For the week of August 14 - 20, 2002

More really bad tips from John Ashcroft

Commentary by DICK DORWORTH

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"There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws."

— AYN RAND

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John Ashcroft, has come up with another bad idea. This is not surprising, as he is a veritable fountain of grimy thought, but when the Attorney General of the United States has a bad idea it can have a really bad effect on the lives of good American citizens. The particular bad idea referred to here is called TIPS, and it is vintage Ashcroft. It would make "suspicious" activity a potential crime, making one man’s suspicion or vindictiveness another man’s downfall. It is not entirely surprising that the very name means the exact opposite of what Ashcroft intended. TIPS is an acronym for Terrorism Information Prevention System, which in English would indicate a system that prevents information about terrorism. Even within his warped sense of acronym reality, Ashcroft can’t get it right. What he meant was Terrorism Prevention Information System to describe a system of information that would prevent terrorism; but TPIS doesn’t have the catchy ring of TIPS and carries a humorously scatological connotation that more truthfully describes the intention of the system by whatever name or acronym. Neither humor, nor accuracy, nor breadth of perspectives is a strong point in the personality of our Attorney General.

Nor does Mr. Ashcroft work for the people in the sense that as Attorney General he is bound by the laws of the land. He is a pie in the sky man, a warrior for good against evil, not a servant of justice and the due process of law, which is his job description. And he has a very warped concept of what is good. For instance, speaking to the student body and faculty of the overtly racist Bob Jones University a few years ago, Ashcroft said, "If America is to be great in the future, it will be if we understand that our source is not civic and temporal, but our source is godly and eternal. Endowed by the Creator with rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I thank God for this institution and for you, who recognize and commit yourselves to the proposition that we were so created….." Any man who thanks God for a racist institution and the racists who inhabit it is by self-definition a loose cannon on the deck of the Ship of State and a disaster in the office of the Attorney General of the United States. His latest salvo against America will hit a lot of innocent people.

A government website reads, "Operation TIPS, administered by the U.S. Department of Justice and developed in partnership with several other federal agencies, is one of the five component programs of the Citizen Corps. Operation TIPS will be a national system for reporting suspicious, and potentially terrorist-related activity. The program will involve the millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places."

That is, TIPS, which, if Ashcroft has his way, will go into effect this month, encourages, rewards, nurtures, gives credence to and applauds the snitch, the snoop, the gossip, the bored and the vindictive. It cloaks the accuser while exposing the accused. It would make of every truck driver, UPS and Fed Ex delivery person, all meter readers, cable technicians, garbage collectors and postal workers, each neighbor and every intolerant citizen a spy for the government, a snitch for the police, a paranoid patriot whose secret accusations will scar the lives and reputations of the accused. It is a vile idea that will make an entire class of millions of Americans undercover agents for the suspicious fantasies of men like John Ashcroft, whose world view is, in a word, obscene.

TIPS is an idea and program of a kind and worthy of the world views of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet, Mao and a host of lesser known but equally repugnant dictators. John Ashcroft’s informant corps is an ignoble concept. It violates basic civil liberties and will sabotage legitimate efforts to prevent terrorism by flooding law enforcement agencies with irrelevant tips about innocent Americans who have nothing to do with terrorism. TIPS is as anti-American as torture, arrest and detention without due process, secret tribunals and, well, neighbors snooping and informing on neighbors and service and trade workers snitching on customers. Though its defenders will cry extremism, it is not extreme to point to that TIPS is the tool of a police state, an instrument of fascism, the brainchild of a brain dead fanatic who does not serve the public good.

TIPS is a bad idea reminiscent of Benito Mussolini who wrote the following: "Fascism denies, in democracy, the absurd conventional untruth of political equality dressed out in the garb or collective irresponsibility, and the myth of ‘happiness’ and indefinite progress…Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State…The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone."

TIPS is a bad idea Mussolini would have embraced.

 

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