[Peace-discuss] US Battles Terror With a Touch of the Spanish Inquisition

[patton paul]

Here's a ringing denunciation of John Ashcroft and the USA Patriot Act
from someone with lots of mainstream credibility.
-Paul P.

US Battles Terror With a Touch of the Spanish Inquisition
by Walter Cronkite


President Bush's televised answer to the growing concerns of many --
including some Republicans -- about the powers granted to him in the USA
Patriot Act was to ask for even stronger measures, particularly the
expanded use of "nonjudicial subpoenas." That means a federal agency such
as the FBI can write its own subpoenas to conduct a search -- no judges
needed.

Unfortunately, security and liberty form a zero-sum equation. The
inevitable trade-off: To increase security is to decrease liberty and vice
versa.

In the past, such trade-offs have been temporary -- for the duration of
the crisis of the moment. But today, we cannot see an end to the war on
terrorism, and that forces us to decide how secure we have to be and how
free we want to be.

By delivering the speech last week himself, Bush added presidential heft
to the issue and took some of the heat off of his attorney general, who is
seen by many as the heedless champion of security at any price.

In his 2 1/2 years in office, Attorney General John Ashcroft has earned
himself a remarkable distinction as the Torquemada of American law.

Tomas de Torquemada, you might recall, was the 15th-century Dominican
friar who became the grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. He was
largely responsible for its methods, including torture and the burning of
heretics -- Muslims in particular.

Now, of course, I am not accusing the attorney general of pulling out
anyone's fingernails or burning people at the stake (at least I don't know
of any such cases). But one does get the sense these days that the old
Spaniard's spirit is comfortably at home in Ashcroft's Department of
Justice.

The Patriot Act is much in the news as Ashcroft and his minions seek both
to justify its excesses and strengthen them, thus intensifying its
dangerous infringements on the Bill of Rights.

There was something almost medieval in the treatment of Muslim suspects in
the aftermath of 9/11. Many were held incommunicado, without effective
counsel and without ever being charged, not for days or weeks, but for
months or longer, some under harsh conditions designed for the most
dangerous criminals.

It was in the spirit of the Inquisition that the Justice Department
announced recently that it would begin gathering data on judges who give
sentences lighter than called for by legislative guidelines.

Nothing so clearly evokes Torquemada's spirit as Ashcroft's penchant for
overruling U.S. attorneys who have sought lesser penalties in capital
cases. He has done this at least 30 times, says the Federal Death Penalty
Resource Counsel. In several cases, Ashcroft actually has overturned plea
bargains negotiated by those government prosecutors.

The New York Times editorialized that the attorney general seems to want
the death penalty used more often.

Ashcroft is not alone in this. His boss, while governor of Texas, seemed
never to have met a death sentence he didn't like.

The two of them represent a subdivision of the Republican Party known as
the "social conservatives," who often have favored the use of government
power to police moral issues they view as modern heresies, such as
abortion, homosexuality and obscenity. They contrast with those
Republicans who tend to resist such uses of federal power and can
generally be counted on to defend individual rights.

What makes this administration's legal bloodthirstiness particularly
alarming is the almost religious zeal that seems to drive it. So, what we
are seeing now is a confluence of two streams of American thought. One of
those streams represents those who believe security must have priority
over civil rights. The other stream represents those who believe that
civil rights must be preserved even as we prosecute to the hilt the war on
terrorism.

Our liberty could drown in the resultant turbulence of these colliding
currents.