the secret police. As for the rest of us, our patriotic duty is to trust that Bush knows best in the best of all possible countries, and get on with shopping. "We believe that when we have arrested violators of the law that we think have been associated with terrorists", Ashcroft explained, "that that is a valuable component of defending the United States of America".

Back when the flames were still visible at the World Trade Center, almost everybody thought so. Ashcroft's rallying cry was "the Constitution does not apply to terrorists". Few protested what sounded like bellicose hyperbole. As, indeed, the U.S Constitution does not apply to Osama bin Laden and his cohorts holed up in Afghan caves. Having declared holy war on the United States, one fervently hopes they're about to experience the martyrdom they seek.

For that matter, few lost any sleep over those detained. A couple of months in an American federal prison wouldn't kill anybody; continuing lax enforcement of U.S. immigration laws certainly could. Those who decried "racial profiling" sounded like members of the crybaby culture mouthing phrases they'd heard on TV.

As the star chamber powers have accumulated, however, it's not just the ACLU who's getting nervous. No less a conservative than New York Times columnist William Safire has sounded the alarm. "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general", he argued, Bush had seized "what amounts to dictatorial power". Cowed by terrorists, Americans "are letting George W. Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts". Safire argues that the new policies mock not merely the Constitution, but the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Safire, who led cheers for Kenneth Starr, thinks that liberals won't speak up for fear of being called unpatriotic. He may be right for a change. If so, here's one liberal who thinks he may be understating the danger. So far, the most draconian policies apply only to aliens. But since their supposed rationale is to hide intelligence secrets and protect jurors from reprisals, the same logic would also apply to American citizens.

A religious crackpot utterly unsuited to be Attorney General, as recently as 1997, Ashcroft appeared in a Phyllis Schlaffly-sponsored video arguing that Bill Clinton was conspiring with other Democrats to hand over the U.S. to a cabal of "international bankers". It doesn't take a psychic to know where he and Asa Hutchinson, his running buddy at DEA, would like to take this thing. Shoot, I could write Ashcroft's speech myself. Didn't the Taliban traffic in heroin? They did. Don't the NARCOTRAFFICANTES of Latin America finance terrorism? They do. So why not merge the "war on terrorism" with the "war on drugs" into a righteous crusade against America's deadliest enemies? Think Bush would object? Ponder the consequences. If the Congress and the courts, backed by strong public opinion, don't stop them now, you can kiss your constitutional freedoms goodbye.