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John Ashcroft Goes for a Spin

By The Philadelphia Daily News
Posted on Thursday August 21, 2003

His Patriot tour is half fact, all friction

Philadelphia area law enforcement officers had the dubious honor yesterday of being the first in the nation to serve as props for Attorney General John Ashcroft’s national tour defending the Patriot Act.

Required to be there more than an hour in advance of Ashcroft’s appearance – tight tight security to heighten the drama – the smartly turned- out officers, guns at the hip, spent the majority of the lead time cooling their heels in the Kirby Auditorial of the Constitution Center, waiting.

Ashcroft appeared as if on a state visit, and gave a speech that was mostly boilerplate with the same old general defenses against specific criticisms of the Patriot Act., passed in haste by a traumatized Congress following the Sept. 11 attacks. Once the script ended, so did Ashcroft’s appearance. He took no questions. Of course.

Mercifully, the crowd was spared the now-traditional Bush administration practice of providing a backdrop with the catch-phrase of the day. Only the podium bore the message: the Web address of the new site dedicated to defending the Patriot Act: www.lifeandliberty.gov.

The Web site purports to counteract the “myths” of the American Civil Liberties Union that the Patriot Act gives the Justice Department unprecedented, and dangerous, powers to investigate Americans.

Basically, the Justice Department denies that the Patriot Act can or would be used to invade the privacy of American citizens or that it significantly reduces the level of “probable cause” needed to search records or property.

Our reading of the act tells us that, while some of its provisions were necessary, some provisions of the act do put Americans’ civil liberties at risk.

Evidence of how the Justice Department has been using the act is hard to come by – the court that issues the warrants is not open to public scrutiny, and neither librarians nor businesses may tell customers that the government has gotten their records. But news reports and surveys suggest that library records have indeed been seized and that businesses have seen an uptick in government requests for customer records.

It’s not surprising that the Justice Department’s defense of the Patriot Act is directed almost exclusively at the ACLU. That’s partly because the ACLU has filed suit against a provision of the act that allegedly allows the government to see the private records of individuals without the traditional “probable cause” required in the past. But it’s also because the ACLU, with its liberal credentials, is an easy target.

Harder to explain away as hysteria are objections from other quarters, including Republicans in the House of Representatives, who voted overwhelmingly for an amendment to the act that would ban so-called “sneak and peek” searches, in which the targets are not informed until long afterward. Or the 150 states, cities and towns – including Philadelphia – that have passed legislation protesting parts of the Patriot Act.

Ashcroft said flat out yesterday that America is “safer” now than it was Sept. 11 – but the man and his Justice Department scare us to death.