[News] From John Ashcroft's lips to God's ear

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 From John Ashcroft's lips to God's ear
Kiss Your Rights Goodbye
http://www.villagevoice.com/print/issues/0434/indiana.php
by Gary Indiana
August 23rd, 2004 4:45 PM

It will never be said of George W. Bush that he left office with any less 
intelligence, grace, and dignity than he came in with. Intimidation of 
black voters in Florida has already begun, with surprise visits to the 
newly registered by Jeb Bush's state police, "investigating voter fraud"­an 
ingeniously ironic whopper, of the stripe that's endeared the Bush family 
to generations of Saudi princes, defense contractors, and homicidal dictators.

Iraq is a catastrophe, bloodier by the hour. Our Afghan proxy controls a 
full 10 yards of sovereign territory around his office in Kabul. The only 
successful war Bush has waged from the comfort of his ranch thus far has 
been an unremitting attack on the U.S. Constitution. The First, Fourth, 
Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in the Bill of Rights have already sustained 
serious injury.

The usual method of redressing constitutional grievances is through the 
court system. But well in advance of the fait accompli, Bush's fans in 
Congress derailed most of President Clinton's judicial nominations, a 
practice the media overlooked in its frenzy to document a cum stain 
artfully preserved by Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. No member of the 
Senate was more fanatical in excluding qualified people from the federal 
bench than our current attorney general, John Ashcroft. The vacancies 
imposed by Ashcroft and other Senate evangelicals have now been filled by 
right-wing ideologues, who dominate seven of 13 federal appellate districts.

It's a small, telling measure of G.W. Bush's contempt for the electorate 
that after Missouri voters chose to elect a deceased candidate rather than 
give Ashcroft another term, Bush promptly installed him as the country's 
chief law enforcement officer. When sworn in, Ashcroft was, appropriately, 
anointed with oil by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Ashcroft is, not to mince words, a lunatic. This would have been 
universally recognized at almost any other moment in American history. In 
the looking-glass world of "the war on terror," however, Ashcroft's 
religious manias haven't excited even mild censure from anyone in 
government. By all reports, Ashcroft runs the Department of Justice like a 
Pentecostal revival meeting, enjoining his staff to raise their voices in 
righteous hymns of his own composition.

After 9-11 and the anthrax scare, Ashcroft's Patriot Act, and the 
subsequent Homeland Security Act sailed through a terrified Congress like 
shit through a canebrake. Although Ashcroft has disavowed a leaked draft of 
the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, which bears a twinship to the Nazi 
Party's 1933 platform, Patriot Act II, as it's affectionately known, is 
definitely on the menu for a second Bush administration, should Diebold 
Corporation and Brother Jeb come through for our current appointee.

A curious feature of the Patriot Act is that it authorizes virtually 
nothing that would effectively prevent terrorists from hitting American 
targets. Like other "emergency" measures since 9-11, it attacks Americans. 
Racial profiling, arbitrary searches and seizures, roving wiretaps and 
judge-less warrants, harassment of nonviolent activists, indefinite 
detention without probable or even improbable cause, and guilt by 
association are only a few of the "appropriate tools required to intercept 
and obstruct terrorism." Not all of them are stipulated in the Patriot Act, 
but such has been its use-value.

Naturally, putting these and similar "tools" in the hands of intelligence 
agencies and police officers guarantees their rampant misuse, just as 
deregulating industry has freed corporations to break every labor and 
environmental law they haven't managed to rescind.

Unfortunately, a large terrorist event in New York City is just as likely 
to happen with or without the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland 
Security, no matter how many random Muslims and political dissidents the 
FBI harasses or locks up.

Inflating ordinary misdemeanor crimes into "terrorist acts" does nothing to 
enhance security; it's a standard practice of police states, and will only 
benefit the corporatized prison racket. Since operations like 9-11 and the 
earlier embassy bombings in Africa took at least five years to plan, the 
fact that nothing's happened here since 9-11 has nothing to do with 
Ashcroft's theatrics or Bush's "toughness."

When it comes to cases, every legal tool law enforcement needed to hunt 
terrorists was already on the books before the Patriot Act. If "the war on 
terror" were serious and not a bait-and-switch operation to squash dissent 
and push an agenda long preceding 9-11, legions of "intelligence" personnel 
and presidential advisers would have been out of work on 9-12.

Nobody in this administration has lost a job for failing to uphold the 
Constitution, ignoring the public interest, or exhibiting limitless 
incompetence. No honor among thieves, as the saying goes. Even the 
pornographic horror of Abu Ghraib wasn't enough to make Donald Rumsfeld 
resign. As Dick Cheney asserted in a different context, everyone in the 
Bush administration has "other priorities," all of them antithetical to the 
public interest. What is the public, compared to Jesus Christ and Halliburton?

I mention Jesus Christ only because John Ashcroft frequently likens himself 
to the simple carpenter from Nazareth who died for our sins. In his 
autobiography, Ashcroft reveals a messianic complex seldom found outside a 
locked ward, characterizing each of his career disappointments as 
"crucifixions." On rare occasions when things go well, his father, an 
Assembly of God cultist, or someone equally demented is always on hand to 
smear a little Crisco on his forehead, as was done for the prophets in 
biblical times.

Ashcroft inhabits the same mental universe as Osama bin Laden, which isn't 
as useful to a "war on terror" as it sounds. Like bin Laden, Ashcroft 
considers his job to be smiting the infidel, prosecuting Muslims and Arabs 
on an ethnic-religious basis. Many Homelanders conflate Muslims with 
terrorists, so Ashcroft has been able to do the same, forearmed by Jesus 
for the clash of civilizations. Alas, unlike bin Laden, Ashcroft really 
doesn't know much about our civilization, much less anyone else's.

The Justice Department would have it that numerous "sleeper cells" have 
been ambushed since 9-11. Fat chance. Plea bargaining, a judicial travesty 
designed to relieve our court system of its onerous duty to give defendants 
jury trials, and mandatory sentencing, which voids the discretion of judges 
to tailor sentences appropriate for individual defendants, have placed the 
fate of anyone charged with a crime in the total control of prosecutors.

In the terrorism cases to date, people from targeted ethnic groups have 
been fingered, for whatever reasons, by informants; locked up without 
benefit of counsel; and threatened with life imprisonment or execution 
(typical mandatory sentences for "terror" crimes). Predictably, these 
casualties of the Patriot Act tend to confess to lesser crimes the 
prosecutor offers from a standard menu of transgressions. The so-called 
Lackawanna Six, U.S. citizens of Yemeni origin, pleaded out on "providing 
material support to terrorists" when menaced with capital charges.

Eleven alleged terrorists in Alexandria, Virginia, charged with what 
amounts to "association" with Al Qaeda, pleaded out on violations of the 
Neutrality Act.

Seven members of a "terrorist cell" in Portland, Oregon, likewise charged 
with multiple crimes, pleaded out on lesser, tossed-in charges of gun 
possession.

A hearing on probable cause in most of the above cases might have concluded 
that the defendants' rights had been violated. It's more likely that these 
people are innocent than guilty, considering how many episodes of mass 
hysteria have translated into show trials­or, in these cases, no 
trials­throughout American history.

In every case "linked" to 9-11, Muslims, mostly American citizens, have 
been confronted with the same dilemma anyone "overcharged" with felony 
counts faces: Take your chances with an overworked, underpaid public 
defender or plead out for lesser jail time, even if you're innocent. In the 
rare cases in which a defendant's lawyer has managed to compel production 
of the state's "secret evidence," it proved so flimsy that charges were 
drastically lowered by the courts or simply thrown out.

The Moussaoui case illustrates how the terror war has played out in the 
U.S. Initially indicted on six conspiracy counts, any one of which could 
lead to life imprisonment or execution, Moussaoui insisted on questioning 
three "enemy combatants" in detention who he said would testify to his 
non-involvement in 9-11.

The judge ordered Moussaoui's access to the detainees; rather than produce 
them, the Justice Department claimed that they could reveal "classified 
information." The prosecutors moved for a dismissal, in hopes that an 
appellate court would void the judge's order and call for a new trial.

Under the weird procedures Ashcroft has devised from a breathtakingly 
cynical reading of international law and U.S. statutes, the government can 
switch Moussaoui's status to that of "enemy alien" and try him before a 
military tribunal. This isn't just overcharging, it's railroading.

Only between 3 and 5 percent of felony defendants in the U.S. ever receive 
a jury trial. For "terror" suspects, just being called a terrorist by the 
Justice Department is enough to get you shipped to a dog pound on Diego 
Garcia without being charged. This is likely to entail being 
sleep-deprived, tortured, and raped by some smirking hillbilly like Lynndie 
England, courtesy of Donald Rumsfeld.

Three years after the fact, there has been no satisfactory explanation for 
what happened on 9-11, although it's clear from many credible accounts that 
the House of Saud was paying protection money to bin Laden, and several 
Sauds who died under fishy circumstances afterward knew in advance that an 
American target was going to be hit. The Bush family's complex business 
dealings with the Saudis, including some of bin Laden's siblings, have 
clouded every inquiry into the 9-11 plot.

What should have been a disaster for G.W. Bush's presidency, then, has 
instead served as a pretext for conducting it like a dictatorship, with 
John Ashcroft's Justice Department as its secret police. Strange to say, 
the branch of the government that got the country into this mess is the 
only one that can get us out. The Supreme Court's rulings in Hamdi v. 
Rumsfeld, Rasul v. Bush, and Rumsfeld v. Padilla, affirming habeas corpus 
rights for detainees as well as criminal defendants, while not unequivocal 
triumphs for Hamdi, Rasul, or Padilla per se, at least indicate a dawning 
recognition within the Supreme Court that its own prerogatives are liable 
to be usurped by an executive branch that defines "war" against a phantom 
enemy as an eternal state of emergency. If we can't rely on the court for 
fairness, the republic may yet be rescued by its resentment.


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