Ashcroft, Seeking Broad Powers, Says Congress Must Act Quickly

New York Times [News Department, Ministry of Truth] ^ | 2001-10-01 | ALISON MITCHELL and TODD S. PURDUM

[Benoit Baldwin]

October 1, 2001 THE LAWMAKERS Ashcroft, Seeking Broad Powers, Says Congress Must Act Quickly By ALISON MITCHELL and TODD S. PURDUM "FACE THE NATION" Attorney General John Ashcroft, left, and Senator Orrin G. Hatch before being interviewed on CBS Sunday. ASHINGTON, Sept. 30 — Attorney General John Ashcroft implored lawmakers today to approve the Bush administration's antiterrorism package by next week, warning: "Talk will not prevent terrorism. We need to have action by the Congress." Facing bipartisan resistance to proposals like increased electronic surveillance powers and the indefinite detention of immigrants considered national security threats, Mr. Ashcroft argued that such powers were needed to disrupt terrorist activity. "We need the tools to prevent terrorism," he said in an appearance on the CBS News program "Face the Nation." In fact, over the last decade there has often been more talk than action on antiterrorism initiatives, some nearly identical to those proposed by the Bush administration in response to the devastation in New York and at the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Since the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, Congress has received a raft of proposals for expanded electronic surveillance, tighter airport security, tougher money-laundering laws, a counterterrorism czar, increased intelligence sharing and stepped-up monitoring of foreign students. Some legislation passed, including measures to increase criminal penalties for acts of terrorism, crack down on immigration violators and substantially increase federal money for investigating terrorism and protecting government buildings and computer networks. But many other proposals died, were weakened or were never effectively put in effect. Airlines fought some tighter security regulations on the ground that they would cost too much. Banks opposed a crackdown on overseas money laundering. Computer companies succeeded in weakening efforts to restrict overseas sales of software that encrypts data. Educational institutions resisted the monitoring of foreign students. And the National Rifle Association and civil liberties groups repeatedly worked together to defeat proposals to expand federal authority for wiretapping and other surveillance. As he struggled last year to pass a broad antiterrorism bill, Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, delivered a warning that now sounds prophetic: that after another World Trade Center bombing "everybody will be excited about getting something done, but the time to get excited is now." Although Mr. Kyl's bill passed the Senate after the attack on the destroyer Cole last October, the legislation died in the House. There is no guarantee that any of the legislation before Congress would have stopped the devastating Sept. 11 attacks or prevented the largest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor. In fact, many lawmakers still debate whether a number of the measures are warranted, would be effective or are constitutional. "Up to now there's really been no constituency to move with any of this," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who co-sponsored Mr. Kyl's legislation. "There was no critical mass to move a bill, and I don't think anybody believed the depth to which these terrorists would go." Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said today on "Face the Nation," "I don't think we can delay it any longer." But lawmakers are still fighting over the details of the package. Congress has been warned in the past. Three national commissions reported that the nation and its intelligence, law enforcement and health care agencies were ill prepared to deal with domestic terrorist strikes. When the National Commission on Terrorism made a sweeping series of antiterror recommendations last year, L. Paul Bremer, the commission's chairman, said: "We think there's a chance terrorists will try to stage a catastrophic event in the United States in the future. We're talking about something which will have tens of thousands of deaths." But even as experts said that a growing terrorist threat required more powers and fewer constraints on government agencies, the suspicion of government itself was on the rise. Even President Bill Clinton proclaimed that "the era of big government" had come to an end. And in a sign of the antigovernment sensibilities of the Republicans who took control of Congress in 1994, Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who has since left Congress, said during a House debate on antiterrorism legislation that while terrorism posed a severe threat, "There is a far greater fear in this country, and that is the fear of our own government." Legislative attention to terrorism was episodic, rising in response to attacks like the 1993 trade center bombing. "What we lacked after 1993 was resolve as a nation," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who proposed sweeping antiterrorist legislation two weeks after that deadly explosion. The antiterror bill President Clinton finally signed in 1996, a year after the Oklahoma City bombing, included new counterterrorism financing for the F.B.I, new provisions to turn immigrants away from the borders, a streamlined deportation process and a special deportation court empowered to use secret evidence. But it did not include the primary enforcement tools the president had sought — including authority for federal agents to use wiretaps that follow a person instead of a phone, and for chemical identifiers in explosives and black powder. Those measures were stripped in the House by a coalition of liberals, who remembered the domestic spying on civil rights groups and Vietnam War protesters, and conservatives, who said the deaths in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and at the Branch Davidian complex near Waco, Tex., showed the government could not be trusted. The National Rifle Association lobbied hard against those provisions, as did civil rights groups. The civil rights groups also opposed similar efforts in later years to allow law enforcement to get a single court order to trace suspect telephone or computer communications across multiple networks or phone companies. They argued that the threshold standard for obtaining such orders was too loose. James X. Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, said in an interview: "Our attitude was, there is a logic to this request. But given how the communications networks have grown, into e-mail, cellphones, voice mail, pagers, regular phones, other Internet applications, the idea that you can go from service provider to service provider without a judge ever actually asking what leads you to believe there's criminal conduct, we said that was too much." Lobbying pressure also weakened efforts to place controls on the sensitive software used to keep computer data and telephone communications secret. For years, at least since coded files were found on the laptop computer of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 trade center bombing, Louis J. Freeh, the former director of the F.B.I., and Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, urged tight restrictions on exports of so-called encryption software on the grounds that it could fall into terrorist hands and complicate law enforcement. But they confronted a wall of opposition from the computer industry. Computer industry lobbyists built Congressional support for lifting such restrictions. The industry, along with privacy advocates, argued that the pace of technology had outstripped government's ability to control it, and that American industry would suffer unfairly without access to foreign markets. Last year, the Clinton administration issued Commerce Department regulations allowing export of such programs after a one-time review by the Defense Department, except to countries on the State Department's list of terrorist states. Sales to Europe do not require advance review. Over time Congress doubled spending on counterterrorism programs, to about $12 billion this year. After the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, Congress year by year gave Mr. Clinton the new money he wanted for embassy security. But it refused his request for a guaranteed future stream of more than $3 billion for security through 2005. That led Senator Joseph R. Biden, a Delaware Democrat, to warn that Congress risked repeating what it had done in the mid-1980's, after car bombings at embassies in Kuwait and Lebanon, when a government commission called for major new spending on embassy security. At first, Mr. Biden said, Congress responded with significant money, "but as the years passed, security became a second-order priority." Over the last three years, three more commissions have made recommendations to Congress, including lifting restrictions on the C.I.A.'s use of unsavory infiltrators for counterterrorism, allowing the armed forces to lead the response to any major attack on American soil, and creating a cabinet-level homeland security agency. Mr. Bush recently named Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania to head such an agency. Similar calls for such a high-ranking coordinator have been sounded repeatedly, but have died because of longstanding rivalries among competing law enforcement agencies. "Unfortunately you have these big bureaucracies that have a lot of history, pride and political influence that resist change, particularly change that they perceive as a loss of their power and influence," said Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Up until Sept. 11, they had been strong enough to prevent efforts at restructuring the federal government." Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

[holyscroller]

"indefinite detention of immigrants considered national security threats, stepped-up monitoring of foreign students, cracking down on immigration violators..."

I'm all for these provisions, but he forgot the biggie... the daily war of illegals slipping across our sieve borders. Let's put up a wall and post troops there with orders to shoot on sight.

[Zon]

Government regulating has been an abject failure at protecting the citizens. What does government do? The classic liberal statist response to everything that they do that doesn't work. "If it doesn't work, we didn't go far enough." If gun control increses crime, well then we need more of it. If welfare increases poverty, well then we need more of it. If socialized medicine raises medical costs, then we need more of it. If FAA harassment of the flying public doesn't prevent hijacking, then we need more of it. If our intelligence gathering and domestic secret police (FBI) were caught with the pants around their ankles in spite of their total abuse of the Bill of Rights, then give them carte blanche to abuse some more. The list of total and complete failures of government programs to do what their stated goal was is endless. And yet government's response to it's own failure is always the same do more of what caused the problem in the first place and tax us more to pay for it. -- from occupied ga

[HiTech RedNeck]

F.O.G. (a good acronym for your quotee) speaks as if "government" was some static entity in which Bush is no different from Clinton etc. Such dogmatism is ridiculous on its face. I can't blame Ashcroft for asking for jet skis to make up the distance lost when Clinton swam the wrong direction.

[Zon]

F.O.G. (a good acronym for your quotee) 

Actually it's a bad acronym unless you want me to interpret as I see fit because I don't know what the it stands for.  I could create a dozen examples that use those three letters in that sequence.

speaks as if "government" was some static entity in which Bush is no different from Clinton etc.

I spoke nothing of Clinton or Bush. I did quote "from occupied ga" which he neither spoke of Bush or Clinton when  he wrote it originally. Both "from occupied ga" and myself used it in direct reference to congress and government bureaucrats. BTW, Bush s not a liberal. That you make such comparison is beginning proof that you created a straw-man.

 Such dogmatism is ridiculous on its face. 

Continuing to construct your straw-man

I can't blame Ashcroft for asking for jet skis to make up the distance lost when Clinton swam the wrong direction.

You want more statist government empowerment at taxpayer expense?

I should have included the short paragraph that "from occupied ga" proceeded the above quote with. It is this: "I'm waiting for the brown shirted government sycophant cheerleaders to come and flame me for having the effrontery to post criticism of the government "at a time when we all need to pull together" or some equally fatuous phrase." -- from occupied ga

[HiTech RedNeck]

No straw man whatsoever. Bush administration would have to act the same as Clinton administration for FOG's accusation of "nothing more than more of the same" to hold water. Such blanket claims discredit those who profess them.

Clinton tore the walls of the house down. It's a doggone shame that now Bush administration has not only to build the walls back up but to defend it double time from the barbarians at the gates. But leaving it torn down and undefended is NOT an option.

[HiTech RedNeck]

or some equally fatuous phrase

The fatuosity is coming from FOG.

[Zon]

No straw man whatsoever. Bush administration would have to act the same as Clinton administration for FOG's accusation of "nothing more than more of the same" to hold water. Such blanket claims discredit those who profess them.

If it's not a straw-man the alternatives are just as unflattering of you. Myopic or naive because government was doing it long before Clinton became president. You've been discredited because you didn't look back in history further than Clinton, that you think it began with Clinton you profess your myopia.

[HiTech RedNeck]

So what? Democrat administrations have historically been much lousier at foreign policy than Republican ones. It does not deny the culpability of other administrations to set forth Clinton as the poster child for this.

[Zon]

I'd like you to elaborate on what you meant on this thread: 'Stop complying now ... Don't give the government-regulated airlines your business'

[HiTech RedNeck]

By the way, the threat is basically that of a foreign power in our midst; a fifth column that was imported, and now we have to do something about it. Almost all the terrorists being pursued are not citizens. They do not deserve the same freedoms as citizens. IMHO.

Wail and moan along with FOG all you want. But we have a real mess and it has to be cleaned up.

[Zon]

i>Democrat administrations have historically been much lousier at foreign policy than Republican ones. It does not deny the culpability of other administrations to set forth Clinton as the poster child for this. 

So now you claim that your argument has all along been about who makes the best (worst) poster child?

It's the bit lesser of two evil's that you still choose to side with the initiation of force, fraud and coercion against individuals. FOG's quote is not a statement or comparison of Clinton or Bush (and certainly not about a poster child). In its primary statement it is a statement about government.

You know you're talking to a redneck if "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place." -- Swift

[from occupied ga]

Since I'm being flamed and I wasn't even part of this thread, I feel compelled to make a comment.

I knew the statists (like HiTechRed) couldn't refrain from flaming me. Rather than show any examples of where government has ever done anything but use any and every excuse to increase it's power over the citizens (for example, withholding tax was a "temporary" measure introduced during WWII. WWII ended 56 years ago, but it seems we still have witholding tax. Telephone taxes were instituted during the Spanish American war as a "temporary" measure - don't see them going away. ) the Reds have to resort to flame. Well I understand their frustration. When you have no logic to support your position, but your ego won't let you admit you're wrong, it sure is easier to insult than to continue rational argument.

Bureaucrats, the cluleless tyrants in Kongress and in the executive branch work in their own self interest. It is to their self interest to increase their powers at the expense of Freedom. If you don't believe Jefferson and Madison, then some more recent work - J. M. Buchanan in 1986 got a nobel prize (Public Choice Economics) for saying something to the effect that governments weren't dispassionate entities dispensing wisdom, but they functioned just like a corporation, growing and expanding to meet the best interests of those in government Communists, Socialists, National Socialists, and other Reds somehow think that this as a good thing. For them it may be, but for those of us who still hold to the Jeffersonian ideal rather than the Hegel/Marx philosophy, it is an evil which during the 20^th century along resulted in genocide and the death of 50,000,000 innocents at the hands of their own governments.

[Wonder Warthog]

"Wail and moan along with FOG all you want. But we have a real mess and it has to be cleaned up."

Yes, but why do we have to throw the Constitution out with the wash water in order to do so??

[Zon]

But we have a real mess and it has to be cleaned up.

Agreed. Expecting or asking some of the facilitators, whether they be in name or office, to clean up the mess is akin to having the fox guard the hen house. The tell tale sign as to whether they are the fox is to ask yourself, "have they honestly come clean and sought and acted in an honest and consistent manner to identify the internal problems and how the facilitated the mess?"  

They have not. The fox is asking/demanding to guard the hen house with more of the same.

[Zon]

I apologize for not flagging you. It just never entered my mind.

[HiTech RedNeck]

some of the facilitators, whether they be in name or office

You insinuate that the direction of an office does not change with the character of its occupants? That can quite kindly be described as extreme fatuosity.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Sound the FOGhorn! THE STATISTS ARE COMING! THE STATISTS ARE COMING!

BULL HOCKEY.

[from occupied ga]

No problem - I don't think that "HiTechRed" likes me

[from occupied ga]

THE STATISTS ARE COMING

I got news for you Red - They're here already