Nicholas M. Horrack
Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2003

In the halcyon days after Sept. 11, 2001, he and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge fought for the camera angle as Ridge attempted to set up a national homeland system, which Ashcroft had assumed would be the attorney general's job.

At one point the rivalry became so acute, United Press International learned, President George W. Bush gave his budget and support to a trusted Texas appointee, Joe Albaugh at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to work with Ridge and try to even the playing field.

Ashcroft became the epitome of the administration's tough anti-terrorist stance, rebuffing liberal criticism of the Justice Department's sweeping detention of foreign nationals and backing government agents who held people for weeks and months without contact with family members.

He told Bush administration officials to go slow on responding to Freedom of Information requests, testified on behalf of military tribunal trials and ordered the carrying forward of several of the more dubious cases to grow out of the Sept. 11 attacks.

He was the one who announced the arrest of Jose Padilla on charges of being an al-Qaida operative sent to the United States to find nuclear targets, a case that has produced little progress. Padilla was transferred to military custody.

His public persona became so conflicting for the administration at one point that the White House approved the replacement of his press spokesman with Barbara Comstock, a lawyer and veteran Republican investigator. Since then the attorney general's exposure has been more careful and considered.

Ashcroft was not an accidental choice for attorney general. Before Sept. 11, his conservative credentials on judicial nominees, enforcing federal pornography laws and protecting gun owners' rights were good. Karl Rove, Bush's trusted political adviser, had handled Ashcroft's political campaigns and Majority Leader of the Senate Trent Lott, R-Miss., favored his nomination.

The centerpiece of Ashcroft's stewardship at Justice was the Patriot Act, a law passed as Rep. C. L. Otter, R-Idaho, told UPI, when "the smoke was still coming out of the rubble" of the terrorist targets. "I was not even in my office. The anthrax attacks had me working in an adjunct office. I had to take a bus to vote."

Otter and 65 others voted against the act in the House, but it passed both houses easily.

It gave the federal government new powers of electronic surveillance and information sharing to track terrorists, delving into their personal and financial records.

But it also became a lightning rod for criticism of the Bush administration. Some 150 U.S. communities have passed laws objecting to various parts of the law and the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are suing to halt some parts of the law as unconstitutional.

Libertarians, perhaps not surprisingly, think Ashcroft is one of Bush's biggest problems along with the economy and the unremitting war in Iraq.

'Significant Problems'

Last June, the Justice Department's inspector general lambasted the Justice Department. He found "significant problems" in how the detainees were handled and called for a top-down review of those weeks.

All that might have been ignored as an election year approached, except that it also rankled conservatives. Otter said he approved of many things in the act, "but I want re-establish the level of standards the Justice Department used to have." He said that now they can entered peoples homes and offices, investigate religious and political organizations without court orders simply on the approval of the attorney general.

"They took the courts out of it," he said. He wants to put them back. "We went too far, too fast."

David Keene of the American Conservative Union told UPI that his members "don't think that John Ashcroft is a bad man. We think that he was so fixated on his mission that he leans way over toward law enforcement."

Keene said that he and others worked when the law was being considered in Congress to try to trim back some of the excesses.

He said that they thought the definition of a terrorist should have been more like what most Americans thought, limited to an international terrorist. But what passed the Congress was a "much broader sweep."

Likewise the sunset proposals, areas in the bill that have an expiration date that Keene said should have been shorter. "So Congress could take a look and see what they've done," he said.

Keene said many members of Congress never read the bill before it was passed.

Now solid Republicans like Otter, Don Young of Alaska and James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin have all criticized the bill and the White House could see trouble on the horizon.

Ashcroft set out Tuesday on a 12-state speaking tour to try to resell the Patriot Act and, not entirely incidentally, himself.

He gave a 25-minute address to the American Enterprise Institute after an introduction by that doyen of the conservatives, former Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

It was supposed to be a somewhat moving address. Ashcroft invoked Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and compared the rubble in lower New York, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon to Bunker Hill, Antietam, the Argonne, Iwo Jima and Normandy Beach. He quoted Lincoln and Winston Churchill.

But there were very little new specifics. Most of the cases he talked about have not gone to trial and though there were admissions of guilt none of them had directly to do with Sept. 11.

Ashcroft even brought up the case of Heman Lakhani, a 68-year-old British citizen of Indian origin who was charged last week with trying to transfer a surface-to-air missile to terrorists.

According to the government, however, what Lakhani thought were terrorists were undercover government operatives for the United States and the people he got the missile from were undercover operatives for the Russian police. Even the missile that was shipped to the United States was a fake.

Copyright 2003 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

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