Posted on 02/06/2002 5:05:45 AM PST by francisandbeans
When Attorney General John Ashcroft told the nation, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists," he wasn't blazing any new trails. He was merely doing what despots and would-be despots always do: attempting to intimidate into silence those who dare to question him.
Ashcroft's statement is one of the most astounding things to be said by a U.S. official in many years. To read it carefully — letting its full message sink in — is to be overtaken by a sense of horror that is otherwise hard to imagine. Every American should be offended to hear the government's chief law enforcement officer equate public expressions of concern about the threats to liberty from drastic "anti-terrorism" measures with joining al-Qaeda. Does Ashcroft have such a low estimate of the American people's intelligence?
Perhaps he needs to become acquainted with Thomas Jefferson. It was Jefferson who said, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." That's true in the best of times. It's doubly true during war — especially an Orwellian undeclared, open-ended crusade against an enemy as nebulous as "international terrorism." Ashcroft is a perfect Orwellian character. In 1984, Big Brother told his people that "freedom is slavery." It follows that slavery is freedom. Ashcroft refuses to concede that the Bush administration is seeking to curtail liberty in the least. Those who see diminished liberty must be hallucinating, seeing "phantoms of lost liberty."
So when the president unilaterally abolishes due process for noncitizens, we are only imaging an erosion of liberty. And when Congress passes, without even reading, the administration's alleged anti-terrorism bill, which expands the government's powers of surveillance, permits secret searches of homes, and weakens judicial oversight of law enforcement, again, we are deluded if we think freedom is evaporating. I write "alleged anti-terrorism bill" because the new law does not restrict the expanded powers to suspected terrorists, but applies them to any criminal activity. This is a classic power grab under the cover of an emergency. September 11 has given policymakers a chance to bring down from the shelf every new police power they have wanted for years. They assume no one will question the need for such broad powers, and if anyone does, they can shut him up by portraying him as an ally of the terrorists. The game is rigged in favor of power.
It is no comfort that the erosion of liberty in the name of fighting terrorism has a bipartisan cast to it. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York has given his blessing to oppressive government with an op-ed in the Washington Post titled "Big Government Looks Better Now." As Schumer puts it, barely concealing his glee, "For the foreseeable future, the federal government will have to grow... The era of a shrinking federal government has come to a close." Of course, the senator was trying to enlarge it long before September 11.
Schumer insists that only the federal government "has the breadth, strength and resources" to keep us secure. Forgive me for asking, but did we not have a federal government on September 11? Was it not in charge of our security on that date? Then what is the senator talking about? And if it isn't impolite to ask, just where does the federal government get all those resources? Last time I checked, it didn't produce anything. It simply took resources from the people who did produce them.
Once we understand that all government possesses is the power of legal plunder our whole perspective changes. Schumer insists that "the notion of letting a thousand different ideas compete and flourish — which works so well to create goods and services — does not work at all in the face of a national security emergency. Unity of action and purpose is required, and only the federal government can provide it." But he’s got it wrong. Security is a service. Competition and innovation are valuable in the effort to keep ourselves safe. The last thing we need is central planning. That’s what we had on September 11.
Sorry, doesn't work that way.If you don't like this country, work for change. Which is exactly what many are doing despite the objection of the sheep.
;)
It's amazing what you can hallucinate on acid. Reality need never intrude.
Yeah, why bother reading something before voting on it?
Exactly then what would Ashcroft's critics do to successfully and expeditiously investigate and root out suspected terrorist and criminal adversaries of America?
Focus their existing powers on real threats rather than on political harassment (e.g. Clinton's tax audits, etc) and minor issues (e.g. Clinton's directive to move resources from anti-terrorism investigation to copyright enforcement).
We can't ALL be stupider than you are.
Nope. An "opinion" expressed by the Attorney General has an obvious influence on all federal law enforcement personnel. In this case it influences them to give less weight to civil liberties issues than the law requires.
Frankly, this defense implies that Ashcroft's statement is a cowardly means of giving a directive without taking responsibility for any subsequent results, a la Henry II's "Will no friend rid me of this troublesome priest?"
A hex on you:
May you be accused of a crime you didn't commit.
Where are the threats of arrest or seizure of media assets that would be an actual attempt to squash dissent? Is it not possible that the people who decry the treatment of detainees in Cuba are trying to build false sympathy for the terrorists? I don’t agree with all of Ashcroft’s decisions or statements, and the drape thing was embarrassing, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over this quote, thank you very much.
Sorry, someone's got to be in the botton 95th Percentile of Intelligence. Its not your fault. Its genetics.
I think that no public official should be exempt from smearing, including Ol' Beaver-Face Ashcroft. His opinion of opponents of the USSA-Patriot-in-Name-Only act probably makes Janet Reno hot.
THIS one almost had me howlin', if you'll excuse the pun < g >
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