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

[Ricky Baldwin]

Thanks, Paul!


This actually ran in Friday's News-Gazette, p. A-7. 
Maybe some letters to the editor, you know, along the
lines of 'yeah-what-he-said'??????

Ricky
--- patton paul <ppatton at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
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