Administrative/Regulatory
Aug. 9, 2002
Ashcroft's Plan for Spy Recruiting
Forum Column - By Leslie T. Thornton - Discussing the anniversary of Watergate back in June, Wall Street Journal commentator and CNN Capital Gang regular Al Hunt called John Ashcroft "the most blatantly political attorney general since ... John Mitchell." But he is worse than that.
By Leslie T. Thornton
Discussing the anniversary of Watergate back in June, Wall Street Journal commentator and CNN Capital Gang regular Al Hunt called John Ashcroft "the most blatantly political attorney general since ... John Mitchell." But he is worse than that. And we better find a way to check Ashcroft's heretofore unchecked power before we end up with a body of new laws and policy commitments that make George Orwell's "1984" look like "Splendor in the Grass."
Rescued by President George W. Bush after losing his Senate re-election bid to a dead opponent, a spectacularly bleak harbinger of one's political future, Ashcroft clearly owes the president his best effort in fighting the "war on terrorism." But in addition to being a braggart and alarmist who rarely gets the facts about a terrorism threat or arrest right, Ashcroft tries to make and promote exceedingly bad law and policies.
The latest example of Ashcroft's unruliness is the Justice Department's Terrorism Information and Prevention System, known as TIPS. Despite its benign packaging as one of five component programs of the Citizens Corps, the Justice Department states that TIPS would have truck and bus drivers, postal workers, meter readers, port workers and others "who have regular routines that take them down roads, rivers, coastlines, and public transit routes, and through neighborhoods and communities" look for and report suspicious activity, whatever that means.
Initially, such information was slated to be analyzed and maintained in a single database, but after House Republicans in Washington yanked TIPS from the Homeland Security proposal, Ashcroft sacrificed the database proposal in order to save the rest of the TIPS program.
TIPS is causing derision and controversy on Capitol Hill, but the program is alive. In his late July 2002 hearing before an extremely hostile House committee, Ashcroft said the administration planned to go ahead with the plan. It did not matter to Ashcroft that the opposition to the program in the House was led by conservative Republicans including Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, and Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga.
Indeed, Armey told Ashcroft that the government should not "promote citizens spying on one another" and Barr called TIPS a "snitch system ... [a] formal program organized, paid for and maintained by our own federal government to recruit Americans to spy on fellow Americans, smacks of the very type of fascist or Communist government we fought so hard to eradicate in other countries in decades past." It mattered even less, of course, that Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., attacked the program.
Worse, there is no blueprint on how TIPS would work. The Justice Department had planned to launch the TIPS program quietly in 10 pilot cities this summer, with very little guidance, structure or privacy protection. When Ashcroft was called by Congress to testify on the Homeland Security agency proposal, however, he was asked to be specific about the TIPS program and how it would operate.
Though he had few answers on the specifics of the program, Ashcroft insisted that the administration planned to go forward with it, anyway. House members who opposed TIPS or had unanswered concerns yanked it from the Homeland Security bill. It's alive in the Senate and likely will pass after more compromises. But the House action put the pilot program on hold.
If this hearing was not held, therefore, we might have had an unregulated government-promoted program that engaged in large-scale invasions of privacy in 10 cities.
That anyone thinks ordinary people are qualified to make the kinds of decisions that law enforcement and other officials are trained to make every day, yet still get wrong, is ludicrous. If we are worried about race-profiling and vigilantism and other intrusions on our rights and beliefs, what will happen if we are invited by the government to spy on one another?
Early unscientific but important anecdotal evidence bears out the likelihood of racial profiling and the many challenges the program poses for the untrained workers it enlists. According to New York Times reporter Andy Newman, a Federal Express driver Newman talked to for his July 21 article said that, after Sept. 11, he began passing on information to authorities about what he saw in his Arab-American customers' apartments. On the other hand, a mail carrier in Brooklyn said he didn't know how the government expected him to do what its trained and equipped agents could not: "distinguish between the out-of-the ordinary and the genuine threat." The driver of an 18-wheeler said he probably wouldn't know a terrorist if he or she bopped him in the nose but he was willing to pitch in, anyway. And a number of workers said the whole idea was in direct conflict with their jobs.
Many of the religious conservatives who pushed Bush so strongly to appoint Ashcroft attorney general have begun to register their concerns about Ashcroft's actions openly. In a July 24 New York Times article, Neil A. Lewis reports that some of Ashcroft's biggest religious conservative supporters "have lost enthusiasm" for him, citing "his anti-terrorist positions as enhancing the kind of government power that they instinctively oppose." Neil quotes a conservative strategist as stating that, before recent events, "Ashcroft would have been talked about as the Bush successor." Instead, the strategist said, the talk is that 'too bad we pushed for him.'"
TIPS would be bad enough if it were an isolated departure from an otherwise conservative but un-extreme leadership. But Ashcroft has long shown his colors, both in what he is willing to say and do and in what he is not. For example, Ashcroft asked the Supreme Court in June to allow secret deportation hearings for people arrested after Sept. 11, arguing that disclosing any information about the detainees would compromise national security. In March, the Washington Post reported that, since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has been moving alleged terrorism suspects secretly to other countries, including Egypt and Jordan, in order to subject them to torture and other interrogation tactics that lawfully cannot be visited on them here. When reporters asked him about it, Ashcroft wouldn't discuss it.
Moreover, the Justice Department's office of the inspector general has opened nine formal investigations of Justice Department personnel and activity based on 458 complaints it has received about the post-Sept. 11 activities and responses of the administration.
President Bush mentioned the TIPS program in his State of the Union speech in February, but he hardly elaborated on it, and much of the American public seems to have forgotten about it. TIPS, however, most likely will be a reality sometime soon. It's time for Americans to wake up.
Leslie T. Thornton, a public policy and litigation partner with Patton Boggs in Washington, D.C., was secretary of Education chief of staff under President Clinton and chief policy and political liaison to the Clinton White House. The views expressed are hers alone.
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