Is feared U.S.
police power being revived?
Commentary
by PAT MURPHY
The
red-white-and-blue bumper sticker on the tradesman’s pickup truck at a
Ketchum construction site — "Love My Country/Fear My
Government" — is fading.
When new,
it bespoke outraged reaction to the Ruby Ridge clash between the Weaver
family and the FBI and, later, the Waco inferno blamed on the FBI. Tales
of no-knock home invasions by SWAT teams also spread around the Internet
about hat time.
But just
as the bumper sticker is fading, so, too, has the militant suspicion of
federal powers that fathered the militia movement.
Yet,
today, the 10th anniversary of the beginning of Ruby Ridge
siege, federal police powers are expanding more rapidly and becoming
more pervasive in American life than at any other time.
And with
far more dangerous dimensions.
This
burgeoning power is being concentrated in the hands of U.S. Attorney
General John Ashcroft, a political and religious zealot who often acts
as if he’s above the law and, unlike predecessors, rarely appears in
public to account for his actions.
Most
Americans who casually follow Ashcroft’s activities seem unconcerned.
So far, they perceive Ashcroft is using powers to detain
"them" ¾ Arabs and followers of Osama bin Laden ¾ in the war
on terrorism without appeal to a court and without lawyers.
But the
same power could be turned on "us" ¾ Americans" ¾
simply if Ashcroft declares by fiat that an American is a terrorism
suspect or "enemy combatant" and with no need for Ashcroft to
justify it.
Items:
-
An
angry federal Judge Robert G. Doumar ordered Ashcroft aides who
refused to answer his questions to produce documents justifying the
detention of U.S. citizen Esam Hamdi, 21 as a terrorism suspect.
"This case appears to be the first in American jurisprudence
where an American citizen has been held incommunicado and subjected
to an indefinite detention in the continental United States without
charges, without any findings by a military tribunal, and without
access to a lawyer," Judge Doumar wrote.
-
Ashcroft
has refused to answer questions of the Republican-led House
Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., D-Wis.,
investigating how Ashcfroft is using his broad new anti-terrorism
powers. Ashcroft instead sent answers to the House Intelligence
Committee that plans no investigations and has asked no questions.
-
President
Bush has ordered Ashcroft and Defense Scretary Donald Rumsfeld to
determine whether the U.S. military should have more domestic powers
over civilians.
-
George
Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, one of the most
persistent and acerbic critics of President Clinton’s conduct,
writes that "Attorney General John Ashcroft’s announced
desire for camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be ‘enemy
combatants’ has moved him merely from being a political
embarrassment to being a constitutional menace."
Since
Ashcroft once told a congressional committee that he believes critics
and protesters of President Bush’s anti-terrorism policies were aiding
enemy interests, would Ashcroft slap critics and protesters into
detention camps without benefit of hearings or lawyers?
Ashcroft’s
use of detention camps stirs memories of President Nixon’s
"Huston Plan," named after White House aide Tom Huston, which
proposed illegal wire taps, entry of homes without search warrants,
opening mail, and the roundup of thousands of Vietnam war protesters to
be held in barbed-wire compounds in the nation’s capital.
In later
years after his resignation as a result of the Watergate burglary, Nixon
justified the "Huston Plan" on the basis that he believed any
presidential order is legal.
Fortunately,
five days after the media disclosed the plan, Nixon abandoned it under
pressure from no less than J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director, who even saw
the tyrannical and unconstitutional character of the plan.
Are we on
the brink of reliving history?