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Octomber
2, 2001
Ashcroft: Be Afraid,
Be Very Afraid
The attorney general
fans public fears of another attack to win quick passage of anti-terror
bill.
By Steve Perry
Scare
the Hell Out of Them
Over the weekend attorney general John
Ashcroft took to the airwaves to warn of the likelihood of another
terrorist attack on American soil in the days to come. On Sunday
and Monday nearly every major American news outlet followed his
lead. The papers were full of dire ruminations on the next bin
Laden strike, and practically all the email I received was about
the same thing: Are we about to be hit again? The only sensible
answer is that no one knows. Every day brings fresh reports of
terrorist plots foiled and terrorist plots possibly still in
the offing, but it's impossible to tell the difference between
credible evidence, disinformation left behind by the 9/11 perpetrators,
and disinformation concocted by the U.S. government.
The one sure thing is that
the timing of Ashcroft's PR offensive had everything to do with
ramming the Bush administration's hastily forged anti-terrorism
bill through Congress. At minimum the Justice Department wants
vastly expanded wiretapping rights-so-called roving wiretaps
that would apply to standard phones, cell phones, email and the
Internet-and the power to detain indefinitely and deport at will
any non-U.S. citizens it considers suspicious. A less publicized
provision would allow the use of the National Security Agency's
Echelon program-a little-known multinational data collection
system that intercepts telephone and computer communications
around the world-for purposes of domestic police actions in the
U.S. According to Declan McCullagh of the Wired.com website,
"Information gathered from Echelon and other electronic
surveillance by foreign governments could be used against Americans
'even if the collection would have violated the Fourth Amendment,'
according to the Justice Department's analysis of the bill."
One overarching question for
legislative purposes is what will count legally as "terrorism."
According to a
report in Monday's Los Angeles Times, "the Justice
Department has proposed to define 'terrorism' so broadly that
some lawmakers fear it would include a teenage computer hacker
or a protester who tosses a rock through the window of a federal
building. And because the government wants to prosecute all those
who 'harbor' or 'conspire' with terrorists, a loose definition
could thousands of protesters as conspirators in a terrorist
plot." By administration standards, a hacker who posts a
joke on a government website could be branded a terrorist and
jailed for life.
Thus far Congress has balked
at the administration's efforts to expand federal police powers.
It appears that even in the face of the September 11 bombings,
a sizeable contingent of the public and its elected representatives
still fear the depredations of their own government as much as
the threat of foreign-bred terror. Hence the weekend offensive
by Ashcroft. The skeptics include not only usual suspects on
the left-liberal side, such as the ACLU and its adherents, but
numerous members of the Republican right motivated by the memory
of Waco and Ruby Ridge. "It would be entirely inappropriate
to move such an important legislative initiative without serious
deliberation," Georgia Republican Bob Barr said on the floor
of the House. "Let us not rush into a vast expansion of
government power in a misguided attempt to protect freedom. In
doing so, we will erode the very freedoms we seek to protect."
Powell
v. Rummy: a False Dichotomy?
Much continues to be made of
the Bush administration split between the Powell/State Department
and Rumsfeld/Pentagon factions. (As noted previously, the former
prefer strong diplomacy and limited military strikes while the
latter wish to pick fights on several fronts; for more background,
click here.)
Assessments of who's winning vary from day to day and week to
week. It's the pennant race story of post-attack coverage. First
it was Powell out in front, then Rumsfeld by half a game. Now
most press accounts put Powell in the lead once again. And indeed
the president, by his very hesitance to leap in with both feet,
seems to be following the Powell line even as he keeps insisting
on a "war against terrorism" of broad scope and long
duration.
In some quarters Powell v.
Rumsfeld is deemed a Manichean struggle on which the future of
the American Imperium will stand or fall. But the seeming contradiction
between the two sides may come to less than presently imagined.
There's ample room for synthesis of both approaches. Bush so
far has demonstrated an admirable tendency to restraint and forethought,
and the preponderance of signs points to a first strike as carefully
targeted as possible. Score one for Powell? Not necessarily.
What does seem clear is that
Bush wants to get bin Laden and prefers setting up surrogates
to do the heavy lifting in going after the Taliban. It's an elegant
solution apart from the fact it can't work. Even with money and
arms from the U.S. and U.K., the Northern Alliance and other
sundry Afghan rebels just don't have the manpower to do much
more than annoy the Taliban. But their efforts will likely buy
Bush and the U.S. time to regroup and assess options; they may
spare U.S. forces the almost certain debacle of waging ground
war in the Afghan mountains in wintertime. But eventually circumstances
will militate toward sending more American special forces units
and "advisers," and then additional troops. That's
where the Rumsfeld option comes into play. Bush will have to
decide how far he wants to go in carrying hot war to Afghanistan
and elsewhere-a list that certainly includes the Pentagon's favorite
secondary target, Iraq. His choices will be circumscribed by
factors it's impossible to speculate about for now: the degree
of support at home; the state of the U.S.'s many fragile international
alliances; the behavior of Israel toward the Palestinians; and
whether there are any more attacks on American soil in the meantime.
Go,
Sharon!
Longtime critics of American
Middle East policy-and its linchpin, the U.S.'s unstinting support
of Israel's provocation of the Palestinians and its continual
efforts at shrinking Palestinian territories-now find themselves
in an ironic position. If you believe the U.S. needs to begin
distancing itself from Israel in order to blunt the radical elements
of Islam and forestall a protracted war it cannot win, you have
to root for the continued belligerence of the Sharon government
in the short term.
The calculus is simple enough.
The perpetrators of the September 11 attacks want to draw the
U.S. into a war of attrition on numerous fronts. American prerogatives
for waging such a war depend on the stability of the moderate
pro-U.S. governments in the Arab world, which in turn depend
in large part on the Americans' ability to hold Israel in check
for the duration. If Sharon charges ahead in his offensive against
the Palestinians, as he obviously wishes to do, two salutary
consequences follow: The U.S. will be unable to make war on multiple
fronts, and it will be forced to start the process of cutting
back its ties to Israel-a step that would do more to short-circuit
al-Qaida and its brethren than countless U.S. bombing runs. CP
Steve Perry writes frequently for CounterPunch
and is a contributor to the excellent cursor.org
website, which offers incisive coverage of the current crisis.
He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
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