For the week of December 12 - 18, 2001

The Ghost of Nixon?

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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Here’s the plan hatched in the White House.

"An expanded range of covert activities against suspected terrorists, including mail opening; ‘black bag jobs’ (surreptitious break-ins); wiretapping; increased infiltration of left wing groups; recruitment of informants on campuses, and greater use of electronic surveillance."

To casual readers, that outline for war on terrorists may sound like Attorney General John Ashrcroft’s chilling blueprint for dealing with the threat of Osama bin Laden and his apparatus.

But, no, this "expanded range of covert activities" was President Richard Nixon’s "Huston Plan," a dark set of police-state measures fabricated in the 1970 White House (and named after 29-year-old Nixon aide Tom Huston) to deal with domestic chaos and Vietnam War protests, as described by Jonathan Aitken on page 413 of his 1994 book, "Nixon: A Life."

Not content with those fearsome steps, Nixon also proposed building a giant outdoor detention center in Washington to house thousands of war protesters rounded up by military troops and police.

To their everlasting credit, astonished Nixon advisers told the frantic and often reckless president that his plan was brimming with a witch’s brew of unconstitutional assaults on American freedoms. Cooler heads prevailed; Nixon abandoned the plan.

Now, Attorney General Ashcroft has embarked on strategies with disturbing similarities to Nixon’s methods ¾ eavesdropping on phone conversations between attorneys and clients detained by the Justice Department; pondering a plan for FBI agents to infiltrate religious and political groups; rounding up and jailing Arab men without charges, and using military tribunals for trials of non-citizens.

Intoxicated by the sort of soaring popularity ratings and congressional support that Nixon enjoyed until Watergate brought him down, Ashcroft presses aggressively on.

Ashcroft waves off suggestions that he’s impinging on rights that he, the attorney general, is sworn to protect.

Some worries run deeper, however. Since Ashcroft has told the U.S. Senate that he believes critics of his tactics provide aid and comfort to terrorism, some critics wonder whether he might twist his authority to include declaring opponents of the anti-terrorist campaign as subversives, and round them up.

Unlike Nixon, who was counseled by aides with an understanding of the Constitution, Ashcroft has no such restraints in his circle of conservative advisers.

President Bush fully supports him, and Ashcroft has surrounded himself with rigid ideologues who instinctively mock and belittle champions of civil liberties.

Finally, those who believe the U.S. Supreme Court’s five-vote conservative majority handed George W. Bush the presidency in the midst of the disputed Florida vote recount have good reason to doubt that Ashcroft’s policies would be reversed by the high court.

 

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