Attorney General

Each weekday morning scores of Pavlovian schoolchildren raise their right hands to their hearts, face the flag, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. In the attempt to instill a healthy dose of compulsory patriotic sentiment, the Pledge inundates young minds with core American “values” of “liberty and justice for all.” Little do these impressionable minds know that, according to the Bush Administration, the caveat ‘for all’ doesn’t actually apply to everyone.
The Bush administration’s skewed interpretation of the applicability of American values is embodied in the actions of the Attorney General over the past five years, and, particularly, in the person of John D. Ashcroft. Although Ashcroft resigned at the beginning of this year, his is still a name that should implant fear in the heart of anyone possessing a pulse. His successor, Alberto Gonzales, has essentially carried over all of Ashcroft’s policies into this first year of his term. Thus, an adequate examination of the Department of Justice should focus on Ashcroft and the policies that he formulated which continue to affect us today under Gonzales.
Ashcroft represents the epitome of the fundamentalist Christian right-wing of the Republican Party that has co-opted control over the nation’s politics. He is a member of the Assembly of God Church, an evangelical Christian sect that preaches, among other things, that homosexuality is evil and causes disease, Christians shouldn’t befriend non-Christians, and mixed gender dancing is unacceptable. His membership in this Church would be a moot point if he were attached to the first amendment notion of the separation of church and state. However, his insistence on being anointed upon entering any government office, holding of daily prayers in the Justice Department, and forcing his staff to sing his own religious patriotic hymn, “Let the Eagle Soar,” provide ample evidence to the contrary. Oozing out of his religious background is a conservative worldview that even Pat Robertson would envy. Ashcroft is vocally anti-gay rights, anti-abortion rights, pro-capital punishment, anti-affirmative action, and a strong supporter of the War on Drugs. His bio on the official Department of Justice proclaims that he is “pledged…[to] combat discrimination so that no American feels outside the protection of the law.” The only way I would feel within the protection of the law with this man as the Attorney General of my country is if I were a white heterosexual male completely lacking any sense of empathy. And this is before the USA Patriot Act was passed.
Like the administration itself, the Attorney General essentially has had two terms, pre-September 11 and post-September 11. In the former, Ashcroft focused on lessening the applicability of the Freedom of Information Act, revitalizing the War on Drugs (and in the process jailing one-half of the heroic duo of Cheech and Chong), and aggressively pursuing the death penalty in federal cases.
The literal and symbolic destruction of two pillars of Western capitalism and, by extension, American values, produced the War on Terrorism. Soon thereafter Ashcroft reformulated the Justice Department, shifting its overriding priority to fighting and winning this war. As the government frequently accused the terrorists of attacking us out of envy toward our freedoms and our values, Ashcroft was pushing Congress to swiftly approve the USA Patriot Act, a sweeping piece of legislation designed to greatly limit those very freedoms. In this new, and yet eerily classic, struggle between good and evil, Ashcroft was accruing new powers to help fight the bad guys. Increased phone tapping abilities, internet traffic monitoring, foreign student monitoring, library record searches, and warantless Sneak-and-Peak searches all became, and remain, novel powers granted to government in the name of fighting evil, alias of terror.
In June of 2005, President Bush estimated that about 400 arrests have been made under the act. Although purported to solely aid the government in fighting terror, the act has been utilized in cases of money-laundering activities, computer fraud, child pornography, and against the homeless.
Malcontent with restricting civil liberties for Americans at home, the Justice Department sought to ensure that prisoners of war were not even afforded the protections of the Geneva Convention, let alone allowed resort to even barebones constitutional protections. The Yoo/Delahunty Memo and the Alberto Gonzales Memo became the legal basis for the administration’s determination that enemy combatants did not deserve protections under the Geneva POW conventions, determining Afghanistan to be a “failed state,” or as Gonzales, the current Attorney General, phrased it, “not a government, but a militant, terrorist-like group.” Such a justification allowed the government to pursue a policy allowing for indefinite detentions without charges and trials by secretive military tribunals.
Determined they were affording still too many rights to these POW’s, the Torture Memo was initiated from the Department of Justice contending that the President yields “commander-in-chief authority” to order torture. Cleared by Gonzales himself, this memo opened the floodgates to future prisoner abuse scandals that would soon reveal themselves at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharib.
In response to criticisms of these initiatives, Ashcroft declared, speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee in December of 2001, “We need honest, reasoned debate, not fear-mongering. To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to…enemies and pause to…friends.” It is inconceivable that the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, the man charged with upholding the Constitutional principle of free speech, would proclaim that dissenters attempting to open a healthy debate are essentially aiding the enemy. A healthy debate is one of the founding principles of this nation, not a new-fangled addendum to democracy.
In the spirit of adding to the healthy debate a hypothetical is in order. If, perhaps, a trigger-happy assassin or some other series of unfortunate events were to substantiate the need for a new Attorney General, we would gladly and gallantly offer our services (this is with the stipulation, of course, that we receive an unlimited living stipend of Sumatra coffee beans and Seagram’s 7 whiskey for the length of our term).
America is, in reality, with or without Bush and his cronies, a democracy full of hypocrisy; a democracy where children grow up reciting lies at the behest of government. At the same time, lip service to ideals is more contradictory and undesirable than an honest, reasoned attempt to achieve a reality as close to those ideals as possible, even if the result is often falls short and looks like hypocrisy.
“For all” does not and should not mean “for all…except homosexuals, women, African-Americans, non-Americans, and anyone that is even suspected of having some, however minute, connection to terrorism.” It is, instead, a universal notion of equality of rights and protections that this country must make attempts to achieve. If American values are so important that we must spread their fertilizing seeds across barren, arid deserts, then how can they be so easily corrupted and forgotten? Our principles will hearken back to a day when striving for the ideals civil liberties and equality were as fundamental as a sovereign nation’s right to defend itself, pardon, the right of sovereign Western democracies to self-defense.
Our first initiative will be to make the Freedom of Information Act useful and important, for transparency in government is an essential goal of any democracy. Being the on the opposite side of the spectrum of Ashcroft and company, we would lessen penalties and increase treatment for drug users while eradicating the notion of the social problem as a war.
Approaching the issue of terrorism in a post-September 11 world is an inevitability. Indeed, not responding to terrorism would be highly irresponsible. However, the Patriot Act was not necessarily essential, or perhaps, was not the best manifestation of such a body of legislation. The act purports to have been devised for the sole purpose of fighting terror, but has, in reality, been enacted for cases unrelated to terrorism. Application of the act in any such case is inherently unacceptable. If the Department of Justice can make an adequate case that some provisions of the USA Patriot Act have been essential in fighting terrorism, then we will make a conscious attempt to amend the legislation. If such action is taken, we will include input from constitutional lawyers and interest groups such as the ACLU to ensure the propagation of civil liberties in conjunction with an acknowledgement of the necessity of fighting terror. If the case is inadequate and the provisions prove to be nonessential, then we will not seek renewal in December, 2005.
The issue of the prisoners of war and the torture accusations is as simple as promising to uphold a consensual piece of international law, rather than smarmily attempting to circumvent it on an unsound legal basis. In fact, the Bush administration has since reversed their stance on this issue and Gonzales distanced his involvement during his appointment hearings. The same is true with the issue of torture of enemy combatants: it should never be condoned. Gonzales should have never been able to replace Ashcroft after the role he played in such atrocities at the hands of a ‘civilized’ western democracy. All the United States had to do is was provide the minimum protections afforded to these men under international convention.
America is in an ideological battle and the Ashcrofts are winning. The USA Patriot Act will most likely be renewed in December and the only person who has been held accountable for the Abu Gharib prisoner abuse, Lynndie England, has been described, psychologically, as a child. The actual pursuit of American values has been replaced by lip service to such ideals for realization of political ends. When the Justice Department’s website purports that Ashcroft was “committed to…leading a professional Justice Department free from politics,” it was referring just to those politics which are at odds with his own. If something is not done, the next generation of children will grow up to be as disillusioned as those before them. Although not perfect, we had been making strong inroads towards the notion that “freedom and justice for all” actually meant more than the meaningless, monotonous routine of a seventh grader.