The Government Strives Mightily to Keep Fear Alive

The Bushies are becoming pros at using fear as a political tactic.
---BumbleBeeBoogie

TERROR ALERT
The Government Strives Mightily to Keep Fear Alive
John Ashcroft unplugged: On the road, pushing Patriot Act
Jonathan Turley
Sunday, August 31, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/08/31/IN277420.DTL

It is the record industry's answer for any aging rock band or artist with slipping sales: Go on tour. The White House appears to be following that advice in trying to bolster the slipping support for both Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act.

The tour promises to be Ashcroft Unplugged, a city-by-city performance explaining why citizens should embrace the Patriot Act and its rollback of civil liberties. Of course, this will be a hard sell in more than 150 cities and three states that have passed resolutions opposing the act and are fighting its use in their communities. It is one thing to get people to shell out a few bucks for a final KISS tour. It is a bit more difficult to get a free people to surrender their freedoms.

The Justice Department announced the national tour to correct "misinformation" about the Patriot Act and to share its many virtues - and, by extension, those of the attorney general himself, who remains the least popular member of the administration. Because I have been cited by the Justice Department as one of the critics who have "misinformed" the public, I would like to offer my own suggestions for the Ashcroft Unplugged Tour.

In many ways, this tour is a variation of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 classic "Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." If citizens are going to come to love the Patriot Act and the rollback of their civil liberties, Ashcroft needs to emphasize the other, less known, positive features of the law.

For example, the new authority to conduct secret physical searches of our homes means greater interaction for home pets. Before Ashcroft, privacy kept pets in stressful isolation for long days until the return of their working owners. Under the Patriot Act, insertion teams of agents will often bring dog and cat treats for such pets as they scrub your computer and insert surveillance devices. Owners will return to find their animals rested and frisky.

Likewise, the new government monitoring of our library book withdrawals offers people some benefits to offset the loss of confidentiality that has existed for decades. For example, the FBI will finally be able to produce a conclusive listing of the people who have actually read supermodel Emme's new book, "Life's Little Emergencies: Everyday Rescue for Beauty, Fashion, Relationships, and Life" (at last, a possible use of Guantanamo Bay that I would support).

Finally, the Patriot Act could be a breakthrough for clinical paranoids who have been struggling with fears of government monitoring for years: Now they know they are being monitored.

Of course, even with such benefits, Ashcroft is likely to find a fairly hostile audience. Part of the problem is Ashcroft himself. From the beginning, there was a concern not that Ashcroft was using these new powers aggressively but that he was enjoying it too much.

Ashcroft has become the James Watt of Justice. Where Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary Watt sought to clear-cut every forest, Ashcroft appears intent on felling every individual civil liberty that stands in his way. He has, for example, asserted the unilateral right to declare any U.S. citizen an enemy combatant and to strip him or her of all rights and access to both the courts and counsel. A recent internal report at the Justice Department confirmed that individuals were being abused and held without cause - a report that Ashcroft dismissed. Now, Ashcroft has announced that he will "disabuse" the public of such concerns.

The Ashcroft Unplugged Tour shows a common reaction by the Bush administration to criticism. The administration has long taken the view that criticism of policies simply calls for better marketing rather than changing the product itself.

For example, when the administration faced an uproar in the Middle East over its policies and military campaigns, it hired ad executive Charlotte Beers to market its policies to the Arab street. Made the undersecretary of State for public diplomacy, Beers had previously marketed such products as Head & Shoulders and Uncle Ben's Rice. The administration apparently believed that a similar campaign could convince 1.3 billion Muslims that U.S. policy had "fewer flakes" or was "less sticky." It was an utter failure, and Beers resigned.

Ashcroft will soon learn that marketing cannot overcome defects in a product. The Patriot Act represents the most significant rollback of civil liberties since the Civil War. Some of the country's most conservative leaders have denounced both the act and Ashcroft's record as a threat to liberty.

In response, Ashcroft has already indicated that he will strive to keep fear alive - suggesting that restricting his powers could "unleash more death and destruction on our soil." Moreover, he has previously declared that critics of his policies should be viewed as aiding and abetting terrorists.

Ultimately, the public will have to decide whether to buy what Ashcroft is selling. However, an ancient rule applies when an attorney general comes knocking with a pitch that less freedom means more freedom: Caveat emptor, or buyer beware.
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Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School.