Under attack -- by the FBI :Boston Globe

[jbfam4]

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2003/11/25/under_attack____by_the_fbi/

Under attack -- by the FBI
11/25/2003

ATTORNEY GENERAL John Ashcroft should be the chief protector of the United States Constitution, not its chief threat. By allowing the FBI to ask local police departments to report antiwar activities to the FBI's counterterrorism squads, Ashcroft makes the FBI look unsuited to protect Americans against the terrorist threat from Al Qaeda.

That is the effect of the FBI memo to local police that was disclosed in Sunday's New York Times. With this swipe at Americans wishing to exercise their constitutional right to free speech, Ashcroft and the FBI demonstrate an abject failure to understand two vital things: the delicate grandeur of American liberty and the political profile of the terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Senator Edward Kennedy was hardly exaggerating when he told ABC's "This Week" that the FBI memo recalled the worst abuses of the Nixon years. "It is absolutely outrageous in terms of what this country is about," Kennedy said. Indeed, some conservatives who do not at all share the political outlook of most of the antiwar protesters have also complained of Ashcroft's use of the so-called Patriot Act to infringe upon Americans' rights.

If Ashcroft does not understand why it is wrong to engage the FBI in spying on Americans who demonstrate peaceably for peace, President Bush ought to call the attorney general into the Oval Office for a civics lesson. If the core value of genuine conservatism is to protect the citizen from the overweening power of the state, then Ashcroft and the FBI have been subverting the conservatives' credo.

[donhakman]

1. I suspect

it is bush that gets the civics lesson from Ashcroft.